From The Rainbow Machine: Tales from a Neurolinguist’s Journal by Andrew T. Austin.
“I hate myself” contains more than a low opinion. It describes an activity and a relationship: someone is hating, and someone is being hated. If help concentrates entirely on reassuring the hated self, the activity of the critic can escape examination. The person may receive repeated messages about being worthwhile while continuing to attack themselves in exactly the same way.
This is the distinction that interests me in the self-esteem material in The Rainbow Machine. It is not an argument that low self-esteem is unreal or that distressed people deserve criticism. It is a reason to investigate the particular process hidden inside a familiar label.
The obvious problem nobody mentions
Some difficulties involve a practical issue that the surrounding people find awkward to discuss. A person’s manner of speaking, personal presentation or behaviour may be affecting relationships, while everyone talks around it. The person receives vague encouragement instead of information they could use.
While working in the medical centre of a large manufacturing site, I received a call from a line manager. He was sending over an employee whose breath had become a problem for colleagues. The employee arrived without knowing why he had been sent. I told him directly that his manager had passed the uncomfortable task of mentioning it to me. He left again.
That exchange did not demonstrate a successful treatment. It demonstrated a communication failure that had already occurred: the person most directly involved had not been told what the issue was. Referring someone elsewhere can become a way of avoiding an ordinary but awkward conversation.
Useful feedback should be private, specific and proportionate. It should distinguish a remediable issue from a judgement of someone’s worth. An unusual appearance is not automatically a problem, and a practitioner’s personal taste is not an objective standard. The relevant question is whether there is reliable information about a difficulty the person wants help addressing.
Feeling better about conduct or changing the conduct?
A person may dislike aspects of how they behave. They may repeatedly break commitments, avoid responsibilities or act in ways that damage relationships. Reassuring them that they are wonderful does not necessarily help them change those behaviours. Neither does condemning their whole identity.
There is a useful distinction between respecting a person and approving everything they do. Someone can deserve care while needing to learn a skill, repair an action or take responsibility for a pattern. A concern about behaviour need not be translated into either “you are worthless” or “there is nothing to address”.
My criticism of indiscriminate self-esteem work is that it can overlook this distinction. If a person wants to behave differently, the task may include learning how. If their standards are cruel or unrealistic, the standards themselves need examination. The label alone does not identify which situation is present.
A referral framed as low self-esteem
A social worker once referred a young woman to me who had been depressed, had made suicide attempts and was deteriorating despite individual and group work. The referral was framed around self-esteem. I wondered whether the formulation being used was missing something important, although deterioration during therapy does not by itself prove that the therapy caused it.
When I asked what the problem was, the young woman said she had low self-esteem. Asked how she knew, she replied that she hated herself. I wrote the words down. Looking at the sentence made the distinction easier to examine: the “I” doing the hating and the “self” receiving it occupied different grammatical positions.
She had learned to request more self-esteem because that was the framework through which the difficulty had been discussed. I wanted to examine the hatred as an activity, rather than assume that additional reassurance for its recipient was the whole answer. The question became how she related to herself, not simply how highly she rated herself.
My language in that encounter was confrontational. Such an account is not an invitation to shame a vulnerable client or attach a new condemning identity to them. Nor does it establish a durable outcome: I do not present follow-up evidence here demonstrating that this conversation resolved her difficulties. Suicidality requires appropriate assessment and support, and a linguistic observation cannot substitute for either.
Track the pronouns without inventing separate people
“I am an idiot” and “You are an idiot” can function differently in inner speech. One sounds like an assertion about identity; the other can place the speaker in the position of an accuser addressing someone else. Similarly, “I can do this” and “Come on, Andy, you can do this” may carry different relationships between speaker and recipient.
These differences do not establish that several independent personalities inhabit the person. They are distinctions in language and perspective. A person can shift between them in ordinary thought without noticing. Paying attention to the wording can reveal how encouragement, accusation, distance or identification is being organised.
It is also worth noticing whether the criticism supplies anything usable. Does it identify a particular action and a possible correction, or does it merely repeat an insult? “I need to prepare the information before the meeting” gives a different kind of direction from “You always ruin everything”. The latter may feel forceful while teaching very little.
The critic’s responsibility
If the critic claims to want improvement, a reasonable question is what improvement it is helping to produce. Repeated hostility can become a habit that appears purposeful because it feels severe. Severity and usefulness are separate matters.
The active side of the relationship therefore deserves attention. Can the person identify what they wanted to happen? Do they know a better way to act? What information or practice is missing? Can they give themselves an instruction they could realistically follow? The work may involve learning to guide rather than attack.
This is different from demanding positive affirmations. Replacing “I am useless” with an unbelievable declaration of brilliance may leave the underlying conflict intact. A more credible description can acknowledge both a mistake and the possibility of doing something specific about it.
Perspective taking and its limits
Connirae and Tamara Andreas’s work on Aligning Perceptual Positions offers distinctions for examining self, other and observer perspectives. Such distinctions can help clarify where an internal comment seems to come from and how the person relates to its recipient. They should be explored as features of experience, not imposed as an explanation in advance.
The broader principle is to listen before deciding that a familiar label supplies the answer. The NHS guidance on low self-esteem includes recognising negative beliefs, being kinder to oneself and seeking talking therapies. Examining self-directed criticism belongs alongside that concern for care, rather than turning suffering into a character accusation.
Choose an ordinary example of self-criticism and write the actual sentence. Identify the behaviour being discussed, the judgement being added and whether any useful instruction is present. If there is a real mistake, name the repair. If there is only a global insult, notice that it has supplied no plan. The practical distinction is between a voice that repeatedly condemns and a way of speaking that helps the person recognise what to do next.
More from The Rainbow Machine
Return to the Rainbow Machine index for related articles on critical self-talk, identity, language and therapeutic relationships.