Self-Esteem

You don’t feel like you’re enough.

Every day, young girls face incoming messages from everywhere, telling them they aren’t good enough. Sometimes, people are well-meaning, but it comes off harsh anyway. Even friends and family are guilty of letting you know that you could be better.

Social media and paid advertising actively encourage girls to start young concerning their idea of beauty, regardless of age.

Robin* experienced the impact of social media in her 15-year-old world. Her friends, though well-meaning, were always talking about their looks and how to boost their attractiveness. They were obsessed with scrolling on Instagram, looking for “new looks and vibes.”

Robin wasn’t initially obsessed, but after hanging with her girls for a while, she became sucked into the online world of beauty and perfection.

The pressure to look perfect started to build.

There were days when Robin would spend hours on the ‘gram’ looking at celebrity posts and then stare at herself in a full-length mirror. She started to feel bad about the image she saw looking back at her.

“You aren’t enough,” that internal voice said to her. “You should be curvier like Kim Kardashian. Your hair is not long or thick enough. You don’t even have enough cleavage showing in your last post, so you won’t get that many likes. You have struggle looks.”

And somehow, if Robin didn’t get her dad to buy her Kylie Jenner’s lip kit, she believed she was failing at life.

She was already planning to get a summer job to start saving for lip injections in the future and liposuction, so she’d like the person staring back at her. These celebrities did that, and it seemed to work for them.

Parents don’t understand.

“Everyone loves them because of how they look. That’s how I need to be looked at,” Robin thought.

Her dad’s attempt at making her feel beautiful always made her roll her eyes. He doesn’t get how things work now. You must be beautiful and popular, or no one wants to be around you.

Robin started searching YouTube for videos about creating that coke bottle body shape everyone’s obsessed with having. She stumbled upon a video about how starving yourself and wrapping your midsection in saran wrap every day would give her that look. Out of desperation, she quickly hit the like button so she wouldn’t forget the steps, hid it from her dad, and tried everything she had learned in the video.

Within days, Robin was hungry, snapping at everyone around her and crying tears of frustration. “I shouldn’t have to do all this just to be attractive!” she told herself. She was ready to make a change.

Relief from society’s unhealthy message is one call away.

When Robin was ready for therapy, we talked about where her lack of self-esteem came from and how she came to believe she wasn’t good enough as is. We talked about the societal pressure for teens to look and be a specific way to be noticed.

Together, we found that she was so fixated on what celebrities were doing because she had no other interests in anything else. Her free time consisted of TV and a daily dose of Instagram, sometimes Tik Tok.

Through months of trial and error when trying new things, Robin discovered a passion for dance. She loved how her body felt when she moved freely to the sound of a beat. It was as if the music spoke to her soul.

After one big performance, her dad showed Robin the recording of her dancing on stage for the audience. She saw outside herself for the first time and realized that she was beautiful and needed to make no adjustments to her looks. She was happy doing something meaningful for herself and not others.

Call me to find new meaning in the life you live in your body.

*Name changed to protect client confidentiality.