Insecurity & Lack of Confidence

Insecurity and lack of confidence or self-esteem can have profoundly negative effects on someone’s life.  When our self-worth is dependent on something conditional like being liked, being impressive or accomplishing, then life is much more stressful.  In addition, these struggles can have significant, negative effects on relationships and work.

Here are some common symptoms of lack of confidence:

Mental & Emotional Symptoms

• Harsh & critical self-talk
• Excessive fear of failure 
• Sensitivity to criticism
• Difficulty accepting compliments
• Constant comparisons
• Excessive self-doubt & trouble making decisions
• Perfectionism

Relational Symptoms

• People pleasing or self-sacrificing
• Difficulty setting boundaries
• Hesitancy to express opinions
• Avoiding social situations or feeling overly anxious in groups
• Overly apologetic
• Difficulty trusting others
• Excessively defensive

A vicious cycle people can get caught in is they are aware of being insecure and they try all sorts of tricks to make themselves more confident.  This rarely works and tends to just feed the critical self-talk that is creating the insecurity in the first place.

The reason why this almost never works is because insecurity is an emotional pattern.  Rationality & logic don’t change emotions.  “Knowing better” or trying to convince yourself to be confident never works in the long run.  Thankfully though there are ways of addressing this quite effectively.

Emotion Focused Therapy for Insecurity & Lack of Confidence

The main type of therapy I use is called Emotion Focused Therapy (EFT) and it’s typically quite effective for helping people to work through struggles with insecurity. 

The bullet points above are symptoms of insecurity or lack of confidence, not the root causes.  The focus of EFT is to address the root causes.  

Though each person’s healing process is unique & tailored to them, a quick idea of some of main parts of the process include:

1 | Identify the Stuck Patterns

The bullet points of all the symptoms of insecurity noted above are downstream results of larger upstream processes that we’re often not aware of.  We all have blindspots in our self-awareness and beginning to become aware of our self-defeating patterns is a very helpful step.

When it comes to insecurity, it’s often the case that one or more of these types of negative, self-defeating patterns is active:

• The “It’s never quite good enough” pattern (perfectionistic standards)
• The “I always do it your way” pattern (self-sacrificing & approval seeking)
• The “I’m worthless” pattern (defectiveness & shame)
• The “I’m inadequate” pattern (failure)
• The “please don’t leave me” pattern (abandonment)

2 | Building Emotional Regulation

We tend to struggle with downstream symptoms of things like insecurity because we have not built the capacity to tolerate or regulate the more intense emotions that lay underneath.  It’s then easy to get caught in a dysregulated overwhelm state (anxiety) or a dysregulated shut down state (depressed).

3 | Building Emotional Awareness

People caught in patterns of insecurity have a lower capacity to access their emotional experience and can lose sense of who they are at their core (their sense of self).  

4 | Understanding the Bigger Picture

It’s helpful to understand that our tendency to get caught up in negative, self-defeating patterns come from somewhere.  When the above processes are attended to it often allows us to make connections of where we picked up these patterns to begin with.

If you'd like to understand more about the EFT process you can read more here.

Next Steps

I offer counseling & therapy in Hood River. If you’d interested in potentially working with me the best next step is to check out this page.