Reasons For Low Self Esteem Are One And Many!

The reasons for low self esteem can be one and many depending on the severity of the low self esteem symptoms. What do I mean by one and many?

Chronic Low Self Esteem

The most common cause of chronic low self esteem is not getting our dependency needs met in the critical childhood development stages, namely infant, toddler, pre-school and school age.

Reasons For Low Self Esteem

For example if we didn’t have a good bond to our Mother than we didn’t get our infant dependency needs met. These dependency needs are needs we can’t get met on our own and need our parents or primary caregivers to help us get these needs met.

The bond with the Mother is absolutely essential. To the degree our Mother wants us and is looking forward to being a Mother is the degree we bonded with her.

Experiencing the bond allows us to really depend on someone to be there for us in every sense of that word. When we can rely on our Mother to be there for us, we grow up and are able to depend on others to be there for us. Without this bond we can’t depend on anyone and look outside ourselves to help get this primary need met.

This can be the beginning of depression or an addiction like smoking, drinking, work, shopping etc etc. You see, these needs are so powerful and necessary to becoming emotionally mature adults, we keep searching for ways to get these needs met even when we are adults. The dependency needs if not met when we are infants or children don’t go away. They stay with us until they are met. But they must be met in healthy ways. Please see dependency needs for more great information. 

Temporary Low Self Esteem

If one does not have chronic low self esteem and got most if not all of their dependency needs met then temporary low self esteem can manifest itself if one didn’t get enough sleep, experiencing stress at work, had a verbal fight with a loved one or family member, skipped breakfast and felt moody because of low blood sugar etc etc.

Self esteem fluctuates during the day depending on how one genuinely feels about oneself. If one gets their basic needs met each day then the level of self esteem is good to great.  If one doesn’t get their basic needs met, then depending on how many needs didn’t get met, one can suffer from temporary low self esteem.

As you can see reasons for low self esteem can be one or many. It all depends on did we get our dependency needs met as children. Even if we did get most if not all these needs met, we can still experience temporary low self esteem if we don’t get our basic needs met. The great thing here is once we get our basic needs met our self esteem immediately improves.  

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