subject: 2 Of My Most Successful Patients Do This Everyday To Enhance Their Self-esteem. Do You? [print this page] Almost everyone feels inadequate when things go bad. With a chronic self-esteem disorder, though, these thoughts are with you on a daily basis. They occupy the real estate in your head and entirely distort your view of who you are and your capabilities.
Cognitive therapy is a proven treatment that can defuse and even reverse those thoughts. When used for enhance your self confidence and self-esteem, cognitive therapy provides a unique set of tools that can be used to reverse your thinking processes from those of insecurity to those of self-confidence.
Over time, cognitive therapy can actually reverse the way you view yourself and the world. My experience suggests that it works better than psychiatric medications in helping those with mild to moderate feelings of inadequacy.
Treatment with cognitive psychotherapy can greatly enhance your self-confidence and reduce your feelings of inadequacy and insecurity. Cognitive therapy uses a number of tools that help you start thinking and feeling more confidently.
Cognitive Therapy for Low Self-Esteem and Self-Confidence: It Changes the Way You Think.
Cognitive therapy was originally developed as an alternative way to treat symptoms of depression. The central principle underlying its effectiveness is that thinking processes influence one's moods.
Using this model, feelings of inadequate self-esteem and serious insecurity are produced by a process of ongoing and daily negative and pessimistic thinking. These little demons are known as automatic thoughts (ATs).
They occur to us, automatically, without any conscious effort or volition. For example, a person with a high degree of felt insecurity might have these types of automatic thoughts:
- "I never succeed at everything."
- "I'm terrible at my job."
- "I am doomed to fail at whatever I try."
As in most forms of manipulation, automatic thoughts too may have a grain of truth. However, the person with low self-esteem seriously and negatively exaggerates the pervasiveness and depth of his situation which continues to fuel burgeoning feelings of inadequacy.
Cognitive therapy teaches and tutors you to identify and restructure your negative thoughts so that they become more positive and more in tune with reality. With practice, you will then be able to identify and reverse the strong but distorted beliefs fueling your low self-esteem.
The emphasis is on thinking "with perspective" or with a heightened sense of balance and objectivity. People find that when viewing things more objectively and realistically, they usually experience an enhanced sense of confidence.
Cognitive Therapy for Low Self Esteem Works this Way:
Most problems have discrete components or elements. They include:
- the conflict as is viewed by the person
- the persons specific conscious or subconscious thoughts about it
- the persons emotional feelings about it
- the persons bodily sensations
- the persons specific behaviors that took place before, during and after the conflict situation occurred
In cognitive therapy, you learn to dissect problems into their components. Once a person dissects them into their parts, problems that were previously viewed as overwhelming, become much more manageable.
During consultations, the therapist teaches you how to use cognitive therapy's many tools. Then between consultations, you will do homework that has been assigned to help you learn how to correctly apply the cognitive therapy tools to your own issues.
The goal is to make small changes in your thinking and behavior each day. Then over time, these small adjustments lead to lasting improvement in self-confidence and self-esteem.
In addition to consulting a therapist, one way to learn and practice these cognitive skills is by using self-therapy kits (STKs). They are compact self-help programs that tutor you on how to identify and restructure negative automatic thoughts.
They teach these skills by using: CDs, DVDs, MP3s, e-books, workbooks, audios, videos etc. and are used at home and are self-paced. They provide psychological and cognitive therapy tutoring and use behavioral exercises and employ ways to monitor your progress.
Two of my most successful patients use them every day and they have improved both the pace and quality of their cognitive therapy outcomes many times over.
