Book Review - Overcoming Low Self-Esteem, By Dr Melanie Fennell

I really rate the titles in the 'Overcoming' series. All are written by practising psychologists, yet in a highly accessible, practical style. Melanie Fennell’s book in the series is a great example. Dr Fennell is an experienced Cognitive Behavioural Therapy teacher and practitioner, and it’s the CBT approach that informs the thinking and exercises in this book. The thinking is robust, yet wears its provenance lightly, and the exercises are paced to encourage step-by-step progress. So this isn’t a ton of theory: it’s a practical workbook to guide the user through the necessary stages of dealing with what can be a crippling problem.

Just what low self-esteem is, its origins and its impact, are the subject of the early parts of the book. There’s a brief questionnaire to help you work out where your self-esteem may need a boost. The section on 'how low self-esteem develops' plots the path of 'how you got to here' in a way that makes total sense if only someone had said so earlier. We can then behave as if we have low self-esteem permanently installed on our hard drive, reinforcing our negative self-perception.

Thankfully, the bulk of this book is all about how to then overcome the patterns we have installed, first by noticing them, then testing their validity, and installing far more helpful patterns of thinking, feeling and behaving. I particularly like the thought-provoking questions and exercises on 'Combating Self-Criticism', and moving from there to 'Enhancing Self-Acceptance' using tools such as the 'Daily Activity Diary' and 'Positives Notebook' exercises. These techniques are classic CBT, yet written in a highly accessible way with illustrations and examples that are easy to identify with.

With greater self-awareness of one’s patterns and greater attention on strengths, resources, positives and what’s already working, the reader/student is then ready to tackle 'Challenging The Rules' and 'Undermining The Bottom Line'. Finally Dr Fennell pulls all the tools and techniques together, relating them back to the model given at the start, and provides guidance for crafting a plan to make it all stick.

'Overcoming Low Self-Esteem' is more like a practical course than a book, where the student gets the explanations, tools, frameworks, questions and answers they need to guide them through the journey to self-acceptance, at their own pace. Warmly recommended.