Low self-worth is often explained rather superficially, as a mere lack of confidence or an excess of self-criticism. But psychoanalyst Ronald Fairbairn has given us a deeper, more unsettling account. He suggests that low self-worth is not a failure in our development but an adaptation to a particular kind of early relational challenge.
When parental love is broadly unconditional, a child can experience themselves as basically acceptable. They may be corrected for behaviour – hitting a sibling or throwing food – but their being is not in question. But when love is conditional or withheld, or the child is actively disapproved of, neglected, or abused, something more complex happens. The child is faced with a dilemma: either the caregiver is deficient, rejecting, or unavailable – or I am. Since recognising the caregiver’s failure would threaten the relationship itself and the child’s existential sense of safety, the child chooses to take the blame. This is Fairbairn’s famous “moral defence”.
In the moral defence, the child concludes: If I were better, more compliant, more successful, less needy, then I would be loved. Low self-worth is born not from cruelty to the self, but from loyalty to the parents. It preserves hope. If the problem is me, then something can be done about it – by me.
Submission follows. The self learns to adapt, perform, deliver, and suppress protest in order to maintain attachment. Shame is the glue that holds this logic together. Shame is not just feeling bad about oneself; it is the sense of being fundamentally wrong, exposed, and deficient — and therefore needing to manage oneself cautiously in relation to others.
So, low self-worth is not merely a symptom to be eliminated. It is the residue of a tragic strategy that once made sense. Therapeutic work involves not simply challenging negative beliefs, but slowly loosening the grip of this moral logic. Allowing the person to risk the idea that the early deprivation was not a fault of theirs, that submission was ultimately costly, and that their worth was unquestionable then – as it is now.
Image credit: George Pisarevsky
