When everything looks fine outside but feels empty inside: fragile self-esteem

“Everyone thinks I’m confident. If they knew how much energy it takes me to look like this.”

This sentence is often said by someone you would not expect it from. A person with a good job, a neat appearance, friends who love them and a list of achievements many would envy. On the outside everything is fine. Inside there is something they can only describe as emptiness — or an anxiety that flares up at every criticism, every failure, every moment when someone fails to notice them.

For a long time we thought of self-esteem as something that is either high or low. Low self-esteem was the problem, high self-esteem the solution. Research over recent decades has shown that the story is more complicated. What matters is not only how high your self-esteem is, but also how solid it is. In this post I will write about what psychologists call fragile self-esteem: self-esteem that is high, yet wobbles at every blow.

High self-esteem is not always solid self-esteem

The most widely used questionnaire for measuring self-esteem, the Rosenberg scale from 1965, has ten statements, such as “on the whole, I am satisfied with myself”. It tells us how highly someone values themselves — at the moment they are answering. What it does not tell us is what happens to that feeling the next day, when they get a bad mark, when their partner criticises them or when a colleague gets the promotion they wanted for themselves.

In the 1980s the psychologist Michael Kernis began to study exactly this. He measured participants’ self-esteem several times over, in everyday life, and watched how much it fluctuated. He found that people with equally high self-esteem differed a great deal from one another. For some, their sense of their own worth was stable; for others, it jumped up and down depending on what had happened that day.

This difference turned out to matter. In a 1989 study, Kernis and colleagues showed that people with high but unstable self-esteem reported the most anger and hostility — more than people with low self-esteem. Those with high and stable self-esteem felt the least anger. The same “high self-esteem” can therefore be two very different things.

I wrote about how self-image differs from self-worth and self-confidence in the post Self-image, self-worth, self-confidence: how they differ and how each is built. Here I want to go a step further: not what self-esteem is, but how firmly it stands.

What fragile self-esteem is

Kernis later described the difference between secure (or optimal) and fragile high self-esteem. Secure self-esteem is like a house on firm foundations: it shakes in a storm, but it stays standing. Fragile self-esteem is like a house of cards: from a distance it looks the same, but any stronger gust can bring it down.

We can recognise fragile self-esteem by several signs. The first is instability: the sense of your own worth swings strongly from day to day. The second is contingency: your worth depends on whether you meet certain standards. Jennifer Crocker and colleagues described seven domains on which people most often make their worth depend — among them appearance, others’ approval, winning in competition and academic achievement. The more your worth is tied to such a domain, the more vulnerable you are when you fail in it. I have written more about this in the post When you are worth as much as you achieve.

The third sign is a gap between the conscious and the unconscious. In 2003 researchers led by Christian Jordan distinguished people who had high self-esteem both at a conscious level and at an indirect, unconscious level, measured with reaction-time association tests, from people whose high self-esteem existed only at the conscious level. The latter responded to threats more defensively. As if somewhere deep down they knew their high self-esteem had no firm ground — and so defended it with all the more force.

How fragility shows in everyday life

Fragile self-esteem is hard to spot from the outside, because its whole purpose is not to be spotted. But it often gives itself away in small things:

• Criticism hits too hard. A remark from your boss or partner doesn’t stay a remark but becomes a verdict on you as a person. The response is anger, hurt or a long withdrawal.
• A mistake cannot be admitted. Because admitting a mistake would mean you are not who you think you have to be, it is easier to find someone else to blame.
• Constant comparison. Someone else’s success cannot simply be their success — it is also proof that you are less.
• Avoiding challenges. If there is a chance you might fail, it is sometimes safer not to try at all.
• A need to win. A conversation becomes a contest, and an argument a battle that has to be won.
• Exhaustion. Keeping up the image costs an enormous amount of energy, even though nobody sees it.

If you recognise yourself in this list, it doesn’t mean something is wrong with you. It means you once learned that you have to keep proving your worth — and that you are still doing it today, even though perhaps nobody is testing you any more. This often goes hand in hand with perfectionism and overthinking, and sometimes with a feeling that you are a fraud who will sooner or later be found out — the post Impostor syndrome: why successful people doubt themselves is about that.

The false self: when a child learns to be what others need

In 1960 the British paediatrician and psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott described an idea I find key to understanding fragile self-esteem: the true and false self.

For Winnicott, the true self is the spontaneous, living part of a child — their needs, wishes and feelings, which show themselves when the child feels safe enough. When the environment responds well enough to those needs, the child senses that they are fine as they are. But when the environment demands that the child adapt — be good, clever, smiling, cause no trouble, meet the parents’ expectations — the child develops a false self. This is not a lie in the moral sense. It is protection. The false self guards the true self, which hides because there was no room for it.

Winnicott stressed that we all have a certain amount of false self — politeness, social roles and adapting are part of life. The problem arises when the false self becomes all there is. Then a person functions successfully, kindly and adaptively, yet inside feels empty, inauthentic, as if living someone else’s life. This is exactly the emptiness that people with fragile self-esteem talk about.

Narcissistic defence — careful with words

When we talk about high but fragile self-esteem, the conversation often turns quickly to narcissism. The word is everywhere today: in articles, on social media, in descriptions of ex-partners. So I want to be precise here.

Narcissistic personality disorder is a clinical diagnosis that only a professional can make after a thorough assessment. It isn’t something you can work out from an article or a few arguments. It is, however, an established understanding in psychology that apparent grandiosity — a sense of superiority, a need for admiration, contempt for others — is often a defence against a very vulnerable, shame-filled core. It is not that the person has too much self-respect, but that under the surface they have too little that is solid, and must protect it all the time.

Each of us has narcissistic defences in a milder form. When someone hurts us badly, we may retreat into the feeling that we are above it, that others don’t understand, that we are better than the one who wounded us. That is human. You can read about how such protections work in the knowledge base under defence mechanisms. The key question is not whether you have them, but whether you also have something else — whether you can sometimes relax, admit a mistake, show vulnerability without falling apart.

And one more thing: if this post reminds you of someone who hurt you in a relationship, you don’t need a diagnosis to know that the relationship was not good for you. Your experience counts even without a technical term.

When the crack shows

Fragile self-esteem often reveals itself only when a blow comes that cannot be covered up: losing a job, a divorce, an illness, a failure. Then a conversation might go something like this (a composite, not a real person):

“All my life I was the best. At school, at university, at work. And now that they’ve let me go, I don’t know who I am.”
“Who were you before you were the best?”
“I don’t understand the question.”
“When you were little. Before you had grades.”
“I don’t know. I think back then I was nothing special. That’s why I tried so hard.”

Everything is in that short answer. The diligence did not grow out of a joy in learning or work, but out of a feeling that without achievements he was nothing. Being “the best” was the only way to be seen. When that way disappeared, what remained was exactly the emptiness he had been covering all his life.

This is painful. But it is also an opportunity. A crack in fragile self-esteem is often the first time a person can look at what lies beneath it — and start to build something that won’t depend on the next achievement.

Where fragility comes from

In relational family therapy, in which I am training, we see self-esteem as something that arises in relationship. A child first learns about themselves from the way their parents look at them. If they were looked at with joy regardless of what they did, a sense will grow in them that they are worth something simply because they exist. But if warmth was tied to conditions — to grades, to being good, to being mum’s pride or dad’s comfort — they will learn that they are worth something only when they meet those conditions.

This is how contingent self-worth arises. And contingent self-worth is fragile by nature, because it depends on something that can be lost any day. In an extensive review of research, Jennifer Crocker and Lora Park showed that the constant pursuit of high self-esteem comes at a high price: people who are always chasing validation are often more anxious, learn less well from their mistakes and find it harder to build genuine relationships.

It is important to add that this is not a story about blaming parents. Most parents who tied love to achievement did so out of their own insecurity, often passed down from their own family of origin. In therapy we don’t look for culprits, but for an understanding of patterns that have been handed down through generations — and a chance to stop them.

Underneath fragile self-esteem there is often shame — the feeling that at my core something is wrong with me. I wrote about this emotion in the post Shame: the emotion that whispers “There is something wrong with me”. Fragile high self-esteem is often precisely the way this shame is kept at a safe distance.

Exercise: a week of watching the swings

This exercise lasts seven days, and each day it takes only a few minutes. The aim is not to grade yourself, but to notice how your self-esteem lives.

1. Three times a day — morning, afternoon and evening — write down on a scale from 1 to 10 how okay you feel about yourself at that moment.
2. Next to each number, write one sentence about what happened just before. Praise? Criticism? A look in the mirror? A post on social media?
3. After a week, look at the range. Was the difference between your lowest and highest number small or large? What caused the biggest drops?
4. Find the domain that shakes you most. Work? Appearance? A particular person’s opinion? That is your most contingent point.
5. Do one small thing without an audience. Something you enjoy, but won’t show or tell anyone about. Notice what it is like to do something not for validation.

If you notice that your self-esteem swings a lot, that is no reason for self-criticism. It is information. And information is the first step towards being able to change something.

Where this view is not enough

Not every confident person is fragile. Some people are simply relaxed and self-assured because they were lucky with their environment or built it solidly. Looking for the “real emptiness” beneath every kind of confidence is just as mistaken as believing that every kind of confidence is genuine. I wrote more about what genuine confidence looks like in the post Confidence isn’t volume: what trusting yourself really means.

Don’t diagnose yourself or others. This post describes psychological concepts, not clinical disorders. If you feel that you or someone close to you has serious difficulties, the right place to turn is a professional, not an article.

Mood swings are not always a question of self-esteem. If your mood swings very strongly, if you have periods of exceptional energy followed by deep low mood, or if thoughts of not wanting to live appear, talk to a doctor or psychiatrist. In a crisis in Slovenia you can call the mental health crisis line on 01 520 99 00 (every day from 7 pm to 7 am) or the Samaritan helpline on 116 123 (24 hours a day). In an emergency in Slovenia, call 112.

Sometimes the environment really is unsafe. If you are at work or in a relationship where you are constantly belittled or criticised, your swings are not just an inner matter. They are a response to a real circumstance, and your first task may be to take care of yourself in that environment rather than to work on your self-esteem.

What builds stable self-esteem

Kernis added one more quality to secure self-esteem, which he called authenticity: the ability to know yourself, to see yourself realistically, to act in line with your values and to show who you are in relationships, even when that is uncomfortable. Stable self-esteem does not require you to be successful all the time. It requires you to be able to accept that you are not.

Research on self-compassion points in a similar direction: people who are kind to themselves even when they fail have a more stable sense of their own worth than those who rely on high self-evaluation. Instead of the question “am I good enough?” they ask “what do I need right now?”.

In therapy, this work often happens through the relationship. When someone sees you with your mistakes and does not reject you, you can slowly begin to believe that you don’t have to be perfect to be accepted. This experience is not something you can read in a book. It is something that has to be lived — and this is where psychotherapy has a special place. That is why vulnerability matters: only when you dare to show what you hide can you find out that someone will accept you with it too.

The emptiness you feel beneath a successful exterior is not proof that there is nothing inside you. Often it is the space where the part of you that had to hide is waiting — and which, under the right conditions, can show itself again.

What to remember

• Fragile self-esteem is high but unstable, contingent or defensive — it looks confident from the outside, while inside the person has to keep defending it.
• Kernis and colleagues showed that people with high but unstable self-esteem experience the most anger and hostility.
• Winnicott’s false self explains why a successful person can feel empty: the adapted part has outgrown the spontaneous one.
• We all have narcissistic defences to some degree — but only a professional makes diagnoses.
• Stable self-esteem doesn’t mean always succeeding, but being able to accept that you don’t — and it is often built in relationship.