Low self-esteem can be a symptom of depression, but it isn’t always. If a lack of self-esteem seems to be quite global—it’s not just that you feel inadequate in one particular area, but you feel like that across all areas of your life—then low self-esteem could be a symptom of depression.If you grew up feeling different than everyone, or you felt different within your family relationships, how can you find self-esteem as an adult? A sense of belonging, of feeling like there are other people like us in the world, is one of our basic emotional needs. When you’re struggling with low self-esteem, it’s easy to feel like an alien, like no one feels the way you do. One of the main benefits of therapy is that it can help you feel that you’re not as different from everyone else as you think you are.If you feel like you don’t have much self-worth, could it just be that you’re stuck in the wrong place?Definitely. Difficult relationships or work situations can take a huge toll on our self-esteem. If you’re doing your best but are continually being told that you’re falling short, it’s hard to feel good about yourself. Ideally, we want to make the relationship or the job work but, sometimes, the only way to hold onto our sense of self-worth is to leave.That being said, the problem for people who are suffering from low self-esteem is that, when you’re feeling bad about yourself, your tendency is to blame yourself and take full responsibility for everything that has gone wrong. It’s always important to look at what you’re contributing to a problem and take responsibility for it.We all know people who never take responsibility for their role in things and blame everyone else. Those people just make everything worse. But it’s rarely the case that you’re completely responsible for everything that has gone wrong. Sorting out where your responsibility ends, and other people’s begins, can be a difficult task if your default mode is to blame yourself.How can you talk yourself through a tough situation when you’re blaming yourself for everything?I just worked with someone this week who was struggling with conflicts going on in her job. She was quite traumatized as a child. Her parents had a very conflicting relationship, and blamed her for everything that was going wrong between them. When things blew up at work, she was torturing herself trying to figure out what she had done wrong.The more we talked about it, the more it became clear that, because of the disorganization in the upper levels of the company, she wasn’t getting the information she needed to do her job. Since she was the person who interacted directly with the public, she was being blamed by the customers when products weren’t delivered on time. She knew all of this, but it took a lot of discussion over several sessions, for her to be able to see the situation clearly, and let herself off the hook.One of the benefits of blaming ourselves for a bad situation is that we can convince ourselves that, if we figure out what we’re doing wrong, we can fix it. The difficult thing for this individual was having to recognize that, just as she had no way to keep her parents from blaming her for everything wrong in their relationship, there was nothing she could do to change what was going on in the higher levels of the company.She was powerless. That feeling of powerlessness was so reminiscent of her childhood that she found it intolerable. It was easier to believe that she could actually do something to change the culture of the company. But, once she was able to acknowledge how powerless she actually was, she realized that she had options. She has very marketable skills. Other companies would be happy to have her. She’s not trapped in this company the way she was trapped in her family.I’ve gone into this case (which is completely disguised to protect the individual) at some length because it illustrates how complicated self-esteem issues can be, and why it’s often necessary to talk to someone to figure out how they’re affecting you, so you can make the best decisions for yourself.How can low self-esteem affect your relationships? When you’re not feeling good about yourself, it can be easy to feel that you’re a burden on the people you care about. They’re affected when you’re struggling. They can feel inadequate and helpless to support you in the ways that you need. That just makes you feel worse about yourself.If low self-esteem is causing you to feel like a burden on the people who love you, seeking the support of a therapist is the best thing you can do for yourself. It’s hard enough to feel bad about yourself, without also feeling that you’re hurting the people who care about you. A good therapy relationship can help you to feel better about yourself, and closer to the people who matter to you. Click to learn more about depression therapy and treatment with Jane Rubin, Ph.D.