Therapy and Counseling
Services in San Francisco
The Flood Building
Suite 441
San Francisco, CA 94102
(415) 846-6557
Daniel C. McCracken, MA, MFT
Licensed Psychotherapist
Contact Daniel
Low Self-Esteem
If you reading this then you have made a great step in moving forward to do something about your life. A significant reason for this is that low self esteem can be incredibly self-perpetuating and a cyclical problem which often holds its suffers' in a stuck position. This position often doesn't allow you to seek outside help. Whether you feel that you have little worth, or are at the other extreme, you have an inflated sense of yourself, allowing yourself and others to see "you", feels impossible. I simply encourage you to take a chance.
Those suffering from low self esteem often feel that what lies beneath is a nothingness or a void. This unchallenged fear can guide you to interact with yourself, others and your world in ways that bring pain, self-punishment, isolation, depression, addiction and struggle. What entering into therapy offers is an opportunity to begin to challenge this fear and understand the self-defining constructs that are holding you in this place.
We all form "constructs" of ourselves but it is when they are based in a negative self-image that we form low self esteem or an inflated self esteem. Constructs are built from a variable of factors. Factors such as how we were treated growing up by caretakers and family as well as interaction within our social surroundings. They could also be formed by a real or inaccurate perception of physical and/or intellectual abilities, and internal reactions to previously experienced traumas, either remembered or not.
In therapy, I will provide you a safe place to begin to face these fears at a pace which is designed specifically for you. We will work toward replacing these defeating constructs that originally served you and had a purpose with ones that are true, healthy and life promoting. This will enable you to move forward in life to develop a relationship with yourself and your world that allow for a breadth of connectedness you didn't think possible before.