Nathaniel Branden, the ultimate authority about self-esteem, has written a book, The Six Pillars of Self-Esteem, that is a classic work on the subject. Branden has a chapter in the book dedicated to ways to support one’s self-esteem. “One of the ways we can support self-esteem is by educating clients in the idea of survival strategies, helping them see that their worst mistakes can be understood as misguided attempts at self-preservation.” The author urges people to see that, if something isn’t working in their lives, then “are you willing to experiment with trying something else?” This is one of the foundations of my RENEW coaching process.

One of the six pillars of self-esteem is self-acceptance, including thoughts, emotions, actions, and memories. Our “parts” include “actual subselves with values, perspectives, and feelings distinctly their own. He calls these subpersonalities. “A subself or subpersonality is a dynamic component of an individual’s psyche, having a distinctive perspective, value orientation, and “personality” of its own.” These “may be more or less dominant in the individual’s responses at any particular time.” Understanding and mastering the seven subselves is a key to developing healthy self-esteem.

The seven subselves are:

  1. Child-self – This is “the component of the psyche containing the “personality” of the child one once was, with that child’s range of values, emotions, needs, and responses. Branden writes, “Does it need to be argued that we cannot have healthy self-esteem while despising part of who we are?”
  2. Teenage-self – This is “the component of the psyche containing the “personality” of the adolescent one once was, with that teenager’s range of values, emotions, needs, and responses.” This is the mindset “to which we often revert unconsciously during times of relationship difficulty or crisis, as manifested in such withdrawal behaviors as “I don’t care” or “No one’s going to get me!” or “Don’t tell me what to do!” Branden will help couples pull out of their teenage mind-states by asking “How do you feel right now and is that the age you need to be to solve this problem?”
  3. Opposite-gender self – This is “the component of the psyche containing the feminine subpersonality of the male and the masculine subpersonality of the female…There tends to be a strong correlation between how we relate to the opposite gender in the world and how we relate to the opposite gender within.”
  4. Mother-self – This is “the component of the psyche containing an internalization of aspects of the personality, perspective, and values of an individual’s mother (or older female “mother figures” who had an influence and impact during childhood)…Long after our mother may have died, we play her messages in our head and often imagine they are our own.”
  5. Father-self – This is “the component of the psyche containing an internalization of the personality, perspective, and values of an individual’s father (or older male “father figures” who had an influence and impact during childhood).”
  6. Outer self – This is “the component of the psyche that is expressed through the self we present to the world.” The outer self is “the self other people see.” The outer self is often a “highly armored and defended distortion of the inner self.”
  7. Inner self – This is the “only self we can see and experience; the private self; the self as subjectively perceived.” Branden offers a “powerful sentence stem: If my outer self expressed more of my inner self in the world______.“

Branden’s work is “balancing or integrating subpersonalities. This is a process of working with subselves toward a number of interrelated needs, which include”:

  1. Recognizing and isolating subpersonalities, “to isolate and identify it within the totality of one’s experience.”
  2. “Understanding the relationship that exists between the adult conscious self and this particular subpersonality.”
  3. “Identifying the salient traits of the subpersonality, such as chief concerns, dominant emotions, characteristic ways of responding.”
  4. “Identifying unmet needs or wants of the subpersonality relative to the adult conscious self.”
  5. “Identifying destructive behavior on the part of the subpersonality.”
  6. “Developing a relationship between the adult conscious self and the subpersonality of consciousness, acceptance, respect, benevolence, and open communication.”
  7. “Identifying the relationship existing between a particular subpersonality and the various others in the psyche and resolving any conflicts between them.”

Branden also advises that “the elimination of irrational fears causes self-esteem to rise…Unhealing pain from the past, because of the sense of debilitation it often provokes, and the defenses people typically set against it, represents yet another barrier in the quest for stronger self-esteem.”

Like my RENEW coaching process, if the goal is to “inspire greater self-acceptance, then one can create a climate of acceptance, lead the client to identify and reown blocked and disowned parts of the self, and teach the importance of being in a nonadversarial relationship to oneself and its parts (subpersonalities).”