more ambitious, not necessarily in a career or a financial sense but in terms of hopes for experience in life—
emotionally, intellectually, creatively, spiritually. The lower a client's self-esteem, the less that person aspires to
and the less likely he or she is to achieve set goals.
Either path tends to be self-reinforcing and self-perpetuating. The person with higher self-esteem is more open and
honest, and communications are more likely to be appropriate, which reinforces a positive self-concept. The person
with lower self-esteem is more evasive, and communications are likely to be inappropriate. This can happen
because of uncertainty about his or her own thoughts and feelings or fear of the listener's response, or both. This, in
turn, further diminishes a positive experience of self.
The higher the client's self-esteem, the more disposed he or she is to form nourishing rather than toxic relationships.
Vitality and expansiveness in others are naturally more appealing to persons of good self-esteem than are emptiness
and dependency.^2 Those with healthier self-esteem are more inclined to treat others with respect, benevolence,
good will, and fairness. Such persons do not tend to perceive others as a threat, and self-respect is the foundation of
respect for others.
Roots of Self-Esteem
On what does healthy self-esteem depend? What factors have an impact? There is reason to believe that we may
come into this world with certain inherent differences that make it easier or harder to attain healthy self-esteem—
differences pertaining to energy, resilience, disposition to enjoy life, and so on. I suspect that in future years we will
learn that genetic inheritance is an important contributing factor in the ability to develop a healthy self -concept.
Upbringing, of course, is critical to self-esteem development. No one can say how many persons suffer ego damage
in their early years, before the ego is fully formed; in such cases, it may be all but impossible for healthy self-
esteem to emerge later without intense psychotherapy. Research suggests that one of the best ways to have good
self-esteem is to have parents who model healthy self-esteem, as Coopersmith's The Antecedents of Self-Esteem
demonstrates.^3