Precious You: Clearing the Path to Higher Self-Esteem

By Dr. Miriam Reiss

Do you struggle with low self-esteem or self-confidence? Do you judge yourself or others? Do you avoid conflict — or are you a people pleaser? You deserve more in life but it's hard to sustain high self-esteem on a shaky base. You need a foundation so rock solid it chases crappy thinking away.

 

This pioneering, step-by-step guide reveals
• Why building self-esteem doesn't work
• How you can permanently dissolve low self-esteem's stranglehold
• How to instantly open to and receive your own, precious self-love
• How to dissolve the four hidden levels blocking self-esteem
• How to clear self-esteem's deadly enemies: shame, regret, despair and depression
• How to lock in your own blue-chip self-esteem

 

Walk with Dr. Miriam Reiss, expert coach to C-suite executives, celebrities and Nobel nominees, on her relentless trek to uncover the secrets to lasting, high self-esteem. It's time to stop dashing your own dreams and start creating a life that you love. This is the book you've been waiting for.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Dancing Hearts Press
• Release date: May 12, 2020
• ISBN: 9781393924449

Book preview

Introduction

Books like this are generally written by people who consider themselves experts. When they start writing, they know where they're headed. Not me. Or at least, not in this case.

I started writing about self-esteem as a grand experiment, to learn more about self-esteem in general, and mine, in particular. My intention was to see if I could create and sustain high self-esteem. What was evident was that my current level of self-esteem sucked. As part of the experiment, I was willing to bring you along, let you see behind the curtain and, if you could bear it, watch me stumble, fall, lurch forward and go backwards, as I tried whatever I could that, in the end, might or might not succeed.

Now, self-esteem isn't the topic I was dying to write about. You could say it's the topic I least wanted to deal with, much less write about. It's the area that has been my greatest personal challenge, the place I felt the most novice, vulnerable and ashamed. It's the thing I've avoided like the airport before Christmas, probably because I knew it meant revisiting old places that felt cold, dank, and irreparably broken. Trying to pull an Excalibur-type sword out of my forever stuck self-esteem stone is what I now feel called to do. 

From outward appearances, you might think I would be the last person to have self-esteem issues. I've been a professional executive, career and life coach for over twenty years, since the birth of the coaching industry. I’ve coached thousands of people, from top execs to struggling artists.

This past year, feeling self-esteem calling, I decided to offer webinars to a wide range of people on the topics of self-esteem and self-confidence. What I heard on those webinars reinforced what I had been hearing as a muffled undercurrent from clients throughout my years of coaching: The buck stops at self-esteem. Most of life's biggest challenges can be traced back to issues with self-esteem.

Our jobs and careers reflect our level of self-esteem, as do those we befriend, those we date, and those we marry. We live every aspect of life on this planet at our level of self-esteem. Our governments and politics are a reflection of our local, national and global self-esteem. While I'm not aware of a more important topic (and one that so much has been written about), our society's collective self-esteem issues continue on as a dirty little secret that we camouflage, mask and deny, in the hope that no one will notice.

Are you judgmental or critical of others? Are you a perfectionist? Do you procrastinate or put things off until the last minute? Can you be overly self-absorbed? Are you a worrier? Does your salary reflect what you're really worth? Are you nervous or avoid public speaking? How do you talk to yourself? There are many places, obvious and not so obvious, where our level of self-esteem lives.

The more I lifted my own, embarrassed cover off self-esteem, the more it was revealed to me that there's nothing more important in our relationship with ourselves, with each other and with the planet. I believe that if each of us had high self-esteem, war and suffering would be a thing of the past.

A current, therapeutic view is that self-esteem can be worked with and modified but that low self-esteem is permanent. As I embark on my own self-esteem quest, I'm hoping that's simply not true.

In my early twenties, my starting career was as a high school remedial reading teacher. For some reason, students in my classes often requested help with their math homework. Math had never my strong suit. I had almost failed math in junior high school until I found ways of approaching the subject that my math teachers hadn't shared.

From my unexpected success coaching these students, I wondered if sometimes the most effective teachers in a subject aren't necessarily the ones for whom that subject came easy. Perhaps because self-esteem has been such a battle for me, the things I discover will work for you.

I use the terms self-esteem and self-love in this book interchangeably. Self-esteem is currently the more widely-used expression. To me, the term self-esteem sounds formal and reserved, a fairly arms-length, almost British way of talking about ourselves. I'm hoping that as our society gets more comfortable in its own skin, we'll no longer equate self-love with bubble baths and affirmations that don’t stick.

Some of the exercises and tools I suggest may initially feel somewhat daunting to you, outside your usual comfort zone. You might feel at times like you're going out on a limb. And, to quote actress and author Shirley MacLaine, That’s where the best fruit is.

I invite you to use this book to plumb the richness of your insides. That is where you'll find the richest fruit to be found on the planet.

They’re writing songs of love, but not for me...

- George Gershwin

ON LOVE.

I LOVE YOU VERY, VERY much. The words were spoken slowly, with extreme gravity, by my college boyfriend of three months, his eyes shining with excitement. He scanned my face closely for a response. I looked back at him blankly. My skin crawled. I had nothing to say.

No one had ever told me they loved me. Not my parents, not my friends, no one. I had zero relationship with the word love. The concept of romantic love between two people was entirely foreign to me. My boyfriend might as well have been speaking Swahili.

Utterly terrified, I broke up with him the next day.

Definition of Low Self-Esteem: Believing that I am inadequate (flawed), unworthy, unlovable, and/or incompetent.

– Breaking the Chain of Low Self-Esteem,

Marilyn J. Sorensen, Ph.D.

Your children are not your children.

They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself.

They come through you but not from you,

And though they are with you yet they belong not to you.

You may give them your love but not your thoughts,

For they have their own thoughts.

You may house their bodies but not their souls,

For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow, which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.

You may strive to be like them, but seek not to make them like you.

For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday.

You are the bows from which your children as living arrows are sent forth.

-  Kahlil Gibran

The Backstory

One.

Each time my father would reach over to kiss my mother, she would push him away, with clear revulsion. That scene, played over and over every day of my childhood, was the view I had of love, affection and partnership. This was my normal, one person desperately reaching out for physical intimacy and connection, the other recoiling in disgust.

I spent my twenties and thirties looking for love, yet unavoidably mimicking my parents' skewed model of relationship. When I finally, at 36, met a man who wasn't the love of my life but with whom there was some mutuality, I decided this was the best I could do. When he proposed, I said Yes.

As I heard the minister read vows that my soon-to-be husband had altered and rewritten just prior to our wedding and not shared with me, my heart sank. I recognized this as a sign that the man I had agreed to marry wasn't someone I could completely love or trust.

Four years later, I fled the marriage. Armed with a restraining order and under the watchful eye of two impassive police, I frantically snatched what possessions I could from our Pacific Northwest apartment. 

Two.

My dad loved us. He just didn't care about our general   happiness or self-esteem.

- John Mulaney

MOST SELF-HELP BOOKS I've read, personal growth workshops and lectures I've attended, evolved beings I've met, therapists I've worked with and conscious songs I've listened to, have emphasized self-love as essential. And yet, no matter what I did, I held at my core that I was no good. I believed what my parents had drilled into me on a daily basis, that I would never amount to anything. Even though I experienced my parents as impossibly difficult human beings, they were the original programmers, and my feeling they had to be right overrode everything else.

It was curious that my parents never spoke in any detail about their childhoods. I knew my four grandparents. My father's father, Siegfried, was a raging tyrant and bully whose stories of his youth in pre-Nazi Germany oozed of bluster and braggadocio. When my grandmother tried to talk, he would loudly interrupt, Let me tell it, Meta. Over time, my grandmother developed a stutter. Siegfried never learned much English, staying in the company of fellow refugees. As a child, I found my grandfather scary and kept quiet or out of his way.

My intuition is that my father had been beaten badly as a child by his father. While my father regularly threatened to use his belt on me for  misbehaving, he never acted on that. I was grateful for whatever it was that held him back.

As a child, when I asked my mother about my grandmother Jane, my mother would say her mother was terrible and promptly clam up. My mother's father, Aaron, had been a traveling salesman who spent most of his time on the road. Both sets of grandparents and their children had escaped Nazi Germany and immigrated to America in 1938, just before Hitler hell broke loose. My parents met in Washington Heights, a neighborhood in upper Manhattan populated by German-Jewish immigrants from neighboring towns in southern Germany. My father's sister, Ellie, played matchmaker and brought my parents together. My mother's mother, an Orthodox Jew, let her elder daughter know she wanted her married by reminding her, You know, we don't live forever.

My mother got the message. Of my mother's multiple suitors, my father had the most promising future. After a few months of dating, she told him she wouldn't stick around unless he married her. They tied the knot in a small Orthodox Jewish ceremony in her parents' living room. Following the custom at the time, they honeymooned in Niagara Falls and settled in a tiny apartment three subway stops north of where her parents lived.

Three.

MY PARENTS WAITED SEVEN years before having me, until my father's optical business was stable. My mother was a housewife, helping my father with the filing and recordkeeping for his business. My father's storefront was around the corner from their apartment. My parents had since moved to where they were only two subway stops from my mother's parents.

My parents' apartment looked out on Broadway, the longest and loudest street in Manhattan. Buses, fire engines, police cars, private cars, taxis, trucks, and hospital ambulances competed for physical and ear space, keeping street noise at an ever present, screeching roar. A full-service car wash directly across the street added to the cacophony.

Life with my parents matched outside crazy with inside crazy. Over the twenty years I lived in their apartment, their behavior and everything else stayed the same. If a picture hung crooked on the wall, it would be like that for years until I straightened it. When I did, both parents would simultaneously scream, Leave it alone, don't touch it, you'll break it! Change at the most minute level seemed to be life-threatening to them.

One moment, I had a parent with adult-like listening and sensitivity. If I started to relax and confide in that parent during these times, I would always later regret it. Suddenly, without apparent cause, that same parent would erupt into full-volume, red-hot rage, hurling non-stop criticism and blame, irrational accusations, mockery and ridicule, and blatant projections and generalizations.

My parents ranted about what a bad daughter I was, how I would never amount to anything, that I was more trouble than I was worth, that I didn't listen to them, that they wished they had never had me, that other daughters were far better, that they wished they had died with Hitler rather than come to America and have me as their daughter, and that I was the reason for all their problems. At the same time, they insisted they were the only ones who cared about me, they were the only ones I could trust and that I couldn't trust strangers. Only they knew what was for my highest good. And, they insisted that it was my responsibility to make them happy.

My father's eruptions were amplified by his sense of lack and fear that my mother would stop talking to him, which she often did. At those times, he would come to me, begging me to talk to my mother, to make her start talking to him again. My father just couldn't handle my mother's extended, stony, unfathomable silences. I told my father that he was asking me to do something I shouldn't have to do. As their child, it wasn't my job to fix their marriage. That didn't stop my father from continuing to want me to serve as go-between.

My mother's eruptions had the added ingredients of jealousy and narcissism. She would accuse me of wild, paranoiac things that had no basis in reality. Both of my parents were focused on outward appearances, driven by a What will other people think? mentality. Their way and only their way was the right way.

My parents took turns dumping their daily, absolute rage on me. Often, both ganged up on me at once. That was the worst. At those times, I would loudly defend myself in self-protection but nothing stopped their assaults. Once my parents finally ran out of steam, they acted as though nothing had happened, as though what they had done was perfectly normal and acceptable. This was life as usual.

Whenever I later made reference to their bad behavior, they acted surprised and denied that anything like that had ever taken place. They said, We would never act like that. You're lying. You're making it up.  It was incredible to me that their parts didn't seem to talk to each other. There was no connection between their sane and irrational, volatile selves.

Two decades of living with my parents had short and long-term effects. Since I never knew when attacks would come, I was always walking on eggshells, not just around them but also around everyone else. I lived in a vacuum and had no idea what normal was. I feared that others had the same closeted unpredictability