Self-Esteem and Mental Health: 15 Steps to Empower Your Self-Esteem

By Laura Midna

Self-Esteem and Mental Health: 15 Steps to Empower Your Self-Esteem

 

Do you struggle with feelings of inadequacy, worry, and self-criticism? Are you looking for practical steps to boost your self-esteem and improve your mental health? Laura Midna's Self-Esteem and Mental Health: 15 Steps to Empower Your Self-Esteem is the essential guide you need.

 

Laura Midna, a psychiatric nurse with extensive personal and professional experience, has faced and overcome severe mental health challenges, including depression, anxiety, dissociation, bulimia, self-harm, tobacco addiction, and suicide attempts. Her journey through a bipolar 1 psychotic breakdown led her to discover powerful strategies for building and maintaining high self-esteem.

 

In this transformative book, Laura shares the 15 crucial steps that helped her rebuild her self-worth and find lasting happiness. This guide is designed to be the resource she wished she had during her struggles, providing clear, actionable advice to help you on your journey to self-esteem and mental well-being.

 

Inside Self-Esteem and Mental Health, you'll learn how to:

• Overcome happiness and success anxiety
• Break free from feelings of not being good enough
• Let go of worry and guilt
• Handle mistakes with confidence
• Stop self-criticism and embrace self-praise
• Overcome an inferiority complex
• Understand and address key drivers of addiction
• Reject shame and build self-esteem
• Use pride to foster romantic happiness
• Implement practical techniques for lasting self-worth

Laura Midna's expertise as a self-esteem coach, combined with her in-depth understanding of mental health issues, makes this book a valuable resource for anyone seeking to improve their self-esteem. Her clear, step-by-step approach will guide you toward a healthier, more positive self-image.

 

Self-Esteem and Mental Health: 15 Steps to Empower Your Self-Esteem is your guide to reclaiming your worth and achieving the happiness you deserve. Start your journey to self-empowerment today.

 

Buy Self-Esteem and Mental Health and take the first step toward a brighter future!

• Language: English
• Publisher: Laura Midna
• Release date: Jun 22, 2024
• ISBN: 9798224554959

Book preview

Introduction

One of our biggest and most far reaching problems is believing we are not good enough. There is no question in my mind that mental health issues can hurt self-esteem. Our vision of ourself is shattered. We often experience shame. One of the reasons why many people want to be off their psych medications is that we think the meds represent proof that there is something wrong with us and at the root of that is fear of not being good enough and shame. Mental health conditions do not make you less. You are worthy of great self-esteem and by following the steps outlined in this book you can achieve it.

The belief that you are not good enough is both a consequence and contributor to mental health problems. I am here to tell you that you are enough and the more you believe it the less hold mental health problems have on you. We are not going to let mental health issues have the last word on our self-esteem.

Self-esteem touches everything in our lives in a ripple effect. When we have good self-esteem it supplies energy and creativity. It influences the people we attract into our lives and the quality of those relationships. It is how you feel about yourself that others respond to. Self-esteem helps prevent us from looking for validation from others. It assists goal setting, parenting, work and everything we pursue. Self-esteem does not make us immune to challenges but it gives us buoyancy. Self-esteem brings a certain quality of happiness that cannot be found in its absence. It took me many years to discover how to build self-esteem but those answers are all here in this book.

When I was in my early 20’s I knew I had ‘issues’ and I was also working in the mental health field as a degree prepared RN. I had suffered dissociation, bulimia, self-harm and two high lethal suicide attempts in my teens. Plus, I smoked like a chimney. I had some trauma in my childhood and had a perfectionist mother who was grooming me to support her pride and take care of her. She didn’t want me to have children and went as far as to tell me to get my boyfriend to have a vasectomy because she didn’t want grandchildren.

In my late twenties I sought medical attention for what I thought was a physical problem but it was anxiety. I rejected the diagnosis of generalized anxiety by my doctor and refused to take the medication prescribed because I felt shameful. The diagnosis and medication were threatening the small bit of self-esteem I had. They were making me feel like something was fundamentally wrong with me. Really, I had no self-esteem. I was a perfectionist and had some narcissist traits and believed that if I looked pretty enough I could override all the other inadequacies in myself. I did want to feel better and spent the following years searching for answers to rid myself of crippling anxiety and low self-esteem.

I read everything self-help I could get my hands on and went for treatments including breath work and Reiki. I sold a sports car to have therapy with the late Dr Nathaniel Branden in California. I listened to Tony Robbins and I acted "as if'' when a book promised salvation. I did tapping exercises ad nauseam and also went for acupuncture. I selfishly confronted my aging father as a book instructed, in search of healing. I legally changed my name believing that a better name would give me confidence. My anxiety raged on and my feelings of value depended on the results of my cosmetic surgeries.

It was a bipolar 1 psychotic break which was the turning point for me. Although my self-esteem had never been good, my self-esteem was shattered after I became lucid again and realized how sick I had been. I felt utterly defective and broken, beyond repair. I actually felt self-hate, the opposite of self-esteem. Since I had mania that developed into psychosis, I was not eligible to take an antidepressant to help with the depression of being such a ‘defective person’. Since mania had led to psychosis with me an antidepressant was contraindicated. This gave me a huge problem. How was I going to fix the most profound depression of my life and was it possible to have self-esteem? I had to do something. I researched until I found therapy I believed could help me. Guess what, it worked. The methods were so effective I left them in my personal notes for my children and they found their way into this book. I am happy to report after a second psychotic break, my self-esteem was intact and I had no depression. Shortly before discharge, a nurse commented he had never seen a patient so happy. These methods work.

Self-esteem is an urgent matter because it affects everything. Good self-esteem has the power to completely transform your life. Imagine the difference in your life when you like yourself. We communicate our level of self-worth to others and they reflexively respond. I thought I was rejected by a lot of females in my youth because of my differentness but differentness was not the problem, it was lack of self-esteem. I had attention from males when I was older but I was more of a curiosity to them. With no self-esteem, I was used. My lack of self-esteem invited these things but the rejection and poor treatment left me with some dark feelings around not being good enough. I was able to examine those once my self-esteem started improving and I was not crippled by shame. Now I know, we can be very ‘different’ and still have great self-esteem. Once again, it’s not being different but rather, our feelings about ourselves, which others respond to.

I want to save you time and suffering and immediately get you on a path to healing. Self-esteem will supply energy that you want to examine and heal the broken parts that mental health problems bring. When your self-esteem and feelings of self-worth are not on the line you can look at those broken and shame prone places which need healing. Psych meds absolutely have a role, but it is important for people who want to heal, to understand there is a large territory where growth is possible that has nothing to do with medication. Sometimes psychotropics can mute those places that need healing so it is important to strike a balance with your prescribing doctor. A good scientific method considers all variables and does not put mental