Reddit mentions of Ten Days to Self-Esteem

If you haven't already given it a try, Ten Days to Self-Esteem by David Burns is a decent one.

It's an interactive workbook, so you aren't just reading about how to get self-esteem so much as actively taking steps towards it.

There are other books by him, but this is the one I hear recommended. It isn't about weight loss or body image, but it's written in a way that it can still apply and address it.

https://www.amazon.com/Days-Self-Esteem-David-M-D-Burns/dp/0688094554

Here's a recent post about not loving our N parents that might help show you that you are not the only one who feels this way. I HATED my mother growing up. She was and still is a very unloving, brutal person. Why would I love her? The guilt is probably just societal programming, where not loving and honoring your parents is blasphemous. But if you look at it logically, it makes total sense why we feel this way. How would a dog react to being hit every time it came close to you? Would it love you and try to be affectionate with you? NO. It would probably cower in fear around you or any person, and would snap and attack. Why should we hold ourselves to a different standard than we would any other animal? You get what you give, and what have they given us?

If I were you, I would emancipate myself entirely and ASAP. This is close to what I did. Right at 18, I moved hours away and mostly paid almost all my own bills. My parents really didn't support me too much. I think my mother took out one small school loan and my dad sent me $100 a month, but I could have easily survived without that. I removed ALL ties with them as quickly as I could, because they used anything for manipulation. This really isn't too hard to do.

If you can't do that right now, it sounds like you're detaching emotionally which is good. Maybe you can just keep to yourself and try to survive until you get some physical distance from them. Don't engage them in any way. Only interact with them when you HAVE to. If they hassle you, maybe you can just agree (in principle or even just to placate them) and exit the situation ("yep you're probably right about that, OK gotta go!"). But DO try to get out ASAP. Don't jump into another shitty situation though. See if you can find a female roommate you can stand living with. I wouldn't move in with your boyfriend or another male just out of desperation because I find this usually ends BADLY. But obviously this is up to you. Try to find a place that's SAFE for you and don't just jump from one shitty situation to another.

Then as far as rebuilding your self-esteem, for me I had to get into therapy. If you can do this it could save your life. If that isn't possible, here are a list of cheap books that have helped me immensely (which I recommend reading and working through with or without therapy):

• Feeling Good and Ten Days To Self-Esteem by David Burns
  
• The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle
  
• Toxic Parents by Susan Forward (I don't agree with her recommendation on confronting your parents but the rest is good.)
  
  I believe there are a list of resources including a full list of books on the right sidebar too. If you don't like any of these resources, you can ALWAYS find something that will appeal to you if you keep working at it. There is SO much out there for us if we keep at it. Be sure to take breaks too. This work can be exhausting.
  
  If you can get into Al-Anon that might help too. I personally don't care for 12-step programs, but many people seemed to have been helped by them and Al-Anon is specifically recommended by many books. They say it's for people who have dealt with alcoholics and drug addicts, but I tell you I went to six meetings like they recommend, and it's NO DIFFERENT for those of us who have dealt with narcissism. I've read that all alcoholics are narcissists, so maybe that's why it was so relevant to me. One slogan I picked up that helped a lot is "You Didn't Cause It. You Can't Control It. You Can't Cure It." We didn't cause our parents to be the way that they are, we can't control it (no amount of letter writing, talking, setting boundaries, etc.) and there is nothing we can do to change them. The literature is pretty dismal when it comes to curing narcissism anyway (NPD). Either way, they'd have to want to get help and help themselves, which rarely ever happens. So we have to focus on ourselves and forget about helping them - this is not selfish! We were often groomed to take care of them and our feelings, wants and needs were completely inconsequential. We were just extensions of them. This is probably why it feels so selfish at first to start taking care of ourselves.
  
  >I'm currently depressed and see no good in life.
  
  I've been working at this for a LONG time and still feel this way sometimes. I think it's partly due to growing up where "you lose" is the name of the game. Getting your needs met is completely hopeless with N parents, so perhaps that feeling of hopelessness extends to all of life. Plus, hopelessness is a classic symptom of depression. If you feel hopeless, just know that it doesn't mean it's true. Feelings are NOT facts.
  
  Aside from my other recommendations, I would continue to come here and post and read all that you can read. Claw your way out of this bullshit if you have to. Journaling helps. Get a secure journal NO ONE ELSE will read and just free flow write your thoughts down. If you're feeling terrible, give your feelings a voice. It's like draining the poison from you. Plus if you're doing the work out of Feeling Good, you'll need a good journal to write in daily. My first therapist recommended this for YEARS and I never did it, but I tell it just free flow writing out shit does seem to help tremendously. If you have a Mac, you can use MacJournal, or for Windows there is "The Journal", both of which you can encrypt and password protect. If you want to just write on paper or if you already do just make sure you hide it well.
  
  The other night I had a bout of terrible depression and you would not BELIEVE the shit that I wrote down about myself ("you're a piece of shit!!!" and stuff like that). I wrote until I just felt "deflated", like I had drained myself. It helped a LOT. I then realized that I hadn't been doing several things for myself that I know have helped in the past, and I have rededicated myself to doing these things daily. Many of these actions I have recommended to you here.
  
  Hope this helps even in the slightest and good luck to you.

Cognitive behavioral therapy can help with stuff like this. You can do it on your own, or your school probably has services that can help - mine had kind of two tiers, the drop-in peer counseling that was pretty useless but OK if you just needed to vent, and then actual therapy with a grad student getting their clinical hours, and I found that very helpful. If you want to try it on your own, there are work books like:

http://www.amazon.com/Ten-Days-Self-Esteem-David-Burns/dp/0688094554

(don't let the gimicky title put you off, it's actually pretty good)

The bullet points sound like a lot of distorted, negative thoughts that are bringing you down and CBT can help a lot with that. There was a story in that workbook iirc about a guy who felt like a total failure, he was bad at his job, had no friends, and so on. And he started doing CBT with the author, and even though there wasn't any material change to his life, he started feeling better about things, he stopped feeling hopeless, and that made it possible for him to start making concrete improvements. It seems counterintuitive, like "why should I stop thinking I have no social skills? I really don't have any" but you have some, you interact with people and they don't run screaming; but the pessimism and all-or-nothing thinking like that make it so much harder to improve your situation.

You might want to post this on /r/depression too, a lot of people struggle with similar things. It's great that you're getting back on the horse and going to college again, that's huge and you should give yourself credit for that.

CBT has a lot of tools to help with this. I'd even wager that you're not actually unattractive but that you've conditioned your mindset to see yourself this way. Cognitive distortions can quite literally change the way you see the world (including yourself).

I'd recommend any of these books by David Burns:

https://smile.amazon.com/Intimate-Connections-David-D-Burns/dp/0451148452

https://smile.amazon.com/Days-Self-Esteem-David-Burns-M-D/dp/0688094554

https://smile.amazon.com/Feeling-Good-New-Mood-Therapy/dp/0380810336

>IWTL How to be more positive and be able to get over the slumps of sadness and feelings of inadequacy in life.
>
>Recently I've began to notice that I have feelings of being inadequate in a lot of things in life. I feel that I'm pretty confident in every day life. I do my best to look good, smell good, and make sure I treat everyone I cross with the best attitude I can offer. I try to make sure I'm the best version of myself that can exist, but I still find myself thinking that I'm not good enough. That my friends deserve a better person to talk to, my girlfriend deserves a better boyfriend, and that I myself am just not cutting it. I want to learn how to fix this toxic mindset and be able to turn my thoughts around and be proud of myself for what I'm doing correctly. I'm a 22 year old Male by the way. Not sure if that has any correlation at all, but it's out there.

It's worth learning how the system (i.e. your brain) works in order to create change. In a nutshell:

1. Thoughts create emotions (events are just events; your interpretation of those events is a thought, and thoughts become emotions)
   
2. You have basically a Twitter feed in your head, streaming ideas into your brain
   
3. Most people never realize they can audit that feed (I didn't, until I read the books below)
   
4. TL;DR - you don't have to believe everything you think (and what you think becomes how you feel)
   
   If you're up for some reading & practice exercises, get these two books: (same author, second one is a workbook you fill out)
   
   

• Feeling Good
  
• Ten Days to Self-Esteem (literally a tool to help you identify how you think, how you feel, and decide how you want to change both of those things)
  
  I'd highly recommend walking through the book in the second link, as it helps you write stuff down, audit (i.e. review) it, and then decide how you'd rather think (and eventually feel) instead. It's a simple mechanism, but externalizing it is really what gives you control over it, because you can literally see it, on paper, in front of you. We all lie to ourselves, we all let ourselves slide, and we all believe fuzzy notions about ourselves that are untrue, whether it's an inability to accept mistakes due to perfectionism or feeling sad or inadequate or whatever you're struggling with. Learning how the different mechanisms in your brain work (thoughts create emotions, you don't have to believe everything you think, etc.) is hugely empowering for changing how you feel!
  
  On a tangent, there's a really excellent Ted Talk by Monica Lewinsky on shame that I just watched the other day, and is extremely well-written & well-delivered:
  
  https://www.ted.com/talks/monica_lewinsky_the_price_of_shame
  
  If you're not familiar with her history, in her early 20's, she fell in love with her married boss & slept with him. This isn't big news, except that her boss at the time was President of United States Bill Clinton, so it was a huge scandal. The catch was that we were just at the beginning of the Internet age, so she got mega-attacked worldwide online. Today, unfortunately, cyber-bullying is pretty normal, but she had to learn how to deal with it & take ownership of her story instead of letting others or her internal "Twitter feed" define her. Pretty good talk to listen to! Kind of the overall idea of the books above & that talk are:
  
  

1. You are valid just being you
   
2. Being imperfect is OK (everyone on the planet is imperfect!); mistakes happen & they can be worked on
   
3. Thoughts create emotion; you can audit what you think & choose how you want to feel about things proactively, instead of reactively
   
4. You can let others define you, or you can let your internal Twitter feed define you, orrrrr you can work on how you think, in order to cement your self-image down
   
   My situation was similar to yours; I always felt like a second-class citizen, emotionally - happy on the outside, but lots of doubts & anxiety on the inside. For me, going through this process was both an essential part of maturing & also for defining exactly who I am. I'm not a big fan of the Hollywood approach of "go out & find yourself"; I'm a bigger fan of "think about things & define who you want to be", i.e. I like to be nice, I like to help other people, I like to do good-quality work, I like to feel good & am willing to do the things required to make me feel good (ex. get enough sleep, eat throughout the day, audit my thinking patterns, etc.), and so on. You absolutely should NOT be walking around feeling like you're not good enough all the time! You should be feeling good & happy instead! Learning how your mind works & how to tweak the system has helped me a lot with that problem.

Good job on identifying an issue and taking steps to counteract and fix them, it's way easier said than done.

It's a more concrete help so I'd recommend Ten Days to Self-Esteem. It's a book my therapist recommended me and it's pretty good in helping change the way to approach certain things about yourself. It's not gonna magic it all away but I find that just changing the way you think about things or better defining them helps.

On a similar note, don't ever vocalize your self=loathing. It's fine to think about it still, you can't entirely stop your thoughts, just don't say them outloud. Don't say them to yourself, don't say them around friends and family, just bite your tongue when saying it. I've noticed that just not vocalizing it has weirdly helped me with myself. My other big thing is to treat yourself, like you did with the ice cream. Not all the time of course, but if you ever do something that's hard just for you to do, like going a week without bringing yourself down or just being reasonably responsible, get yourself something. Be it a trinket, a little vacation or just a sweet dessert, it's good reinforcement and you deserve to feel good about yourself.

Hi friend. I am sorry to hear what you are going through. As someone who has experienced a period of depression and anxiety, I can imagine your pain in an all-too-familiar way.

Others have posted prayer as a means by which to overcome your mental health issues. I wholeheartedly agree. Faith and prayer is what kept me anchored in my struggles as well.

In addition, if you find your therapist is not helping, try to find another. There are many, many great psychologists and counsellors out there. You deserve the best possible care you can get.

Finally, look into workbooks for Cognitive-Behavioural Therapy. The ones that come to mind, as there were particularly helpful for me, are David Burns' "Ten Days to Self Esteem" and "The Feeling Good Handbook"

God bless. I will keep you in my prayers, anonymous reddit friend!:)

> replace negative thoughts with positive ones

This is the basis of CBT (Cognitive behavioral therapy). I'd really recommend reading Feeling good and also the authors workbook for any one interested in this. It gives you concert techniques to apply and helps you examine your thoughts. This book changed the whole way I look at my life and problems. I had a huge light bulb moment when I began to understand how much of my suffering came from within me and how I talk to myself.

Something I've learnt is that it's not that straight forward. That just replacing negative thoughts with positive ones won't always work.

I noticed that if I have the thought "My work is shit. It'll never get better" flipping that to a positive thought "My work is OK. I'm still learning. It could get better" feels like I'm ignoring reality. I'm ignoring what needs improvement, where I'm failing and things I could do better.

Instead, there's a technique called the Acceptance Paradox, where you accept and see if you can find some truth in the statement, which would be:

"There's a lot that isn't working and this doesn't hold up to my standards. But I can get better, work to improve it and learn from my mistakes".

That feels more rational and not like I'm trying to trick myself to feel better. There are loads of other techniques in the book to apply to help with perfectionism, low sense of self-worth, anxiety, anger, guilt etc

> It may sound like new age bullshit, but our thoughts really do inform reality.

I think people are mainly turned off by it because when someone has problems and you just tell them "think positive thoughts"/"your thoughts influence your feelings" it feels like you're invalidating their situation and the difficulty of their problems. I feel it needs to be explained and understood more in depth to help.

>don't be afraid to get help

I second this. I knew I had real struggles with anxiety and depression for years and I didn't reach out for professional help until it got much worst and I was in an enormous, chaotic inner crisis. Wish I had done it early.

On the other hand, I probably wouldn't have even if I knew that it'd be for the better.
The idea that I'd be less of a man for not being able to push through these issues by myself and the stigma attached to mental health would have still held me back.

Oops, I made a mistake!
The book to use with a therapist is Ten Days to Self-Esteem - it's a workbook to apply CBT. Don't buy the digital version as it is a workbook. The Feeling Good Handbook is also useful and includes a more detailed version of CBT techniques, but may be a bit overwhelming because of the info contained.

Anyway, glad to help - good luck!

In the interim, here's a book by one of the fathers of CBT with some exercises somewhat focused on depression, but also covering anxiety and related thinking: http://www.amazon.com/Ten-Days-Self-Esteem-David-Burns/dp/0688094554

Your girl has trauma points on several levels that should be addressed. I'm going to hit you with a library of reference material. Self-help books are not a replacement for therapy! That said, knowledge is power, and these are excellent resources.

1. Family of origin issues: this is where shit begins. We learn our self-worth (or lack of it) here. Toxic Parents (Susan Forward) will give you, and her, the concepts and vocabulary to begin to understand and process the effects of a fucked up family and how to deal with it.
   
   
2. Self-esteem issues: Stemming from above. Almost certainly what's behind the 'long, abusive relationship' with some guy who ended up cheating on her. People who stay in abusive relationships (physical, emotional or a cocktail of both) do so as a direct result of issues with self-esteem. Ten Days to Self-Esteem (David Burns) and The Self-Esteem Workbook (Glenn Schiraldi) both give background and practical exercises to help understand the concepts and make progress toward repair. You should both work through this!
   
   
3. Post-Traumatic Stress Issues: Like I said above, you've both been through trauma here. CLEARLY, her trauma is on a completely different level from yours, but you're exhibiting signs of a variation of PTSD yourself. Many people (myself included up until a couple of weeks ago, actually) think PTSD is reserved for war veterans. Not so much. The bible of PTSD is The Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder Sourcebook (also Glenn Schiraldi). Buy this book. You can buy a Kindle edition and read it on your computer with a Kindle app if you want it right now and can't find it in a bookstore locally.
   
   
4. Anxiety Issues: I'm betting she has them. Even if she by some miracle doesn't, you clearly do. For your back pocket -- Feeling Good and The Feeling Good Handbook (David Burns). Excellent Cognitive Behaviour Therapy manuals - you feel what you think, and CBT is brilliant for helping you understand and adjust faulty thought patterns.
   
   You need to be able to talk with her about this. Your relationship depends on it. In order for that to happen, she needs to feel safe talking to you about it. You should be able to express to her that you are upset by what happened to her, but no upset with her. You need to be very, very clear in your mind that that is true before you can be expected to convince her that that is true. Help her to understand that terrible things have happened to her - not just the rape, but all that shit going back to her abusive family of origin - that those things are not OK (that may sound ridiculously obvious, but someone that has grown up in that kind of toxic environment needs to hear that loud, clear and often), that they are not her fault, and that you love her and are prepared to support her when she needs you.
   
   She needs to talk to a professional. Do you have access to a women's counseling center or women's shelter where you are? If you PM me your location, I will be more than happy to help you look for resources. Given what you've explained about her background, chances are very, very good she's suppressing post-trauma reactions. Children of abusive situations learn that it's futile - maybe even counter-productive - to express physical or emotional pain. She needs to get with someone who is trained to hear below the surface and help her.
   
   Wow - I'm verbose.
   
   tl/dr: Giant, waiving red flags all over her background. Get her to a trained rape counselor, educate yourself on the probable issues, be there for her.

I felt that way for the better part of 8 years. I'm 28 and now dating a woman in her 40's (we make for a odd couple, but that's why it works). We met on OkCupid, and it was supposed to be a summer fling...and it's turned into a lot more. I never expected myself to be here. Sooner or later you'll meet someone and it'll just click. It sounds cliche, but after spending most of my 20's seeing friends hooking up long-term, getting hitched and having babies I thought I'd never have a part of that life. I felt that relationships weren't for me. And now, all of the sudden here I am, nearly a year into a relationship.

Right now, you need to focus on you. Honestly, give up on relationships for a while. I did FWB's pretty much all 8 years, which avoids the stickiness (for lack of a better term) of a relationship but still gives you someone to have fun with and have sex with. If you feel that you're heading down a relationship path, be honest about how things are going to both you and your partner in such a situation and break it off if you can't get it back on the track you want. Just don't fade, because that's an asshole move.

In the meantime, do what's important to you and broaden your horizons. Learn an instrument, learn to code, learn to shoot a gun. I spent most of my summer weekends actually outdoors building a cottage and shooting a .22 rifle in a gravel pit. In the winter I was completing a second degree. Also throw yourself into your job. Learn a new skill for it. Learn to be better at it - if you hate your job, well find ways to optimize your time there. If you don't have a job, find something to do, even on a volunteer basis.

Also, don't be afraid to ask for help from friends. If you have a close friend or two, be honest with them about how you're feeling. They'll help you get back on my feet. My best friend organized a camping trip for me and some friends about a month after my break-up for my 21sth birthday and it was amazing how much that helped. When he broke up with his girlfriend two years ago, I had him up to my place and we spent four days golfing and drinking beer.

Right now it feels life sucks in that department. Spend time to get your mind off it and make yourself better. You're the only one who can control those feelings and you have to make the changes necessary so the pain and jadedness don't bother you. But do what works for you and you'll come out the other side in good shape. Just don't allow yourself to mope and feel sorry about it all. And if you find you're making excuses for yourself, get 10 Days to Self Esteem. It will help.

Good luck man, I hope I helped at least in a small way and that my experiences will make life a little easier.

Awesome. I'm so glad you did! And honestly, that wasn't that long of a wait!

I'm so glad that you saw the doctor and are getting help. I'm so glad I did too.

I started my first class yesterday, at the recommendation of the therapist that I saw last week. It's a self-esteem class that is based on this book. A lot of it is kind of self-evident and general "find the silver lining" kind of stuff, but it's actually helpful to go over examples with the group and to be able to categorize the types of thoughts that I've been having and to be able to recognize them so that I know how to turn them around. The meeting was really awkward because there were so many people there from all walks of life and many with much worse problems than I have, honestly. But once I got over that, I relaxed and just went along with everything. Looking forward to next week.

My wife looked at the list of "Distorted Thoughts" with me last night and she was like, "Yup, you do that. Yup, you do that (and here's an example). Yup, you do that! Yup, you totally do that!" and we talked about each one, with examples that she's seen in me. It really helped. And we laughed with each other like we haven't laughed in months. It was so nice.

Even just talking to the doctor and the therapist and knowing that I'm doing something about this has helped me a whole lot. I still don't fully believe that I can "cure" myself - I think it will continue to be a life-long struggle. But at least I'm trying to get the tools to fight it and get along, rather than thinking it's hopeless and not worth it. It's totally worth it. My wife's attitude has completely changed, which has also helped.

And exercising every night before bed for the past two weeks has really helped me get my energy back. I do feel like I have more energy and I'm a bit more awake/alert. I still struggle a bit with the exercise. It's really hard to push myself. But I'm getting better at it. I figure that if I workout hard enough to get that "runner's high" when I come home, it was worth it. I ride my bike for about an hour every night. I go about 10 miles each ride. I'm keeping track of it using the Strava app. The data that Strava gives you makes it more interesting and almost into a game to see how far I can go in that time, or to try to up my average speed, and I can see my route and change that up or keep doing the same course and see how much faster I can do it each time, etc.

(Seriously, that "runner's high" feels like how I felt when I had an edible marijuana cupcake in amsterdam... just tingles all over my body and it feels so good. The difference would be that when I ate the "space cake" it messed with my mind and everything I saw had so much more significance than it did before. That doesn't happen with the "runner's high" but the physical sensations are still very similar. The tingles and relaxation of the muscles. Anyway, it's interesting. And a really nice feeling.)

St. John's Wort is a pretty cheap over the counter drug that may help. Give it a couple of weeks to work, and if you don't feel any better by then think about seeing a psychiatrist. Get therapy regardless.

You mention self-esteem issues. Cognitive behavioral therapy can help. It's always better to go through it with a therapist but you can get started pretty easily with this: http://www.amazon.com/Ten-Days-Self-Esteem-David-Burns/dp/0688094554/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1252600255&sr=8-1. It sounds corny. It'll feel extra corny when you start doing the exercises, but again give it a few weeks of diligent effort and then check back in.

As for what's wrong with the world, lots of people feel better after doing some volunteer work.