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How to Raise Your Self-Esteem
By Nathaniel Branden. New York: Bantam Books, 1988, 164 pp., $5.00
One bibliotherapy text that can be useful in helping clients address their presenting problems, reach their therapeutic goals, and achieve personal growth is How to Raise Your Self- esteem by Nathaniel Branden. This book is primarily for adults, aged 18 and over, whose distress can be traced back to poor development and poor practice of self-esteem. The text is also directed toward adult clients who wish to build their self-esteem and some of its exercises can be modified to use with adolescent clients as young as fifteen years of age. The text is written at approximately a ninth grade reading level and is not for young children, or clients who lack the ability for insight into their thoughts and actions. Some of the activities involve writing thoughts and actions in lists and are more suitable for clients who can read and write.
This book addresses the overall lifetime issue of deficient self-esteem and the detrimental impact on all aspects of a client’s emotional, physical, interpersonal, and spiritual life. The text is about the practice of self-esteem concerning the mental and physical actions that promote or subvert healthy self-esteem. Branden’s theme is the importance of self-esteem and the process by which it is gained. He attempts to show the reader a path to personal growth, a greater experience of self-esteem, self-acceptance, and self-assertion. He also endeavors to illuminate the way to a greater capacity for congruence, honesty and authenticity in relationships. The text demonstrates how all of these factors not only increase personal growth but also dissolve personal conflicts and psychopathologies that have their roots in low self-esteem.
The book provides detailed exercises and behaviors for daily life designed to promote and increase self-esteem. The areas covered within include the importance of self-esteem, self- concept as a destiny determiner, conscious and cognizant living, self-acceptance, freedom from guilt, accepting and integrating the younger or child-self, responsible living, authentic living, nurturing self-esteem in others, self love without selfishness, and the impact of self-esteem. Within the chapters that each address one of these topics, Nathaniel Branden addresses both the practitioner and the client. He provides brief, interesting, realistic, and pertinent vignettes of some of his clients’ situations, comments, and sessions. He directly asks the reader what about the client’s dilemmas rings true in their own lives. Branden provides examples of clients’ thoughts and actions that exemplify topics addressed, followed by a comparable description of a client that does not. Throughout the text when applicable, Branden provides simple directions for sentence completion exercises for the topics addressed within the chapters. He provides the stems, suggesting that six to ten responses should be written quickly without too much contemplation or concern about contradictions or accuracy. He prescribes this method as a means to reveal underlying themes related to one’s self-esteem. The author describes and instructs active imagining in the text as a means to tap unconscious feelings of self-esteem. He offers it as a way to gain acceptance of self and child-self. Chapters also list life areas related to the topic discussed and prompting that the reader should note their strong and weak points, rating themselves on a domain like “self-responsibility” from 1-10. Nathaniel Branden instructs that while all of the exercises presented could be completed in or out of psychotherapy, the resulting themes and issues should be processed with a mental health professional.
How to Raise Your Self- esteem is strong in several aspects. The paperback book is compact and, making it convenient for the client to peruse during free time or lunch breaks. The book is brief with 161 pages and short chapters, allowing the psychologist to assign a chapter for homework without overwhelming or inconveniencing the busy client. The listing, rating, and sentence completion exercises are simple enough for a client to complete independently and process later in a session with the psychotherapist. This is beneficial because it preserves valuable office time to use active imagining exercises that can be time consuming, stressful, and emotional for the client. Nathaniel Branden’s writing style is quite conducive to bibliotherapy because Branden conversationally talks the reader through the text, giving the impression of working with the psychotherapist. This informal style is also beneficial because it can help the psychotherapist easily integrate passages from the book in the sessions, particularly with clients with difficulty reading or comprehending. The text is an effective vehicle for personal growth because the author consistently asks the reader to reflect on their own thoughts and actions and how they are similar or different from those of the clients in the vignettes. This encourages introspection and growth. The text also includes success stories following many of the vignettes, contributing to the installation of hope through treatment for the clients. In each chapter, Branden explains how the topic discussed essentially relates to the overarching concept of self-esteem. This continuity facilitates the integration of each exercise and lesson, raising self-esteem.
While the book has many positive attributes it also has some weaknesses. One weakness is that the author fails to include any exercises in the chapters “Nurturing the self-esteem of others,” and “ The question of selfishness.” This is detrimental because it leaves the client wanting for a method to practice to learn to nurture others and how to love the self without selfishness. The overall lesson of building strong self-esteem therefore seems incomplete. Another weakness is that while the author asserts that raising self-esteem can help treat any psychopathology, his examples only concern those with more general issues like interpersonal, intimacy, life and professional dissatisfaction, and sexual dysfunction. It is implied that the techniques are not used for some of the more severe psychopathologies. A third drawback is that the author only includes one example of how he modified his self-esteem building tactics with an adolescent. It would have been helpful for the author to include systematic instructions to adapt his method to the needs of adolescent clients.
The book How to Raise Your Self- esteem can be quite useful in a clinical setting. It is written for clients to read and use in the therapeutic context and for psychologists to use as guidance for the treatment of client distress. The text can be easily integrated into psychotherapy if the clinician first introduces the importance of self-esteem from Chapter 1 and then gains the agreement of the client to work to increase it. The commitment of the client is vital because the exercises in the book, while simple, may be taxing. Chapter 2, entitled “self-concept as destiny”, can be introduced by the clinician. This can be done while discussing how their poor self-esteem, rooted in past experiences, has helped precipitate their distress. The exercise in the chapter can then be introduced to allow for the exploration of their maladaptive self-concept and its relation to their issues. The sentence completion activity can help elucidate the salient issues and active imagination to envision the self as younger and lacking self-esteem. The imagining of accepting, hugging, and talking to the younger, once rejected self at this point can help the client begin self-acceptance. After initiating the client into the method of the text, the psychotherapist can systematically assign an appropriate chapter each time a related self-esteem issue arises in a session. The chapter and related activities can be completed as homework, to be discussed the following week in the session. The topics and related activities that the client may find most difficult or upsetting should be initially addressed and revisited in session with the mental health care professional. This is to ensure that the client is emotionally supported when facing disturbing thoughts, actions, and life events. Chapter 11 summarizes self-esteem and when the client has made progress in building self-esteem, the psychotherapist can utilize the sentence completion stems presented to show which life skills have been mastered and which have not. With this information the client and the psychotherapist can readdress any remaining weak points in the client’s self-esteem, building skills as needed during treatment.