The Six Pillars of Self-Esteem

The Six Pillars of Self-Esteem — Nathaniel Branden

Patricia was in her mid-twenties when she came to Branden's therapy practice. She had spent eight years with a man who, in his better moments, did love her -- but also regularly interrupted her, mocked her ideas, and blamed her when things went wrong in his own career. What struck Branden most was not the anger she brought into the room, not the humiliation, not even the fear. She brought certainty. "There's something wrong with me," she kept repeating. She was not there to analyze what the man had done. She was there to understand what she had done wrong. The only explanation she would accept for what had happened was one that lived inside herself.

Branden had heard variations of this pattern for decades. Different people, different backgrounds, different presenting symptoms -- the common denominator always the same. At the deepest level, the person did not believe they were entitled to live well, to think clearly, to claim what they wanted. This was not depression, not anxiety in the clinical sense. It was something more foundational: a deficit of self-esteem.

He first began working on the problem consciously in 1954, at twenty-four years old, studying psychology at New York University while running a small therapy practice. He went to the library looking for existing work on the subject. The indexes of psychology books did not contain the term. Freud had traced low self-regard to the child's discovery of its inability to sexually possess a parent. Alfred Adler connected feelings of inferiority to physical insufficiency and the simple fact that adults are bigger and stronger. Neither satisfied Branden. What he observed in clinical work was more universal and more fundamental: a continuous inner tribunal from which no one was excused, an inescapable self-judgment that either supported or undermined every choice and relationship a person had.