For those who really struggle with self-image, there are many types of therapy that can help them improve their self-image and align it more closely with reality.
Therapy modalities that can help include:
- Traditional psychoanalysis: A long-term form of treatment that focuses on changing problematic behaviors, feelings, and thoughts by discovering their unconscious meanings and motivations.
- Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT): a form of therapy that combines cognitive therapy (focusing on what people think and how to change the way they think) with behavioral therapy (an approach that focuses on changing people’s behavior more than their thoughts) to try to change both thoughts and behaviors.
- Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT): a five-component form of CBT that emphasizes the learning of new skills and strategies for a healthy, happy life.
- Client-Centered Therapy: a type of therapy in which the client—not the therapist—is considered the “expert” on their own life and the therapist focuses on providing interest, concern, care, and respect (APA, n.d.).
Depending on the diagnosis you have (if any), your regular treatment can also help with developing a healthy self-image.
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Words to Note
Meditations can be incredibly helpful in boosting your self-esteem and helping you build and maintain a healthy sense of self. Give these meditations a try when you have a few minutes to spare:
“Self-esteem is like a battery. When the battery is charged, the person is positive; when the battery is low, the individual is negative.” Lilly Harry
“A strong, positive self-image is the best possible preparation for success.” Joyce Brothers
“The ‘self-image’ is the key to human personality and human behavior. Change the self-image and you change the personality and the behavior.” Maxwell Maltz
“It’s like everyone tells a story about themselves inside their own head. Always. all the time. That story makes you what you are. We build ourselves out of that story.” Patrick Rothfuss
“Human beings are not born once and for all on the day their mothers give birth to them, but … life obliges them over and over again to give birth to themselves.” Gabriel García Márquez
“Seeing, feeling, thinking, believing—these are the stages of how we change our style on the outside and our self-image on the inside.” Stacey London
“Too many people overvalue what they are not and undervalue what they are.” Malcolm S. Forbes
“Remember always that you not only have the right to be an individual, you have an obligation to be one.” Eleanor Roosevelt