How to Learn to Believe in Yourself

Even if you were not raised to have self-confidence, you can still acquire it as an adult.

I’m 53 years old. I am a tenured full professor at the University of Texas at Austin, have been married to the woman of my dreams for 25 years, and have two wonderful young adult children. My life is quite literally missing nothing. I am happy beyond my wildest dreams.

But I wasn’t always. In fact, for much of my life I didn’t think I was worth much of anything at all.

My parents split up when I was 2 years old, and the family court system sent me to live with my mother even though I would have been better off with my dad. That’s how family courts were (and still sometimes are) with kids from divorced families. The children go with the mother unless there is something clearly and obviously wrong with her.

My mother had a great deal of mental health problems. She alternated between crippling anxiety and bouts of explosive rage, and there was no telling which side of her I would see on any given day (or at any given moment). My mother once described herself as an “emotional cripple,” and I think that was a good description. She was rarely happy, and her bouts of anger were often directed at me for no apparent reason. She would get in my face and scream with no warning. “You are no good! All you do is screw up! Can’t you do anything right? You will amount to absolutely nothing!” Living with her was daily psychological warfare.

From a distance, my dad did his best to counteract these toxic messages, and he was successful enough that I stayed on a reasonably straight and narrow path. But I hated myself. My mother’s words reverberated in my head for years into my adult life (and sometimes still do). I believed many of the awful things she told me about myself, such that it was difficult to have relationships with women. How could I expose myself emotionally to a woman when the one I had lived with as a child was so toxic and abusive?

Before my 17th birthday, I left my mother’s house for good. She had moved me to South Florida while my father was still in New York, and I had a girlfriend and a circle of close friends - so moving in with my dad wasn’t something I wanted to do. I stayed with my grandparents, slept on friends’ couches, and sometimes slept under bridges. But I managed to get myself into Florida State University, where I met Dick Dunham - the mentor who helped me to start healing myself. I worked closely with Dick for more than 8 years, and he was one of the people who really taught me to believe in myself.

The Power of Being in Therapy

I am not ashamed to say that I spent years in therapy. Given how I grew up, I would have been crazy not to seek professional help. Gradually, various therapists taught me to externalize what my mother had told me about myself. Those were her words and were reflective of her frustration with her own life. I didn’t do anything wrong. In fact, pursuing a college degree, and then a master’s degree, and finally a PhD was proof that I was not the person my mother had said I was.

It took more than 25 years of therapy for me to finally start seeing myself as worthy and as being good enough. You don’t undo years of psychological abuse in a few sessions! But every therapist told me some version of the same thing - “What I see is a wonderful young man. And you are making something of yourself. Your mother’s words clearly were not true.”

Will Berry, a spiritually oriented therapist in Fort Lauderdale, was the last therapist I’ve seen, and he did wonders for me. I was in my mid-40s and was already an internationally known academic scholar. All he did was listen to me and tell me that I was clearly a smashing success. My mother had been wrong about me after all. (My mother died of cancer in 2012 when I was 41 years old, and we were out of touch for much of my adult life, so she never got to see what I have become. I often find myself feeling sad about that.)

The Power of Having the Right Partner

In August 1997, I walked into the lab where I was working as a PhD student. I’d just returned from a solo trip to Europe to clear my head before the new academic year started. The lab was the same as what I remembered, with one exception. There was the most beautiful woman I had ever seen, sitting in the corner and lighting up the room with her amazing personality. “She’s my soulmate and the one I’m going to marry,” I felt myself say silently before I even knew her name.

It took me half a year to finally get a date with that woman, but 27 years later she is my wife of a quarter century and we have two amazing kids. Her name is Lisa, and she is quite literally the best thing that has ever happened to me. She is the one who really taught me to believe in myself, more than anyone or anything else.

Almost as soon as she came into my life, Lisa started working on building up my self-esteem. She encouraged and congratulated me for my successes and listened intently when I was frustrated or upset about something. Almost from the moment we got together, Lisa started telling me that I would accomplish great things. I didn’t believe what she was saying - of course I didn’t - but almost everything she predicted has come true. And much of it was because of her.

The right companion can support you when you doubt yourself, can love you when you don’t love yourself, and can give you a secure base to come home to when the world is not being nice. That’s what Lisa has given me for so many years. I’ve had lots of ups and downs in my academic career - I will write another post about making career changes when the writing is on the wall - but Lisa has been my rock, my constant, and my North Star even when the rest of the world was falling apart around me.

And, of course, I have been the same for her.

I have lots of friends and colleagues who chose the wrong partners, who wound up getting divorced and having to raise kids by themselves. I have one friend who is on his third marriage and is still not happy. Another close friend of mine had his 30-year marriage blow up in his face about 5 years ago because his wife finally let loose all the anger she had been holding inside against him for so long. Both of these men are great people, but neither of them spent the time needed to nurture and maintain their relationships. They were too busy with work and other concerns and neglected their home lives.

Lisa and I have had our bumps, just as all couples do, but we have worked hard at keeping our relationship strong. In 2022 I was invited to present a talk at a conference in Dublin, Ireland. Lisa, whose mother was Irish American, expressed a strong interest in coming with me. So we made it work, even though our younger daughter was in high school and we had to bring our older one in to stay with her. That trip was one of the best times we have had together! Not only did we absolutely love Ireland, but getting to travel together was absolutely wonderful. Next summer I am going to Australia to attend a conference, and I am working on Lisa to go with me (even though she is not a fan of long flights).

Maybe I got lucky with Lisa - after all, she was sitting in the lab I worked in when I just happened to walk in. But there were lots of other women I dated before her - who would not have been good for me had I settled down with them. Sometimes not choosing the wrong partner allows you to wait for the right one to come along. As the 1970s song by England Dan and John Ford Coley says, “It’s sad to belong to someone else when the right one comes along.”

If the person you are dating is the right one for you, you will know it. If there are red flags and this person is not right for you, you will know that as well. Just listen to your sixth sense and allow it to be right, even if you don’t want it to be.

Listen to Others When They Compliment You

Many people - including me - do not know how to take a compliment. Someone tells us how great we are, and we just try to deflect and deny it. Instead of saying thank you, we twist ourselves into a pretzel trying to explain why we are not worthy of the praise the other person is giving us. Why do we do that?

Because we genuinely do not believe what that person is telling us.

In her book Toxic Parents, Susan Forward talks about the “parent tape,” where our parents’ words continue to play in our minds over and over again. Even if our parents are not alive anymore, their words exert a great deal of power in our lives. This is one reason I was (and still am) very careful about the words I say to my children. They will believe what you say to them, and they will internalize it as the truth.

My father has always been a tireless worker. He started his first business at age 15 and continued to work extremely hard until he stopped working at age 77 a couple of years ago. Watching him work hard - and work smart - provided me with an example of how to get ahead. My dad focused on building his professional network, on being honest and truthful with people, and on always delivering more than he had promised. When I got into academia, I saw that many of my colleagues didn’t really know how to build and nurture professional relationships. Many of them were too egotistical and self-absorbed to be authentic and honest with others. So I decided to bring my father’s work philosophy into my academic career. The result has been 10 grant awards, more than 450 scholarly publications, and several graduate students and post-doctoral fellows who have benefited from and flourished under my mentorship. I’ve also had several international scholars who have come to Miami (and now Austin) to work with me, and most of them were flourishing as well.

But, for years, when people would compliment me, I would feel as though I had spiders crawling all over me. The words would feel wrong and “icky.” I didn’t like myself very much, so hearing such gushing words made me want to throw up.

But Lisa kept asking me why I couldn’t believe what people were telling me about myself. I was in my late 40s and early 50s, so the days of living under my mother’s abusive roof were more than 30 years behind me. Why couldn’t I just let go of my mother’s words and accept the new words I was hearing?

When I was at the conference in Dublin, I met a young man with whom I had been collaborating for a couple of years. I had never met him in person even though we had exchanged many emails. He was falling all over himself as he gave me one compliment after another. I was one of the best mentors he had ever known (how was that possible if we had never met in person?), he wanted to model himself after me (why would he want to do that?), and he hoped to be just like me when he was my age (did he really know what it was like to be inside my skin?). He was so genuine and deferential that I could see that he meant what he was saying. He even asked me whether he and his wife should have children!! That just blew me away. But Lisa told me to believe what this guy was telling me. “He clearly admires you,” she said. “Many people do. I admire you too.”

My wife of 22 years admires me? What? Why?

Lisa is an incredibly patient and persistent person. She has worked on me for years to believe in myself. Now she was telling me to believe what other people were saying! Maybe she was right? In the last couple of years, I have started hearing the compliments I’ve been given. My mother’s voice is finally fading from my mind.

It only took 35 years!! But better late than never, as the old expression goes.

I watch my own children now. My older one will be 22 in a few months and my younger one is 19. They are both dealing with the insecurities of young adulthood. Further, behavior genetics research has found that trauma is often genetic and is passed down from parents to their children. Although my children had minimal contact with my mother - she was never around and I didn’t really want her around my kids very much - the genetics of trauma suggest that she may have affected them indirectly through the effects of her toxic words on my DNA. Indeed, my younger daughter (who is very similar to me in terms of personality) has been dealing with nagging insecurities for years even though she was never abused. So there are chances that you may feel insecure because of trauma that occurred in the lives of your parents or grandparents. Children of Holocaust survivors, for example, often show signs of severe trauma even though many of them were born in the United States or Israel. But if you are dealing with a lack of self-confidence, I hope you find the right partner, get yourself into therapy, and start listening to others when they compliment you.

The Power of Affirmation

A number of years ago, a spiritual healer whom Lisa and I know recommended that we start writing affirmations. These affirmations could be about ourselves, our future, or just about anything else. But the key was to write them consistently. I wrote about grants I was going to get, my and my family’s health, and my just generally being good enough.

I wrote lots of affirmations about grant awards in 2018, 2019, and 2020. Do you know that five of the seven grants that I wrote affirmations about were funded? That is a 71% success rate - in contrast to the 15% success rate with the National Institutes of Health as a whole. Other things I wrote about also came true, including my new job at the University of Texas at Austin (which was offered to me in the spring of 2020).

I have a good friend who has a lot of issues with anxiety and depression. I recently suggested that she start writing affirmations. She sent me a message with a picture of an affirmation sticker she had affixed to her wall! And I think her affirmations are working - she is definitely feeling better about herself.

Quantum physicists have taught us that the universe is a huge energy grid. What we put out into the world is what we get back. Sounds a lot like the Golden Rule and the Law of Karma, doesn’t it? Rhonda Byrne wrote all about this kind of quantum karma in The Secret, where she introduces and describes the Law of Attraction. Our words, thoughts, and actions send energy out into the world around us - and just as the basic biological principle says, like attracts like. The energy frequency you are sending out signals to the universe what it should send back to you. As Neale Donald Walsch says in Conversations with God, the universe is just a huge Xerox copy machine.

When I started thinking more positively about myself and about the world around me, my whole life got markedly better. This is the Power of Affirmation.

The best part of all of this is that you don’t need to be religious or spiritual for these principles to work. The universe responds to our thoughts, words, and actions. It does not care what religious or spiritual truths we follow - or whether we follow any at all.

Affirmations were one of the final steps I have taken to silence my mother’s voice in my mind, and to allow my own voice to dictate the course of my life. Negative, anxious, or depressive thoughts are not consistent with what we write in our affirmations - affirmations are like turning on a bright light in a dark room. All of a sudden the room is not so scary anymore.

Summing Up

The most important steps in my healing journey have been therapy (I cannot overstate the importance of therapists), finding and marrying Lisa, learning to accept kind words from others, and writing affirmations. I would add one more - being intentional about how we live our lives. Do what you are doing because you are actively choosing to do it. If someone asks you why you are living your life as you’re living it, “I don’t know” should not be your answer. Have goals in mind - both short-term and long-term goals. Share the best of yourself with everyone you meet, and never miss a chance to help someone else. Be the best possible version of yourself. Know that you can do whatever you set your mind to. Always treat others with the utmost care and respect, and be aware of the energy that you are putting out into the universe. If you have negative thoughts, that’s ok! Write your way through them, as my wife says. Write affirmations every day until those thoughts no longer come into your mind.

And this sounds silly and patronizing, but take care of yourself! Get regular medical checkups, get your teeth cleaned, and make sure to go for whatever screenings your sex and age group require. If you have a family history of heart disease, stroke, diabetes, or cancer, make sure your health care providers know that. And exercise often. Becoming a distance runner was one of the best decisions I ever made for my health. It quiets my mind and keeps me healthy.

At least in my estimation, this is how you learn to believe in yourself. If I can do it, then anyone can.