If you suffer generally from feelings of worthlessness and generally have a low perception of your real qualities as an individual, it could be that the cause of your depression is low self esteem.  Low self esteem affects a huge number of individuals, you most certainly are not the only one that has a negative perception of yourself. Low self esteem and resulting depression can affect anyone from just about any walk of life, whether wealthy or not so wealthy, a so called privileged background or a working person.
For example, Suzanna became depressed after conflicts within her family environment.  After suffering from years of put downs and ridicule, it is little wonder that she had built up around her her own wall to protect herself and her emotions.  Within this protecting wall, Suzanna has terrible feelings of low self esteem. She concluded: ‘I am a bad person and cannot do anything right.’ This wasn’t good. If she was to properly analyze her feelings and her conclusions, how she reached these, she could have challenged these feelings of depression and negativity with sound reasoning, thus affecting her outlook upon herself more positively.  Everyone has to recognise that they do some things right and they do somethings wrong.  Life is just like that. Everyone makes mistakes. Recognising that other people are emotionally flawed too and seeing in ourselves that we can be too, it is by such mistakes in our thinking processes that we can further learn from life to move more positively forward. We must not blow our own feelings out of proportion. By keeping things in context, knowing and believing that you are a good person with some great qualities and personal attributes which can be and are very valuable to other people, we can make sure that no matter what others say at times, that our personal positive perception of ourselves stays intact.

Quite often though, especially when going through depression, manic depression or bipolar disorder it becomes all too easy to listen to that inner voice within ourselves which criticises us for everything, telling us that everything we do is wrong.  Listening to that self imposed message, is it any wonder that at times, individuals may feel so low and depressed? Perhaps it might be time for us to challenge directly the validity of such feelings within ourselves and to see whether they really are true or not. Quite often you will find that this inner voice, that is causing us to feel depressed all the time really has no real and true validity at all.

Another depression victim going through bouts of low self esteem was Anthony, a 38 year old single parent of two boys. He said, “I was under immense strain trying to rear my two boys, I thought something must be wrong with me, that despite my best efforts, I wasn’t giving them everything I could as a single parent, these feelings snowballed to the point where I was so overwhelmed by feelings of negative, depressed feelings and my sense of self esteem plummeted, so much so that I ended up hospitalized for a short while, I just wish I had opened up to someone much earlier, what I was going through.” Talking about your feelings with someone you can trust really is a very positive, proactive step in the right direction, by availing yourself the opportunity to share your feelings with others, your personal weight of responsibility will lift immeasurably under most normal circumstances freeing you up to enjoy life a whole lot more.