What causes low self esteem/

[pljames]

What causes low self esteem? I have had it all my life. I would speculate I was told (and believed) "to make the other person happy before you are happy". I feel I misunderstood the meaning of the word because another word took it's place (pride/arrogrance). I am now learning in my (later life) that was the wrong word for me to accept as truth. Psychololgically speaking I am now comtemplating reanalysing the word happy and using it for me first without pride or arrogrance? Thoughts please? pljames

The (brackets are for adding a thought and my style of writing).

[HexHammer]

Short answer: Lack/low production of "Serotonin".

I see you ask A LOT of what I would classify as selfexplanatory questions, most of which are related and will have overlapping classifications.

I wonder if it's to just get your daily "fix" or something else? I would reccomend you to read up on psychology youself, instead of getting half baked answers, as most answers here seems to be.

Forgive me for my harsh outburst but it's just a "polite" motivational butt kick.

[SWM]

low/ lack of seratonin could be observed with low self esteem and is often present with depression, we can certainly say that increasing the ammount of seratonin would usually result in an improvement in mood and more favourable self appraisals.  but then we could ask so what causes low / lack of seratonin?

we can see that people who have consistent patterns of negative (negatvie can be qualified by the type of thought i.e. self critical) thoughts about themselves will reprot feeling low in mood (i.e. lack seratonin)

in this case we can take seratonin out of the equation and observe that the way one thinks about themselves, the world (other people, situations and enviromental conditions) and their future is related to their emotional state.. if some has negative thoughts about themselves the world and their future they will have low mood. negative thoughts about themselves they would have low self esteem.

so we can take a further step back here and ask what causes negative thoughts? in short life experiences and social conditioning build a strucutre of beliefs about the self and the world.

you can understand and work though a self help manual for self esteem on line at
http://www.cci.health.wa.gov.au/resources/infopax.cfm?Info_ID=47

the model used in this self help manual is model developed by Albert Ellis some fifty or so years ago and has been superseded now by model developed by Melanie Fennel http://apt.rcpsych.org/cgi/reprint/4/5/296.pdf

however this online manual is good enough to provide some basic understanding and preliminary work to overcome low self esteem.

[pljames]

Short answer: Lack/low production of "Serotonin".

I see you ask A LOT of what I would classify as selfexplanatory questions, most of which are related and will have overlapping classifications. (Thank you for that sentence. It's my style of asking questions).

I wonder if it's to just get your daily "fix" or something else? I would reccomend you to read up on psychology youself, instead of getting half baked answers, as most answers here seems to be.
(What is my daily "fix"? Can we debate the definition of psychology)?pljames

Forgive me for my harsh outburst but it's just a "polite" motivational butt kick.

[pljames]

SWM,
 Excellent thread. I will have to agree negative draws negative and positive draws postive. I have been negative since my teenage years. It's exstremely hard to change but I am changing thanks to this forum and the postive answers I am getting. pljames