Self-Esteem, Self-Concept, and Letting Go of the Past

Hi and welcome to Journey to Recovery. Today we're going to talk about self esteem, self concept and letting go of the past. This is another one in our series with the new Harbinger books to help you take self help books and integrate them into group counseling situations. So the book we're talking about today is the Self Esteem simple exercises to help you challenge your inner critic and and celebrate your personal strengths. Now obviously this was written as a self help book, but we're going to talk about ways that you can integrate it into group therapy to make your therapy sessions a little bit more lively. Generally, this book is targeted towards the general public. Adults. It works best with adults 16 and up would probably be fine, but definitely 18 and over. The book is geared towards that audience. Uses are for self help, individual or group therapy. Really easy to use. There are a variety of different exercises so it provides a little bit of something for everyone. Not everybody is going to like every exercise. However, it gives you a variety of different things that you can explore with each individual patient to find something that fits for them so they can wrap their head around this whole concept of self esteem and letting go of the past and how the past is impacting them in the present and usually negatively or they wouldn't be in our groups. So our objectives for today, if you're going to stay with us through the entire presentation, then you know that you can sign on to allceus.com and get a giveaway. Get some CE use. Otherwise, if you just want to pay attention and follow along, that's great. So what we're going to do is review the concept of self esteem, discuss the importance of self esteem, identify some of the causes of poor self esteem as if we didn't already know, and review the activities in the Self Esteem Companion discussing how this book can be integrated into group therapy settings. So I think I said most of that already, but you know, we went through it again so you visual learners can get a good picture of what's going on. The table of contents we start out with feeling better fast. It gives you some exercises to guess what help people feel better fast. We want to give them that motivation, help them with the momentum to get the ball rolling to do the hard work that is therapy. Conquering the inner critic, refuting self esteem wreckers, revisioning your development. And this really looks at some of the things that happened when people were developing and saying, okay, we may need to rewrite that a little bit. When we were five, we interpreted the situation this way. Now that we are 25 maybe we can look at it through a bit of a different lens. Finding compassion, that is accepting that we do the best that we can with the tools that we have at any given time. Achieving an accurate self assessment, which most people actually don't have, even if they're not in therapy. So we'll talk about that. Reframing mistakes and minimizing judgments. So what is self esteem? Basically? Self esteem is how people feel about themselves. If you like yourself, then lovely. Theoretically, we'll say you have a high self esteem. It's also called your self concept. It goes to what you believe that you're good at and why you believe you're good enough, smart enough, and people like you. Yeah, I need to just kind of have Stuart Smalley in the background somewhere. But I digress. Self esteem is often a judgment about your own personal worth when comparing who you are against who you think you should be. And guess what? None of us, well, most, mostly none of us achieves that level of who we think we should be. We always want to grow. We always want to get a little bit better. We always want to do things a little bit differently. And there's nothing wrong with that. What we want to look at is how harshly we criticize ourselves if we don't meet every perfect goal because we're not perfect. So, okay, let's look at mistakes as learning opportunities. And hey, that's like 2/3 of the way down the presentation. We'll talk about that. Self esteem lets people believe you're good enough, smart enough, and lovable enough. You can validate yourself. You don't need somebody else to tell you you're okay. You can look in the mirror and go, I'm okay. It lets you know that your best is actually good enough and you are not. Your behaviors, you may make some poor choices, but that doesn't make you a bad person. Poor self esteem often leads to frantic efforts to get approval from other people. Again, if you are looking for other people to tell you you're okay, guess what? You're pretty much screwed. Because other people have other agendas and they're not always going to be able to tell you you're okay. You need to be able to look within yourself and go, I'm okay. I'm not perfect, but I am okay. These are the good things about me. So what causes poor self esteem? And there's a whole litany of reasons. I have many, many other classes on it that you can go to, but we're going to hit the highlights here. Lack of validation as A child if parents never said, you're good enough, I love you, or if they always criticized you in terms of being a bad person, a bad boy, a bad girl, instead of critiquing or constructively addressing, like, those words, your behaviors. Because ultimately, most of us who are in the psychology field believe that people are good. The majority of people are very good. They make some really crappy choices. But sometimes when we look at those choices, you know what? They make sense. It's the best that you could do at that particular time in your life. Now the situation's changed. You can't compare apples and apples. I can't compare the choices I made when I was 16 to the choices that I'm making now that I'm much older than 16. So we need to look at whether the child growing up got a firm foundation and had an idea that he or she was good enough just for being him or her, himself or herself. Okay, Grammar's not my strong suit today anyway. And as an adult, we still need validation sometimes. We need an atta girl or an atta boy. We need a thank you. We need a hug. It's not saying that we have to always live by ourselves and completely validate ourselves. We need people around us, people who care, significant others that will give us positive feedback and constructive feedback, but that helps us know that we're loved, we're cared about, and we make a difference. Again, we need to be able to do that for ourselves some too, but it's kind of a give and take sort of thing. Humans were meant to be in social situations. We're not meant to be hermits in a cave out in the woods somewhere, refusing to let go of the past, always seeing yourself as the bad person. Well, I'm a bad person. I've always been a bad person. I was the black sheep of the family. I'll always be the black sheep of the family. That doesn't necessarily have to be the case. You can change your choices now. Whether your family chooses to change their opinions, that's on them. And that's way easier said than done. This is not a therapy session. But do consider that if you start making the next right choice, people will start seeing you as somebody who makes the next right choice instead of making poor choices. Eventually they will stop expecting you to make the wrong choice. It doesn't happen overnight. You need to be consistent and they need to be open minded. But I digress. Viewing things globally, and this is what I was talking about earlier, viewing things as all my fault if I do Make a mistake. If I do something wrong, I as a person suck. And that's not true. I can tell you there are some things that I am really poor at. Directions is one of them. You know, when it comes to finding my way out of the woods, I am not the sharpest pencil in the box. But when it comes to counseling or therapy or some of those other things, gardening, I have some skills, so I know what I'm good at. And I'm fine with some of the things that I'm not so good at. That's why I have a gps. You know, I don't even really try to learn it because I figure that the GPS will redirect me. So you want to view things specifically. I made a mistake with this thing. It's not me who is a failure. It was my attempt at doing that. And guess what? Failure means you tried. Something you pushed outside of the envelope. If you don't fail, you haven't tried. I can go through all kinds of little sayings about that, but I want you to keep that in your mind. If you are constantly succeeding and you never stumble, you never fall. My sense is you're not pushing yourself very hard, refusing to believe you deserve better and shutting positive people out. Now, again, this goes with refusing to let go of the past, seeing yourself as a bad person or seeing everybody else as bad people because they people in general. Back to these global generalizations. They have hurt you in the past, so you're going to keep them out. Well, that kind of works against you. We can look at it as these 17 people over here were hurtful, so we're not going to let them in right now. But it doesn't mean every single other person on the planet is a bad person. So taking people as individuals and viewing them in terms of who they are, not what they do. So feeling better fast. This chapter starts out with several activities. The first one is called the five finger Exercise and it talks about remembering better times. Then we move on to giving yourself credit, recalling positive memories, staying relaxed, creating personal images for stress reduction, discovering hidden treasures, consulting your inner guide. I call this one the Jiminy Cricket exercise and visualizing your self worth. So we're going to talk about some of these in depth in just a second. The five finger exercise, which is actually four fingers and a thumb pointing around. But you know, what you want to do is have people for themselves or in group, touch their finger to their first thumb to their first finger. Remember a time that they felt cared for and loved. Now if you're Doing this in group, you want to add to the end of that. Remember a time this week which you felt cared for and loved. Have people really focus on trying to remember when somebody did something nice. It doesn't have to be huge. We want to focus on looking at the little things and appreciating the little things so cared for and loved. Remember a time this week when you felt successful. Remember a time this week when you felt helpful, kind and generous. It could be helping somebody carry their groceries out, opening a door again, it doesn't have to be earth shattering. We don't want to take the little things for granted. And finally, loving and caring for someone else. This can be a child, a friend, a neighbor, even compassion for something that you read or saw on tv. This is an excellent way to start the group because it focuses on positive things. We move on to conquering your inner critic, which presents the concept of the pathological inner critic. These are all the tapes and all the things people have said to you in the past that you latched onto and you're not letting go. I'm guilty of this. It was pointed out to me today that I don't let things go very well, good or bad. So that aside, taking that inner critic and saying, what's going on? Is this real or is this just something somebody said to me that I need to let go? Differentiating your beliefs from the inner critic, is this real? Do I believe that I am a bad person? Do I believe that I don't deserve X, Y and Z? Well, that's something only you can decide. But we don't want to rely on somebody's opinion. From 15 years ago, whenever they said you're a slob. Well, look around your place now. Are you a slob? And again, that you are a slob implies the entire person not, you know, you're not the best with house cleaning. So we want to look at specific behaviors, silencing or refuting critical messages. So you look around your house and you go, yeah, I'm not the best at housekeeping. Okay, well does it matter? This is where we're refuting these critical messages. Having a spic and span house does not matter to everybody. It matters to some people. So you've got to decide if it matters for you. Likewise, you can look around and go, this place is pretty clean. And take that critical internal voice and go, you know, she shut up. Creating self affirming internal voices or an internal voice. And yes, you can have voices inside your head. This is your conscience. This is your little jiminy cricket, whatever you want to call it. But we want to create an internal voice that says that's okay, at least you tried activities, group activities. You want to whiteboard critical messages that people receive from their parents, their significant others and society. So you can either do it on whiteboard or easel, paper, whatever works for you in your particular setting. Then examine how those messages are negatively impacting your patients today. Each time a person puts up a negative message, my guess is, my experience is that two or three or four, eight other people in the group will go, yeah, I got that same one. So then they can all talk about how it's impacting them today and how they're going to get it to stop impacting them. They've got to make the choice that whatever that statement is doesn't matter. Or if it does matter, they need to figure out if they've already, if they're still embodying that. So examine the messages, talk about how they're negatively impacting and then refute them. This way. These negative messages aren't there anymore. We're getting rid of them, we're nullifying them, or we're setting them as goals. I want to be a better housekeeper. Art therapy. Paint a portrait of the self affirming inner voice. I'm not a huge art therapy person. I am not that creative. But I have found when I've done art therapy with patients, painting a portrait or doing collages can be very therapeutic. Collages are really good for people like me who can't draw to save their life. I'm good with scissors most of the time, except for when I run with them. But I digress again. Then we move on to refuting self esteem records. And if you've seen other presentations I've done on cognitive behavioral style and irrational thoughts, these will look very, very familiar to you. Cognitive distortions mess up our self esteem because they're all or nothing. Overgeneralization. You take one failure and generalize it to everything's a failure. You take one incident and say well, I failed that time so I can never do this again. Polarized thinking. That's all or nothing. I'm either going to be the CEO of the company or I don't want to work there. Filtering. Generally, if you're in a good mood and you've got a positive self esteem, you'll filter things and hear and see the positive. If you're in a bad mood and or you have a negative self esteem, guess what? That filter only lets in the negative stuff. It's a cloudy day outside. Ah, crap. It's going to be gloomy all day and I'm going to have a bad hair day and I'm going to get wet and the car is going to get all spotty and I just washed it. You know me. I see clouds. I'm like, I don't have to water the garden today and God's going to take care of washing my car for me. Score. You have to figure out what filters you've got that you're taking all this information in and and processing it through because it makes a huge difference on your attitude and how you perceive yourself and everybody else. Global labeling, we already talked about that. Talking about something as being everybody hates me. Nobody wants to do this. Everybody wants a piece of me. Well, generally everybody doesn't. There may be a lot of people and then we need to look at what that means. We also want to look at the negatives. Nobody cares. I hear that a lot. Nobody gives a crap. Okay, well, let's look at that. Do you have a sponsor? Does that person give a crap? Do you have any friends? Do you have any acquaintances? Do you have anybody in your life that cares? Now they may be doing tough love and they may have had to distance themselves, but do they care? Mind reading. Assuming you know what I'm thinking and really you don't want to get inside my head because it goes on all these detours when you assume you know what somebody's thinking or meaning or assume you can interpret something. Generally you're going to be wrong. So you want to pay attention to putting your own values and your own interpretations on something without having all the facts. Shoulds. I should do the laundry tonight. Actually I did it last night, but I should. What will happen if I don't do it? Self esteem wreckers means you're taking that should and there's this little voice inside your head going, you really should have done that. You shouldn't be sitting on the couch watching tv. You should be being productive. You should be doing this. Shoulds are generally something that is going to get you into trouble because it constantly puts pressure on you and pushes you. There's a time for that, but there's also a time for saying no. I choose to sit on the couch and watch TV and I choose to do laundry tomorrow takes the should out and gives you the power. Self blame. Taking responsibility for everything bad that happens in the world. Car crashed. It's my fault. The world is coming to an end. It's my fault you're in a bad mood. It must be my fault my kids didn't do well in school this semester. Well, I must be a terrible, terrible mother. Self blame taking responsibility for stuff that 99% of the time probably has nothing to do with you. And then my favorite, the one that I cherish and refuse to let go is this control fallacy. This is the belief that you can control everything. And if you've been in recovery, you know the Serenity prayer so you know that there are some things you cannot change and then some things you can and you need the courage to do it. Accepting there are some things in life that are not about you and that are out of your control is a huge relief for your self esteem because it says, you know, I'm not responsible for that. I can't blame myself for that. So Group activities Take each of those cognitive distortions we just went over after talking about what they mean. Put easel paper stations around the room. Have everybody go around the room and give examples of how they have experienced that or used that cognitive distortion in the past week. You won't have one for everything, but most people will find that at least they've done at least five or six of them. Another one you can do is a variation on the baby shower clothespin game. When you're at a baby shower, if you say the word baby, then you have to put a clothespin on or take one off. We'll say take one off. So everybody starts and they've got 10 clothespins and every time they start talking and start demonstrating one of these cognitive distortions. If a group member calls them out, then the person doing it has to take off a clothespin and give it to the person who called them out. Keeps people aware of their language. This is what I'm getting at. You can look at the activity online, you can google it. It's a baby shower game. Clearly I haven't been to a lot of baby showers lately. Oops. It made sense when I wrote it. Revision your development this section takes the reader through the major developmental periods from infancy all the way to present. It helps you re examine what happened through a more objective lens so you can eliminate conditions of worth. Now conditions of worth mean I'm worthy only if someone tells me I am. I'm worthy only if I measure up to your expectations. This takes us back and says no, you're worthy. Period. So let's look at some of the messages you got about conditions of worth and why you feel you weren't worthy or aren't worthy. Then it talks about re parenting and nurturing the person from the past. You'll understand in the exercise. So example restatements. In the past you may have gotten the message you're on your own. A better message to have gotten would be I'll back you. I'll stand up for you. You just have to tell me the truth. You can't make your own decisions that tells somebody that I've got to follow your rules or I'm not acceptable. A positive restatement is you can make your own decisions. I may not agree with them, but that's okay. You can make your own decisions. Followed by it's okay to disagree. If you received the message growing up that it wasn't okay to have your own opinions, thoughts, feelings and needs, guess what? That's why you're here. So we take us to the present and say it's okay to disagree. We don't have to agree on everything and it's not going to hurt my feelings if you don't share my same opinion. You can trust your feelings. Now, if you grew up in an addicted or alcoholic family, you learned that it was not okay to have your own feelings. And you certainly learned not to trust your feelings or trust anyone else. So fast forward to today. You need to learn to trust your feelings. And I regularly call them spidey senses. We also talk about head, heart and gut honesty. If you're trying to figure out what your feeling is about a situation, go to your head. If it seems right, okay, go to your heart. If it feels okay, it doesn't feel like you're hurting anybody. Okay then go to your gut. And if your gut is doing somersaults, you're justifying something somewhere, everything needs to say, this is a good move. You need to learn to trust those feelings because sometimes your spidey senses are going to go off and your head will go, just ignore it. Or your heart will go, but I really want it. And your belly is going, no, I don't think so. So you need to learn to trust your feelings. In the past you were told they were wrong, they were incorrect. Whatever. Well, you're not in the past anymore. You're a grown up and you're needing to do what is right for you. And guess what, your feelings are right. Whatever they are, you're doing the best you can. Well, none of us gets up in the morning and goes, well I think I'm going to half ass it through the day. Well maybe I do. Some days we take a day off and that is okay because we have to recharge. But whatever we do, whenever we do it, generally we're doing the best that we can. And if our best isn't going to quite make the cut, then it doesn't. And we've got to figure out how to fix that. But generally we do the best that we can and we can talk about anything. If you grew up in a family that said don't talk, don't trust, don't feel, then talking to other people about what's going on, the skeletons in your closet, the, the color of the sky, whatever it is, may seem very intimidating because you met with judgment in the past or you were told to shut up in the present. Surrounding yourself with people who are willing to listen, they don't have to agree with you, but they're willing to listen is key to helping you build your self esteem and remember that you're okay. You can have different opinions, maybe different than everybody else in your social group. That doesn't mean you're a bad person, just means you have a different opinion. But being able to talk to other people and share and be connected and all those happy, warm, fuzzy, hug a tree and pet a bunny sort of things, they're really important. And by the way, I love trees and bunnies. Review the statements in each section and and have patients discuss what it means. So beginning back in infancy, all the way through adulthood, there are different statements that are provided for ways to change or revision your past. You're rewriting that story. So you want to go through each one of those and have people identify which one's fit for them and figure out how they're going to make the new statements work for them. How are they going to accept that? How are they going to let go of the past where people told them that it wasn't safe, that they were wrong, that they were stupid, how are they going to overcome that? Then they want to talk about contrary messages they may have received when they were growing up. What is it? You know, what were the negative messages you received? In the book, you get the positive restatements. This is what you should have heard. So part of this activity may be talking about, what was it that you did hear that maybe you shouldn't have heard? Hey, there's the shoulds again. Then we move on to finding compassion. You've gone through it and now you're looking back at your life going, you know, people made some really bad choices when I was growing up and maybe I'm not so bad. So now it's time to find compassion. For yourself. You want to practice understanding and relating to others feelings. Understanding too, that they, believe it or not, are probably trying to do the best they can with the tools they have at any given time. It may not live up to your expectations, but that's you. Review the concept of doing the best I can and ask yourself, if you're waiting in line at the grocery store and the cashier is slow as molasses, is he or she doing the best that he or she can? Likely, yes. For whatever reason, when your kid comes home and either made the sports team or didn't make the sports team or whatever, it doesn't really matter. Did they do the best they could? Well, that's a whole other philosophical discussion about everybody's winners. But we do want to give people credit for trying. And if they went out and they tried out for the sports team and they didn't make it, that's okay. They gave it their best shot. And maybe that's not a strength of theirs. And it doesn't mean that they are not athletic, that they're fat, lazy and stupid. It means they may not be good at that particular sport at this point in time. See, that whole global thing came real specific. All right, and then we want to start begin being compassionate towards yourself. Cut yourself some slack, for goodness sake. If you wake up in the morning and you're just having an off day, we all do. Cut yourself some slack. I did yesterday. I sat on the couch like a potato and didn't do much of anything all day long, which I haven't done in a while. I actually watched lots of Netflix and for a brief half a second I felt guilty. And then I was like, no, you know, I'm over that because I work hard and I've got a lot going on and I needed time. So I was being compassionate towards myself. You need to do the same. Cut yourself some slack. You don't have to be everyone to all people all the time. If you are not true to you, you can't be there for everybody else. Ah, that's a statement. So group activity. Have people go through their day. Usually it only takes going through the present day and ask themselves or ask them to complete the statement. Today. I was judgmental. When have them identify times during the day they were judgmental about what somebody was wearing, what somebody was saying, the way somebody was doing something. You'd be surprised or maybe you wouldn't at how judgmental we really can be. And you know what? A lot of times they're judgmental of themselves too. So those are perfectly acceptable judgmental statements to put out there because we're going to refute them. We want to turn it into compassion. If you go to work and you were supposed to get 20 things done and you got 17 done, do you say, I'm lazy and I'm sloppy and I should have been able to do it? There's that. Should or do you say, I did the best I could, I'll have to make up for it tomorrow, catch up, stay late, whatever, and let it go? It's not a statement on you specifically. Maybe you didn't sleep well the night before and were having difficulty concentrating. There could be a myriad of reasons why you weren't as productive as you wanted to be, but cutting yourself some slack and being compassionate and instead of beating yourself up, take that energy and figure out how to fix it. That's what it comes down to. Figure out how to fix it. The other activity have each person list one strength or positive quality in the seven key areas of living. These are identified on page 108. Activities of Daily Living. What are you good at? Cooking, baking, brushing your teeth. Whatever it is, have them find one thing. What are you good at at work? Intelligence. What are you smart about? Personality. What's a good characteristic? Appearance. What's one good thing about your appearance? Relating to others. Can you. Are you empathetic? Can you carry on a good conversation? Can you make people laugh? You know, and then in your romantic life, what is it that you do? Well, then have every other person go around and add to each other person's list. So if you've got 10 people in group, then you will have 10 separate statements for each one of these things for each person. It takes a while. You can do it during break. You can make this an activity that goes on over the course of a month or something. But it is a good activity to help people figure out what other people see in them too. Because we talked about that accurate self assessment. Most people don't really understand what other people see. They only see what they see. So if I see somebody who is useless, boring, stupid, whatever, all those negative self esteem things, I'm going to assume everybody else sees that. So if we start this activity and other people start saying, no, I see good stuff in you, people can start looking at the good things. It doesn't mean the bad things go away. They've got to address those too. But they can start seeing themselves as more than just the bad. We move on to reframing mistakes. Reframing mistakes helps people learn that Mistakes are inevitable. They can be learning opportunities and don't represent the total person. I talked about that several times already today. Mistakes mean you tried. Maybe you didn't have all the information. Maybe you know there are a lot of reasons you can make mistakes. But doesn't mean that you are a bad person. No, it means you made some bad choices possibly. We'll talk more about that in just a second. So five factors which limit awareness which lead to mistakes. Ignorance. You didn't know. It always drives me crazy when people ask me something and they're like, do you understand all that we've talked about here today? And I'm like, well, I heard what you said, but I don't really know what I don't know until I figure out that I don't know it. One of the ways I found to identify the things you don't know is to try to teach. As soon as you start teaching you realize all the stuff you don't know. But that aside ignorance, if you don't know to plan for some unforeseen circumstance or something that's unforeseen to you, well, you know, that could lead you to make a mistake. Forgetting. Sometimes we get so busy and I am sort of a global big picture person. So details not my strong suit. If I get in too much of a hurry, I may forget to do a step. That's always what kicked my butt on chemistry tests too because we'd have these like eight step problems and I'd usually like forget step six. Yeah, that's why I didn't go to vet school. Anyway. Denial of the consequences. You can make mistakes. If you go, you know that might happen. But I'm just going to ignore the possibility that might happen because I want this over here. No alternatives. Sometimes there are mistakes because there were just no alternatives. You're driving down the road, a deer runs out in front of you and you've got a car on one side and a tree on the other side. There's no alternatives. You're going to have a problem. You're going to hit a car, a tree or a deer. This is why I don't drive at night. And automatic habits. Sometimes we do things that are just automatic. We do them without thinking about them and it's a mistake. So we need to increase our self awareness. None of these are insurmountable. All of these factors can be addressed so we are more informed, we are less likely to forget. We are more willing to admit or accept the consequences. We get alternatives, yada yada. So have each person identify at least one time when each factor has caused them to make a mistake. When we are talking about recovery, there are a lot of things that we can talk about here, but you also may just be talking about daily life. We all make mistakes. Let's look at the reasons for them and how to prevent them in the future and then discuss how to minimize this unawareness. For example, ignorance. Back when I used to write grants, love writing grants. One of the first things I learned was that there were always a lot of things that they expected in the grant that they didn't actually come out and say. So the first grant I wrote it was fabulous and on point and really short because I didn't elaborate and I didn't go into all the detail that I personally saw as unnecessary. That was my own ignorance. I didn't research ahead of time. What would a good grant look like? I just took it, answered the questions and that that was a mistake. Forgetting. Forgetting to include attachments in the grant. Forgetting to send your kid to school with lunch money. We all forget. So how can you eliminate or prevent forgetting? I always hate it when I pack my bag to go to the gym and I get to the gym and I've forgotten something. Usually it's something crucial, like socks. You know, I'm not going to put on my running shoes and not wear socks. That was just forgetting and that was me poorly planning. Denial of the consequences. So we want to look at making sure we are looking at everything with an open mind. We have blind spots. Relationships is a huge place where there's denial of the consequences. Well, I will do this because eventually I can change this person because they love me. You know, we can't change other people and that's denying the ultimate outcome of what's going to happen. So you see where I'm going here. We want to discuss how to minimize unawareness through education. Planning, awareness. Making sure you have a plan B and C so you don't have no alternatives. This book, like I said, presents a lot of activities and a lot of exercises. It's not one that's going to walk somebody from point A of no self esteem to having wonderful self esteem and tie it up in a nice little bow. There are a lot of activities, but it relies on the therapist and or the person to kind of put it together and go, okay, this is why it makes sense. Sense. Apply it to themselves and continue to apply it after doing the exercise. Just once. Just once is great, but you have to continue to practice these different things. Maintaining awareness Refuting the internal critic, not making everything global. The exercises tap into the cognitive and developmental aspects of self esteem, which is really awesome because it addresses those cognitive distortions and, and it also goes back and says, you know, the problems that you're experiencing now could have started way back here in infancy, or maybe it wasn't until your teen years. But let's look at some of the messages you got and how that impacted the creation or the development of who you are today. And it provides a lot of discussion topics for therapy groups on things like acceptance, forgiveness, compassion, resentment. There are a lot of activities on handling guilt, anger and resentment. And I think it's really important that we spend a fair amount of time and give patients the ability to identify when they're ready to move on. Overall, I really, really love this book as a tool to use in self esteem groups as well as using with individual patients. And I think people who want to get it and use it for self study or as a self help book would also get a lot out of it. So that's the end of today's presentation. I hope you found it enlightening and I will see you next week. Oh, don't Forget like our YouTube channel to be alerted when we publish new videos and new CEUs. And you can use the coupon code 1168 snipes whenever you make a purchase from newharbinger.com to receive a 25% discount on your order. Did that sound commercial enough? There you go. All right, I will see you next week. Bye.