Where does low self-esteem come from?  We certainly aren’t born with it.

  This is my grandson Rhylan, on the day of his third birthday. You can see he is trying to        hold up three fingers.  Children of that age are full of confidence. 

  One day, my daughter Shauna, Rhylan’s mother was in the car with her husband, Shawn,  Rhylan and their 18 month old daughter, Kendrah.  Rhylan made some rude noise (he burped, I think) and started to laugh, saying “I’m funny”.

Shawn replied, “You’re not funny”. 

Rylan:  “Yes, I am, I’m funny”. 

Shawn:  “No, you’re not funny”. 

Rylan: (with much more emphasis in his voice) “Listen to me, Shawn, I’m funny!”

Shauna was laughing hysterically, but silently, in the front seat.  After all, she couldn’t approve because Rhylan’s response to his father wasn’t really appropriate.  But he was standing up for himself.  That is an example of good self esteem.

But it doesn’t last.  Several studies have been done on self-esteem.  The results of the studies show that by the time children reach Junior High School, 69% of boys and only 50% of girls still feel good about themselves.  By High School, that has changed to 51% of boys and 24% of the girls.  And among adult women, only 1 in 5 women feel good about themselves.

I will go into greater detail on where low self-esteem comes from in the next blog.

Nervousness, restlessness, agitation, insecurity.  These are all symptoms of anxiety. 

One of my sons constantly jiggles one part of his body, usually his leg.  He shakes the table when we eat and used to irritate whoever slept in the same room with him because the bed would go creak, creak, creak all night long.

Another symptom of anxiety is grinding or gritting your teeth.  A surprising number of people have TMJ problems because they keep their stress in their jaw.  The TMJ (temporalmandibular joint) is the joint that hinges your bottom jaw to your skull bone.

I knew a lady who had lived through a tremendous amount of trauma and stress in her life.  In her efforts to control her stress, she clenched her jaw so tightly for so long that she actually shattered the bones in her TMJ joint.

After years of pain, suffereing, surgery and repair, she finally had to hve the whole joint replaced with an artificial one.  But you know what?  The pain didn’t go away.  Because the source of the stress was still there. 

The medical system had just been trying to heal the symptoms, not eliminate the cause!

Have you ever been depressed?  Depression is characterized by being overcome with events and giving up, with feelings of no control and hopelessness.

One of the ways that I used to cope was to try and control things.  Ask any member of my family and they will tell you that I was a control freak.  In my mind, I wasn’t controlling - I was protecting them.  That used to be possible when my children were smaller but as they started to grow up, I realized that I couldn’t control them any more.   I saw my children making choices, that according to my value system, were harmful to them.  And I could do absolutely nothing about it.  That was time of major depression for me, probably the worst I have ever experienced.

We had a seriously handicapped child that died at the age of seven.  As a family, we never dealt with his death properly and nine years later, several of our children were having serious problems.  In an effort to help, we called a grief counselor in to meet with the whole family.

One of the things he had each of us do was to draw a picture of how we saw our family.  I drew my husband and my five children in the back yard, with me watching them.  To my horror, I drew myself with no arms!  Talk about an expression of no control and feeling hopeless!  I get emotional just thinking about it.

In this short little story, can you pick up the number of different ways that unrelieved stress brought on depression?   Do any of you identify?