Low self-esteem in men rarely looks like low self-esteem.

Tom earned more than anyone in his family ever had. He ran a team of forty. When his partner said she was proud of him, he changed the subject within a sentence. In our first session he told me, calmly, he was waiting to be found out. He had been waiting since he was eleven.

01The signs men miss

Tap a card to turn it over.

Other signs: you apologise for taking up space, you deflect every compliment, you compare your salary, body or marriage with every man you meet, you avoid anything new in case you are bad at it, and you feel a flash of rage when someone points out a mistake.

02Where it starts

Most men with low self-worth grew up earning love. A father who noticed only the grades. A mother who needed him to be the sensible one. Bullying at school. A parent’s divorce he decided was his job to fix.

Boys learn to turn shame into action, and men keep doing it. From the outside it looks like confidence. On the inside it feels like a permanent audition.

03What it does to your relationships

You do not need to earn a place at your own table.

Kita Tabachka, relational therapist

04How to build self-esteem as a man

Self-esteem grows from evidence, not pep talks. Three practices help most of the men I see.

Keep small promises to yourself. A ten-minute walk, a bedtime, one call to a friend. Each kept promise is proof you follow through for yourself as well as for others.

Name the critic. Write down the exact sentence in your head when you make a mistake. Then ask whose voice it is. Often it belongs to a parent, a coach or a teacher from thirty years ago.

Let one person see the real picture. A friend, a partner, a therapist. Shame shrinks when someone knows the worst of it and stays.

Tom’s first homework was to say “thank you” to a compliment and nothing else. He told me it was the hardest thing he did all year. Individual therapy is where this work happens, and why men do not ask for help explains why the first step feels so big.

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Written by

Kita Tabachka

I am a BACP-registered relational therapist. I work with individuals and couples, many of them living far from where they began, on relationship anxiety, attachment, intimacy and the strange business of building a self in a new country. The stories here are composites. The patterns are real. My writing is a door into the work, never a substitute for it.

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