What causes a person to have low self-esteem or not feel valued?
Low self-esteem can develop from trauma or an unrewarding or abusive environment during early childhood and adolescence, when self-belief patterns form at the subconscious level. Because ninety percent of behavior is controlled by the subconscious, low self-esteem is difficult to correct without therapy. Unrewarding environments can be of several types: Type A (Sociometer Theory) The individual is assigned a low status in their culture, for example, many cultures discriminate against women. Most if not all of my female clients from various cultures would agree, that in their culture it doesn’t matter how successful a woman can be, she will not be rewarded equally to a man doing the same job. This double-standard continues to produce hurt and anger, and a culture where low self-esteem is systemic.
Type B (Self-Discrepancy Theory) The criteria for being rewarded is clear, but the individual believes they have failed to achieved the criteria. Children raised by one parent after a divorce often feel abandoned and ignored, and not important enough to be valued, and this is compounded under the belief that they are part of a failed family. In adolescence and teenage years, comparison to successful peers or siblings, or unrealistic beauty and body standards on social media, exacerbates low self-esteem under feelings of failure to thrive. Being bullied or body shamed, or belonging to a group that faces discrimination, causes negative beliefs and shame - your identity fails to comply to the criteria for being “normal”. Type C (Fragile Self-Esteem) The criteria is clear and the individual achieves it, but reward is with-held by the parents or teachers. Being raised by parents who predominantly correct without equal amounts of praise, causes you to learn to disregard whatever you do right or well, and measure your value negatively by counting your mistakes. Similar to Type A, the rules are stacked against you - it doesn’t matter how successful you are because just one mistake can reduce you to failure.
Once those roots take hold, a person grows into their twenties filtering their self-perception to focus on their mistakes, and dismiss their successes. They exaggerate single mistakes like “I failed at that” into a permanent character trait: “I am a failure.” They make relationship and career decisions based on negative self-talk: “I am not good enough - I dont deserve happiness - I’ll take any opportunity and be grateful for it.” This can result in abusive work or personal relationships, adding trauma, which creates a self-proving situation where the abuse justifies the low self-esteem, and the person is unable to break free. Trauma at any time in life is devastating because it means we were powerless to stop it. That makes us feel helpless, and our aggressor makes us feel worthless. If left untreated, this can lead to self-blame, which aggravates the trauma and blocks the grieving process, locking the person into a cycle of denial, anger, and depression. A person in this situation can become emotionally “switched off”, and project their pain onto those around them, influencing everyone in their immediate environment to lower their self-value. In this way, the pattern perpetuates across generations.
How does Andrew’s Hypnosis Confidence method work?
Hypnosis Confidence is a personal program for recovering low self-esteem, that works directly with your subconscious mind, where ninety percent of your behavior is controlled. The method is designed to transform learned conditioning from unrewarding environments, to help you develop a subconsciously supportive relationship with yourself, and build confidence. Hypnosis sessions are conducted using a psychoacoustic soundtrack that deepens your receptivity to positive suggestions, making the reprogramming more effective. I write your script specifically for you, questioning the roots of shame and self-criticism, and guiding you to practice nurturing a rewarding and forgiving relationship with yourself. This creates the supportive emotional environment that you needed during your formative years, allowing you to heal your self-esteem and build confidence. My method is greatly enhanced by meditation, which I teach in your hypnosis sessions, and I provide a free assisted meditation soundtrack that helps you to meditate at home. Meditation is the key to letting go of negative self-talk and self-judgment that maintains low self-esteem from past conditioning. You can achieve the best results using a Personal Affirmation Soundtrack between sessions, to create a positive and supportive day-to-day emotionally environment.
The method redefines your beliefs about your value. This may take time, because the rules defining “value” are taught to us as children - but as adults we get to make up our own minds. Qualities like honesty, respect, kindness, being loving and supportive, doing our best, or showing up, can give us value in our adult lives that we may never have been given growing up. The affirmations on your soundtrack will be specific to your situation, and remind you that if you are a good person and you have valuable qualities, you deserve to feel valuable. You can work with multiple soundtracks at different levels, for example your first soundtrack may work at the root level of giving yourself value as a human right, and you may then add a soundtrack that builds on your new value, to feel confident in social situations. The result is a growing sense of self-worth, which develops the more you practice, using the laws of neuroplasticity — your brain’s natural ability to change the way you think, based on how you think every day. With daily practice, the new neural pathways strengthen, building confidence, and the old patterns weaken from disuse.
What happens during a Hypnosis Confidence treatment with Andrew?
In your first session, (two hours) we’ll discus your emotional experience during childhood and teenage years. If there was trauma and you don’t want to talk about it that’s okay, we can start with core work and deal with the trauma when you feel ready. The core work is all about your conditioning, and identifying your self-esteem type: A - No criteria is provided by your culture for you to feel confident; B - Your culture provides the criteria for success but you believe you have not achieved it; or C - You have achieved success but you still don’t feel confident. We also discuss values that are personally important to you, that you appreciate in others. You describe how life would be if you were more confident and we use this to create your affirmations, acknowledging your personal values. During this conversation I compile your hypnosis script.
Hypnosis requires twenty to thirty minutes. You’ll be in a comfortable space at home where you can relax and not be interrupted, listening to my voice and psychoacoustic soundtrack streaming through your headphones. The video allows me to observe your reactions and gauge your depth in hypnosis. You can communicate with me if you need to but most people are just engaged with the experience. The hypnosis session is dedicated to inner child work - building a loving and supportive relationship with your subconscious mind, represented as a child of about 4. You start to trust your adult self and let go of the old failure-based thoughts, realizing that you are deserving of love. As you progress you will come to forgive your teachers or parents. They were taught to suppress their pain and never learned to heal it, but their beliefs are not yours, so you can let them go. I gently bring you out of hypnosis, and we discuss your experience and any insights that came up.
How many sessions will you need to start feeling more confident?
Hypnosis Confidence begins with building self-esteem through inner child work, which forms the foundation for growing confidence. The first change you’ll feel after your session is not confidence yet, but a feeling of valuing yourself more. One session plants the seeds, but repeated sessions strengthen the neural pathways that develop your self-worth in this foundation stage. Each person’s situation is unique and requires a personalized approach. A confidence boost for workplace speaking or social situations can take three to four sessions to feel totally confident, whereas recovering from long-term low self-esteem or trauma can take eight or more sessions before confidence starts emerging — though you’ll still feel improvement in your self-worth, building from the first session. Confidence grows naturally from self-esteem, once the foundation is strong enough to support it.
The number of sessions depends on several factors: how long you’ve been struggling with low self-esteem, how deeply your conditioning has affected you, how much work you’ve already done via other methods and therapy, the degree to which you use your affirmation soundtrack, and your consistency with meditation between sessions. The severity of conditioning matters significantly — low self-esteem from abuse and trauma requires time for treatment to help you through the grieving process, working through denial, anger, and depression before reaching the bargaining stage where you agree on terms to forgive your aggressors, which allows you to let go. This grief process takes time and can’t be rushed, which is why trauma cases need eight or more sessions. The daily practice with your affirmation soundtrack and meditation accelerates your progress by strengthening the new neural pathways between your sessions.
Is Andrew’s Hypnosis Confidence effective for building self-esteem?
Yes, this approach is highly effective. Low self-esteem is well-understood in psychology through established frameworks like Sociometer Theory, which describes how self-esteem functions as a monitor of social acceptance; Self-Discrepancy Theory, which explains how gaps between your actual self and ideal self create emotional distress; and research on Fragile Self-Esteem, which distinguishes between secure and insecure forms of self-worth. Hypnotherapy has been shown effective at addressing the subconscious patterns these models describe. Recent meta-analytic research examining 20 years of clinical hypnosis found that practitioners rated “enhancing confidence” as highly effective, with over 70% reporting strong results across diverse populations. In my fifteen years of practice working with over ten thousand clients, confidence issues are one of the most common presenting concerns — and regardless of which type of unrewarding environment created the low self-esteem, the result is the same: subconscious beliefs about your worth that were formed during childhood. The reason hypnotherapy is so effective is that it works at the subconscious level where ninety percent of your behavior is controlled, rather than trying to fight those deep beliefs with the five to ten percent of conscious willpower. It addresses the root cause — the childhood programming where the beliefs were formed — not just the surface symptoms.
The method works through inner child work that creates the supportive emotional environment you needed during your formative years but didn’t receive. This allows you to recover the self-esteem that was suppressed and rebuild it at the same subconscious depth where the fragile beliefs were originally formed. Research demonstrates that hypnotherapy produces significant improvements in self-perception and personal efficacy, which directly influence self-esteem. The combination of weekly hypnosis sessions addressing your specific conditioning type — whether you were denied criteria for success, believed you failed to meet the criteria, or achieved success but were denied reward — with daily affirmation soundtracks reinforcing the new beliefs creates lasting neural pathway changes. The meditation training I provide is crucial because it gives you the skill to interrupt negative self-talk in real time, preventing the automatic self-dismissal that maintains low self-esteem. Online sessions are often more effective for confidence work because the privacy and comfort of your home environment makes it easier to be vulnerable during the deep emotional processing required for inner child work. Being in your own space removes performance anxiety and allows you to focus entirely on the therapeutic relationship with yourself, rather than managing the external stress of commuting to an office or being seen entering a therapist’s building.
What changes can you expect to feel during and after the treatment?
Change is progressive and accumulates with practice. In your early sessions, during meditations you notice how much negative self-talk actually dominates your inner monologue, and the meditation teaches you to interrupt and drop those self-critical thoughts when they arise, bringing you an early win, in that you can quickly develop this skill. With daily practice in this technique, by sessions three or four, your inner critic becomes quieter, and that automatic self-dismissal gets replaced by a non-judging attitude toward yourself, and the ability to rest your mind, instead of it always having to work over-time. With this new calmness, you notice moments of confidence - speaking up feels easier, and those moments become more frequent. The breakthrough moment is realizing that even if you aren’t perfect, you are good enough to be valuable, and your voice matters.
After using your affirmation soundtrack for one to two weeks, you’ll notice your voice feels stronger when you speak, you make eye contact more easily, and you accept compliments from others without immediately dismissing them as flattery. You feel more comfortable contributing ideas in meetings or social discussions, feeling an inherent worth in yourself that’s not based on achievement or approval. If you’re recovering from trauma that caused you to lose confidence, after two to three sessions it’s normal to experience subconscious resistance in response to your affirmations, where the unresolved trauma emerges as grief - denial, anger, or depression. This indicates that you are ready to work with your trauma. Hypnotherapy works with these grief symptoms to resolve the underlying trauma by supporting you emotionally and coaching you through the bargaining stage to forgiveness, and letting go.
Talk to Andrew and see if you feel he could help with your confidence
Low self-esteem is one of those situations where the hardest part is actually going for treatment - It can be hard to acknowledge in yourself, and when you do, its hard to come forward and ask for help. If you’d like to talk to me about your specific situation, please book a free consultation, there’s no obligation, and I can answer any questions you may have. If you’re ready to start, most people find the First Session, or the AW Experience provides a good place to start working on self value and confidence. When you’re ready to book, I’m ready to listen.