Ben Ralston

Low Self-esteem (and what to do about it)

“I wish I could show you, when you are lonely or in darkness, the astonishing light of your 
own being”

 ~ Hafiz


You may suspect that you have low self-esteem,

but you probably have no idea what to do about it!

Most articles about self-esteem talk about thinking positively, making affirmations, smiling a lot, etc. These things are just band-aids – they will only serve to suppress the truth about how you feel about yourself for a short time. I am not interested in band-aids. I am interested in prevention and cure…

In this post I’m going to tell you what self-esteem is really all about; how it is negatively affected; why I think it’s hugely important that we do do something about it – and what to do.
What is self-esteem?
(other than a term that is much used and little understood)
My definition of self-esteem is 5 words:
~ ‘how deeply you love yourself’ ~
So, how deeply do you love yourself?!
(Don’t worry, I’ll help you answer that question quite accurately in just a moment)…
I believe this is perhaps one of the most important questions you will ever ask, and here’s why:  the extent to which you love yourself dictates how successful you are in every area of your life – relationships, work, and health (emotional, physical, mental, and spiritual health).
I have a nice way of answering the above question. It is called The Mirror Exercise*, and there are 3 simple steps:
1. Look yourself in the eye in a mirror.
2. Tell yourself sincerely: “I love you”.
3. See how it feels, and measure the feeling out of 10 (see below).
If your self-esteem is intact (if you do indeed love yourself deeply) then the exercise should be fun!
However, for most people there is at least some difficulty – as they say the words there is a feeling ofstress. This is because human beings are hardwired not to lie. So if you have low self-esteem (you don’t love yourself), telling yourself “I love you” feels like a lie – it feels stressful.
Lie detector machines (polygraph machines) work by detecting the biological symptoms of stress. But you don’t need a polygraph machine – you know when you are lying, because you feel the stress. That’s why this exercise is really quite an accurate (although not scientific) indication of how high your self-esteem is.
So the mirror exercise is to do the above 3 steps. The final step, measuring the feeling of stress on a scale of 0 – 10, works like this:
10/10 stress: as you say the words you probably feel quite uncomfortable, and you just don’t believe it at all. This means that you have very low self-esteem.
0/10 stress: no stress, therefore high self esteem.
Go ahead and do it now..
~ (I’ll wait right here) ~ 
So, if you just did the exercise, you probably felt at least a little discomfort or stress as you said those 3 words. Here’s why:
We should love ourselves completely. Human beings are Loving beings. The essence of the human experience is love itself. Your essence is love.
In Yogic terms this is known as Satchitananda: pure existence, pure consciousness, pure bliss. In a word – love.
But almost all of us suffer the consequences of unresolved trauma – usually much more than we realize.
Childhood trauma…
Birth trauma…
Trauma experienced by our Mother whilst we were ‘in utero’…
Not to mention ancestral trauma: the emerging branch of science called Epigenetics has demonstrated conclusively that trauma from the lives of our ancestors – especially trauma from the time when our egg was created in the ovary of our Mother (when she was a fetus in the uterus of her Mother*) – directly impacts on our life, even our genetic predispositions and biological constitution!
The kind of trauma that affects self-esteem the most is abuse trauma. And if you think that abuse is probably something that happens to a minority of those ‘other’ people, think again! There are perhaps as many as 99 different kinds of abuse, ranging from the more obvious (sexual) to the very subtle (emotional neglect). And abuse (defined here as a violation of one’s boundaries) is entirely subjective…
Some of the consequences of abuse are that we feel guilty, ashamed, and responsible for what happened. Essentially, we feel that there is something wrong with us – and if there is something wrong with us, we have a very good reason to love ourselves less, right?
Our self-esteem suffers.
My theory is that abuse trauma is the cause of most of mankind’s problems. Not long after establishing this theory, something happened that blew my mind. I was sitting at my desk, thinking and writing about this theory when someone sent me a link to a book:
“The Origins of War in Child Abuse”
 by Lloyd Demause.
So I realized that other people were also coming to the very same conclusions as I was. And I don’t believe in ‘co-incidence’.
The purpose of this post is not to explain the mechanism of trauma and abuse in detail. If you’re interested to know more about that check back later, because I’ll be posting articles about it soon. Right now though I want to stay focused on self-esteem. And what I want to communicate is this:
1. Most people don’t love themselves nearly enough.
2. This low self-esteem causes many, many problems, both on the personal level, and globally (think war, corruption, and environmental destruction).
3. It’s not so hard to fix the problem on the personal level (thus directly and powerfully influencing the global).
When is your self-esteem determined?
“To love oneself is the beginning of a lifelong romance” ~ Oscar Wilde
If you go through a painful divorce after 20 years of marriage, can that affect your self-esteem? I don’t think so: I think that the experience will simply expose your underlying low self-esteem (that was always there even while you were married). I believe that our self-esteem is set in childhood, perhaps up until the age of around 21 years old. Early trauma (at birth and pre-school) is probably the most impactful on how much we love ourselves.
However, another theory (which does not necessarily negate the childhood theory, but may just be another perspective on it) is that we inherit our self-esteem. After all, the trauma that we experience in our lifetime is usually  an echo of similar trauma that our ancestors experienced. So it could be that we inherit poor self-esteem, and then attract experiences that reinforce it (such as divorce), and perpetuate the pattern.
Either way, it does not really matter. Two things are important in this – being able to recognize the effect of the trauma (as opposed to the actual trauma itself, which is far less relevant), and being able to heal those consequences.
With modern healing techniques like Reference Point Therapy, which are simple, fast, and highly effective, we are able to pinpoint the exact consequence of the trauma (which is usually a subconscious association between one of our survival instincts, and safety), and heal it (release the subconscious association).
The effect of this kind of healing is a subtle change in all aspects of one’s life. Relationships, feelings, emotional reactions, and even the physical structure of the body (posture, lung capacity, etc) are transformed.
And the beautiful thing is that the change is not a particular change, but a wave of change – it is an ongoing process, namely, of us coming back to our true selves: love.
The analogy I use is this: if you have walked for a long time with a stone in your shoe, it will eventually affect every area of your life – your posture, your emotions, your deeper feelings, your sense of self-identity (ego), even the expression on your face!
But when you remove the stone, all of these changes do not instantly disappear – it takes time for each aspect of you to settle back to normal, and even the expression on your face will gradually, over time, relax.
Similarly, when releasing subconscious blockages, the effects may be felt instantly, but are always ongoing…
How do you raise your self-esteem?
“You can’t build joy on a feeling of self-loathing.” ~ Ram Dass
As with anything else, you solve a problem permanently only by changing what caused the problem.
In this case, low self-esteem is caused by the consequences of unresolved trauma. When you heal the trauma, you instantly begin to love yourself more.
I wish I could tell you in a short blog post how to heal trauma yourself, but it’s not quite as simple as that – it takes a number of days of intensive training to be able to safely find the blockages, identify their roots, and heal them. It’s quite simple really – you don’t need a degree, but you do need proper training.
I hope though that this post sheds some light on something that I believe to be the key to a more sustainable, compassionate, and peaceful human society: how much we love ourselves as individuals.
Participate in a simple social experiment?
“The privilege of a lifetime is being who you are.” ~ Joseph Campbell
I would like to propose what could be a useful social experiment: when you do the mirror exercise post the ‘score’ (out of 10) as a comment below (along with the feelings that came up too, if you like). It only takes a moment to do this, and may be done anonymously, and if this article gets 1000 reads, and 5% of people participate that’s 50 people – a reasonable number of results to compare and analyze . The results will either support or undermine my theory that most of us suffer from low self-esteem, and either way, it’ll be interesting! If you also write a little about what feelings came up as you did the exercise, I will do my best to answer your comment in a helpful way.
And share it up folks – spread the love, as always. Thank you!
* Biology lesson: a woman’s eggs are all produced long before she is born. They are formed in the ovaries at around the time of 3 months gestation in the womb of her own mother.
Bonus: click here for a fascinating and entertaining documentary about epigenetics.
I believe I first discovered The Mirror Exercise in a book, but I have no recollection of which book. So please, if you have ever come across this technique before, let me know so that I can properly give credit to it’s creator? Thank you! (edit: I’ve been told that it may have been Louise L. Hay)

Newspaper interview re: RPT

I was interviewed recently about Reference Point Therapy for a national newspaper. The journalist asked some excellent questions, so I decided to write up the transcript of the interview for a blog post.
Here it is:

–       RPT is the fastest and most efficient method in the world for healing trauma. On what is it based?
It is based on two things – the science of epigenetics (which has proven that ancestral trauma directly affects our own life), and the ancient wisdom of many spiritual traditions, which assert that the essence of the human being is pure consciousness.
–       What kind of traumas can be healed in this way? Is this specific traumas – like car accidents or death – or can there also be subconscious traumas that block the individuals development.
Well, so far it seems that any kind of trauma may be healed with this method. The only kind of trauma that we have no experience trying to heal yet is the Post Traumatic Stress Disorder of soldiers returning from combat (we simply didn’t have the opportunity to work on this yet). But car accidents, grief, serious abuse trauma (sexual, physical, emotional, etc), childhood abandonment and neglect… I have not come across any kind of trauma yet that was not healed with this method. And yes, subconscious traumas do block our development, and it is the very purpose of RPT to unblock our development!
–       Do you perhaps know the answer to the question “ why some people are more prone to accidents / bad things happening to them”. Is this perhaps to do with subconscious blockages, energy which attracts these things?
As a matter of fact, I do! The human being is made up of energy (consciousness). When we experience our highest potential (pure consciousness), we vibrate energetically in ‘tune’ with the world around us. But when our experience is blocked by the effects of unresolved trauma, we vibrate at a much lower level – and there is no ‘flow’. Being ‘in the zone’ is a well known expression – some people live in the zone. Others experience is fleetingly, but we all understand that it is possible. Ultimately, the extent to which we are able to live in the zone is the extent to which we have resolved our trauma. So yes, it is very much to do with subconscious blockages that attract ‘negative’ experiences. Although life is messy, and there will always be experiences that we would choose not to have – but a person who has a high level of consciousness will cope much better than someone who has many unresolved issues.
–       How does the session look? How long is it on average? How is it different from other therapies, which are recommendable for eliminating traumatic events, (for example classical psychotherapy).
The session is entirely talk-based. On average it is 90 minutes, but this depends on the therapist. It is most notably different from other types of trauma therapy in that the actual trauma (what happened) is not ‘relived’. The therapist only needs to know that something happened (trauma). The nature of the trauma is irrelevant – because actually, we cannot heal the trauma itself (we cannot make it go away – because it happened, and we can’t change that!). What we can change is how it makes us feel now (the consequences of the trauma). Another notable difference is that unlike many other methods that take a long time to heal trauma (for example classical psychotherapy), RPT is very fast. Trauma can often be healed permanently in just one session – this is because we get right to the cause of the problem. And the cause of the problem, in case you are wondering, is survival instincts.
–       People often are not aware how traumas from the past define us. And they can’t even put them into words. In what way does the therapist pull out trauma from a client which he isn’t even aware of.
First of all, part of the training of an RPT therapist is in the development of intuition. So in the rare case that a client really has no idea what causes their problem, I am always able to tell them! However, I find that almost every client knows just as much as they need to know in order to heal themselves (with my help). If something is forgotten, it is because it is no longer needed. And RPT gives us the precise tools to be able to access exactly what we need to access in order to heal our problems and raise our consciousness.
–       Can you perhaps give an example of the positive effects of the therapy (of course without names) or maybe in general. How does the person who came to the session with deep trauma feel when it’s no longer there. How perhaps does his thinking change, and his behavior?
One client had a 20-year history of clinical depression, and had attempted suicide. When she came to me she had tried countless different types of medical and alternative healing / therapy, including pharmaceutical drugs. Nothing helped. After one session she was healed (the cause had been childhood abuse trauma), and when I saw her again 18 months later (recently) she remains free of depression. I also found out that she had been diagnosed (18 months ago) with a serious thyroid problem that required surgery. After our session, her thyroid was also healed, and remains so to this day, as evidenced by regular medical check-ups. This is just one example of many such ‘miraculous’ cases. It seems miraculous on the surface, but actually, when you understand that trauma is responsible for most of our problems, it is no miracle at all!
How does the person feel after healing – lighter, less burdened. The feeling is usually subtle (no fireworks or hysteria!), but there is a definite transformation. They will notice that the change is apparent in every area of their life: relationships, self-esteem, clarity of thought, emotional reactions… because what has changed is the person themself. They are more themself now. So everything changes, in a subtle, but powerful and positive way – and most importantly, the change is permanent.
–       Some people, on certain points of their lives, can no longer go on. They are controlled by fears, for which they don’t have a reasonable explanation. Can these blockages have as their source, unconscious trauma.
Almost all subconscious blockages are caused by the effects of unresolved trauma.
–       The therapy is based on the science of consciousness. Does it work in spite of the fact that the client does not believe in it.
It is not necessary to believe anything for RPT to work! Any therapy that requires belief on the part of the client in order to be successful relies on the placebo effect. RPT recognizes the placebo effect, and is far more successful than placebo based therapies. One of the reasons for this is that with RPT we also recognize that a person can only heal a problem when they take responsibility for it – in fact, taking responsibility is the first step (and the hardest). So taking responsibility is what is necessary, and actually, it is the opposite of belief!
–       Can we help ourselves with this therapy also with physical problems.
Yes, because the physical body is also an expression (albeit, a material expression) of consciousness. Problems that manifest in the body are almost always first experienced on the mental and emotional level, but we suppress them. The body then has no choice but to show symptoms on the physical level. All aspects of us are made up of consciousness, and when we heal the subconscious blockage, all aspects of us are healed – mental, emotional, physical, and spiritual.
–       In what way can we use the method in our profession and maybe also in general in more positive way of living or acting?
This is a very good question. Really, you are asking whether this technique is only for people with ‘problems’, and the answer is emphatically ‘no’! Despite enjoying wonderful physical, emotional, and mental health, I continue to practice this method on myself. Why? Because as we raise our consciousness by becoming more aware, and by releasing our fears, we enjoy greater levels of joy, inner peace, and abundance. For me, RPT is much more than a therapy. It is a unique method of personal development and spiritual growth.

Profound healing: transformation of physical and emotional problems in 1 session. But what about 18 months later?


Last night I gave a presentation near Ljubljana.
Nataša came.
I barely recognized her, but as soon as she said her name I knew which Nataša it was.

 I’d met her 18 months ago, just the once. She came to me for a single healing session. The email she sent me afterwards has been on my website as a testimonial ever since.
She’d been suffering from depression and (to put it mildly) ‘dark thoughts’ for most of her life.
Despite seeking help from multiple doctors, psychiatrists, therapists, and healers, nothing and no one had been able to help her.
When she came to me she had also been having serious problems with her thyroid and was due surgery to have it removed. That was actually the catalyst that led her to me.
The result of that single session: 

total transformation…

 No more depression, and no need for surgery – normal thyroid function.
The email she sent me after the session said this:
“My son never wanted to cuddle me before… now he’s constantly cuddling up next to me, and the light in his eyes when he looks at me says it all.
Thank you.”
18 months later her thyroid is still fine, and she is still free of depression.
One. Single. Session.
Sometimes people accuse me of narcissistic self-promotion, self-aggrandizement, and writing that reads like advertising.
I get that, really I do. Everywhere we look people are trying to sell us something.
And as the son of an advertising executive I’m particularly sensitive to it – the very, very last thing I want to do is come across like that, believe me!
But the thing is, it’s just not about me.
It’s about this wonderful, miraculous therapy: profound healing that actually works (on the causal level), permanently.

Strong feelings of Anger, Suspicion, and Anxiety – cleared in one session.

Great client (thank you Becky!), great results, great testimonial. Unfortunately my technical skills are not so great so it’s a poor quality video, but I think you can see enough to know what worked and what didn’t!

To summarize: I did one session a little over a month ago with Becky, and a week later we did a short follow up session (included in price of the first session: part of the deal when you book a session with me).

So all in all a little over 2 hours of work together.

3 separate big problems: feelings of anger (measured a month ago as 9/10), anxiety (8/10) and suspicion / distrust (10/10) cleared in one session. If that isn’t a good result I don’t know what is!

Why healing, personal development and spirituality are really the same thing.

Kiwan and Jai. Masters of Simplicity.
Sometimes, life seems so damn complicated, doesn’t it?! I have an intimate relationship with my wife to maintain and nourish; my child to educate, support, and nurture; my work to soak up my passion and creativity… and all the while the whole world seems to be trying to sell me something!


But lately, more and more, I’m feeling like everything is actually incredibly simple. Because the root of all these various and complex problems is the same – me!
When I get myself in order, everything else falls into place. Life becomes, once again, very joyful.
I used to think that I had to do lots of different things in order to get myself into that joyful space: Yoga; meditation; eat just right; get a balance between work and play; personal development work so that my relationships would work (as long as my partner also did personal development work!)… God, when I look back at what I was doing I cringe…
Now I realize that there is only one thing I need to do, and all the labels I used to apply really boil down, in essence, to this one thing:
Healing is this one thing.
Personal development is the same as this one thing.
Spiritual growth comes about as a result of this one thing.
Healing.
I’m not talking about the word ‘healing’ as it’s come to be used so much – as a kind of band-aid. This healer and that healer who do this and that, and eventually, after a while, you realize that actually, nothing has been healed!
I’m talking about profound, permanent transformation.
The reason why healing, personal development, and spirituality are the same thing: because we are already perfect.
There is nothing to do, to achieve, to get. It’s all there already, right there, inside you.
All we have to do, is let go of what’s blocking it form coming out!
When Buddha said: “Be a light unto thyself”, I’m pretty sure that’s what he meant: ‘just look at yourself, you’re perfect!’
When Jesus said “All these things, and greater, you shall do too”, he was saying that he was nothing special – just an ordinary human being like you and I, who had realized his perfection, and through it, was able to achieve miracles. And that we all can do that too!
We’re all so beautiful, amazing, and perfect. But we don’t love ourselves enough. And that’s the crux of the matter. We simply have to let go of the blockages that stop us from loving ourselves.
That’s healing (and it’s really very simple).
It’s also personal development and spiritual growth.