The Self-Esteem Crisis We Were Taught to Create

From the moment we enter school, we’re asked, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” It sounds encouraging, but it plants a subtle, damaging belief: You are not enough as you are. You’ll only matter once you become something—once you achieve, succeed, or look the part.

This belief becomes the foundation for how we build self-esteem. We learn to measure our worth by accomplishments, status, and appearance—mirroring the adults around us or rebelling against them. Either way, we’re taught that self-worth is something earned, not something innate.

But here’s the deeper issue: we were never taught how to hurt.

We were taught to hide our pain, suppress our emotions, or distort them into something else—anger, sarcasm, addiction, distraction. Vulnerability was seen as weakness. Sadness was shameful. Disappointment was something to bury. So when life inevitably brings loss, failure, or change, we don’t know how to feel—we only know how to flee.

This emotional avoidance stagnates us. It blocks our ability to grow, to heal, and to find the rainbows that often follow the storm. Instead of learning to sit with pain and move through it, we become stuck—emotionally crippled, unable to process anger, grief, confusion, or fear. And when our self-esteem is built on external validation, every setback feels like a personal collapse.

A “bad hair day” becomes symbolic of deeper failures: a broken relationship, a failed business, aging, illness. And with each perceived failure, we spiral into confusion, depression, addiction, or self-destructive behaviors. What began as a flawed model of self-worth becomes a full-blown life crisis.

We were taught that the more we accomplish or the better we look, the more we deserve to feel good about ourselves. But this model is broken. It leaves us emotionally fragile, unable to cope with the very things life guarantees: change, loss, disappointment.

The truth is, our purpose in life isn’t to become something—it’s to experience everything we choose. That includes joy and success, but also heartbreak, failure, and uncertainty. Life isn’t about controlling outcomes; it’s about learning from them. And self-esteem isn’t about perfection—it’s about presence.

The book My Dog Got Run Over by a Rainbow offers a radical shift: self-esteem isn’t built on what you do or how you look—it’s built on how you relate to yourself when life doesn’t go as planned. Because more often than not, life doesn’t go as planned.

True self-esteem comes from learning to feel our emotions—not suppressing, denying, or dramatizing them, but facing them fully and using them as fuel for growth. It’s about finding value in yourself even when everything else falls apart. It’s about learning to hurt in healthy ways, so we can heal in meaningful ones.

Until we unlearn the old model, we’ll keep mistaking achievement for self-worth—and mistaking crisis for failure. But when we learn to build self-esteem from the inside out, we stop chasing perfection and start embracing life as it is. And only then can we begin to see the rainbows that were always waiting behind the clouds.