Specialism
Therapy for low self-esteem
CBT for the inner critic, the rules you live by, and the evidence you never let yourself count — online across the UK, in English or Spanish.
Does this sound familiar?
There is a running commentary, and it is not kind. Not good enough. Fraud. Everyone else finds this easier. You would not speak to a friend the way you speak to yourself, and if you heard someone else say it about you, you would object.
Compliments slide off. Criticism sticks for years. Good outcomes get reassigned to luck, timing or other people, so nothing ever accumulates into evidence that you are actually all right.
And there are rules holding it all together: never let anyone down, always be useful, do not take up space, be the one who copes. They work, in the sense that they keep the belief from ever being tested — and they are exhausting.
It shows up in decisions more than in feelings. The role you did not apply for, the relationship you stayed in, the rate you did not charge, the thing you did not say in the meeting and heard someone else say ten minutes later. Low self-esteem is expensive, and the bill arrives quietly over years.
How I treat low self-esteem
I use the CBT model developed for low self-esteem, which treats it as a belief about yourself that has been learned and then protected — usually formed early, and maintained ever since by rules and predictions that stop it ever being disproved.
We start by making the whole structure visible: the bottom-line belief, the rules and assumptions built on top of it, the predictions you make before anything difficult, and the way you interpret the aftermath. Once it is written down, most people can see that they have been running a closed system in which nothing counts as good news.
Then we open it. Behavioural experiments that test the predictions directly. A deliberate record of the evidence you normally discard, because the discarding is the mechanism. Work on the self-critical voice, its tone and its origins. And where the belief was laid down by something specific — bullying, a critical parent, an abusive relationship — EMDR can take the charge out of the memory that still proves it.
We are careful about the rules, because dropping them all at once is neither possible nor wise. Rules like always be useful have kept you safe and have often made you good at things. We test them one at a time — what actually happens if you say no to this, once — so the change is built on evidence rather than on a decision to think differently about yourself.
What to expect
We start with your history as well as the present, because this belief usually has a beginning. A typical course runs 12–20 weekly sessions of 50 minutes, with real experiments in your own week between them.
Progress here tends to be gradual rather than dramatic, and it shows up first in what you are willing to attempt rather than in how you feel about yourself. People often notice they have applied for something, or said no to something, weeks before they would describe their self-esteem as better.
Sessions run online across the UK and worldwide, or in person at Sanctuary Therapy Centre in Prestwich and Hebden Bridge. If low self-esteem sits underneath depression, social anxiety or an eating difficulty, we will treat those together rather than in sequence.
Common questions
Is low self-esteem a mental health problem? It is not a diagnosis in itself, but it sits underneath a great many things — depression, social anxiety, perfectionism, difficulty leaving bad relationships — and it responds well to treatment in its own right.
Is this just positive affirmations? No. Affirmations you do not believe tend to make things worse. We work with evidence and experiments, so the change is something you have seen rather than something you have told yourself.
I have felt like this since childhood. Is it too late? No. Long-standing beliefs take longer to shift than a recent problem, but they are learned, and what is learned can be rebuilt.
Is this the same as confidence coaching? No. Coaching tends to work on performance and presentation. This works on the belief underneath, which is where the problem actually lives.
Is this the same as imposter syndrome? They overlap. Imposter feelings are usually low self-esteem showing up at work — success gets attributed to luck or timing, and the fear of being found out grows with every promotion. The same model treats both.
Will I have to be arrogant to get better? No, and the fear of becoming big-headed is itself often one of the rules keeping things in place. Healthy self-esteem is not a high opinion of yourself; it is an accurate and stable one, which means being able to hold a mistake without it becoming a verdict on your whole character. Most people describe the change as being less interested in the question of whether they are good enough, rather than as having answered it in the affirmative.
Can sessions be in Spanish? Yes — I offer therapy in English and Spanish.
Ready to take the first step?
Send an enquiry and Gisela will be in touch within one working day.