The Talmud says that a person's "yetzer hara" tries to destroy one anew every day (Kiddushin 30b). I believe that this is the origin of the negative self-evaluation and self-destructive behavior. Humans were instilled with a yetzer tov, a drive for life, and a yetzer hara, a self-destructive drive. Moses states this explicitly: "See, I have set before you the life and the good, the death and the evil" (Deuteronomy 30:15). By causing a person to think poorly about himself, the yetzer hara seeks to destroy him. The yetzer hara is cunning and wily, and will use anything it can to achieve its goal of destroying a person.

Of course, the "inner voice" is not audible. It consists of negative ideas. It is an "incessant inner critic," and our aim should be to change this inner voice from being a destructive critic to being a constructive guide, to acknowledge the good within us and to criticize only when there is honest, constructive criticism.

The inner critic may find fault with everything you do. It tells you how inadequate you are compared to others, who always do things so much better. It never compliments you for doing something good. It tells you that your friends are bored with you and wish you would go away. It tells you that you weigh too much even when you are at optimum weight, or that your appearance is unattractive when you are in fact rather handsome.

When you were a child, you had no way of differentiating right from wrong, good from bad. It was your parents' duty to teach you, and this required discipline. It is quite likely that when you did something inappropriate, your parents may not have said, "What you did was wrong," but, "You are bad." Or they may have said, "You ought to be ashamed of yourself."

They may have exaggerated things, like your accidentally dropping and breaking something, commenting, "Why are you so clumsy? Can't you even walk straight?" and reacted as though a broken dish or a spilled bottle of milk was a calamity. They may have shouted at you, which made you feel bad. They may have reacted with disappointment at your report card, conveying the message that by not excelling at school you were letting them down. Even good parents who care deeply for their children may say unwise things.

You may have had difficulty in arithmetic, such as doing word-problems, that other kids seemed to have understood. Your teacher might have said, "What's wrong with you that you can't get this?" If you could have dug a hole in the ground and jumped in, you would have. The feeling "There's something wrong with me, I can't understand things," is grist for the mill for the inner critic.

All kinds of things can happen in childhood, at an age when one does not have the capacity to correctly understand things, and therefore one may take them as indications of personal deficiencies. A parent may be absent from the home because of illness or other reasons. Young children may interpret this absence as, "Mommy went away because I was naughty." If parents fight or there is a separation, children often feel that they are to blame.

The yetzer hara is not going to let such opportunities go by. Many things that happen to us are stored away in our subconscious mind. The yetzer hara will dig these things out, and even if you do not recall the specific incident, it will resurrect the feelings that accompanied such incidents. The feeling "I am bad" will, of course, result in having little regard for oneself.

There is a small but extremely important difference between guilt and shame. If a person has done something wrong and feels guilty because of it, that is a healthy feeling. The discomfort of guilt discourages people from doing wrong and motivates them to make amends and to rectify the wrong. The feeling of guilt for what someone has done can, therefore, be constructive.

But if instead of feeling that one did something bad, a person feels that he is bad, inadequate or unlikable, there is little corrective action one can take. The feeling "I am bad or inferior" constitutes shame rather than guilt. Or to put it another way, guilt is the feeling that "I made a mistake," whereas shame is the feeling that "I am a mistake." Keep this definition of shame in mind. Once the feeling of shame occurs, it can haunt one for life.

The achievements we make are primarily of an intellectual nature, hence we may logically know that we do have value. However, the feeling of shame, that we are bad, lazy or inept, is of an emotional nature. As a rule, emotion is more powerful than intellect, and if the two conflict, emotion usually wins. That is why even people of international acclaim may nevertheless have low self-esteem. Rabbi Shneur Zalman in Tanya states that it is possible for the intellect to dominate emotion, but this requires much effort and strength of character. Achieving intellectual dominance is one way in which low self-esteem may be overcome.

Note that I said "intellectual dominance;" not "intellectual acuity" or "intellectual brilliance." Paradoxically, very bright people may harbor extremely low self-esteem. Perhaps the reason for this is that the "inner voice" that puts you down is the yetzer hara, and the Talmud tells us that the yetzer hara is particularly powerful in highly gifted people (Succah 52a). It is only logical that God will not give a person of meager personality assets an overwhelmingly powerful yetzer hara. However, a gifted person has the strength to cope with a more powerful yetzer hara, which exerts great pressure to crush the person. Intellectual dominance means that one puts his intellect to work to defeat the wiles of the yetzer hara.

Of course, a person may experience adversities, and it is only natural that these may depress a person's feelings. However, even adversities should not cause a person to lose self-esteem. It is a sharp blow if the company's downsizing results in the loss of one's job, and one feels depressed. But why should the company's downsizing reflect on one's feeling of worthiness?

The Midrash states that King Solomon ruled over a huge empire. He was cast from his throne by the king of demons, the Ashmidai. He wandered throughout the country, and when he said he was King Solomon people regarded him as insane. The Talmud states that whereas he had previously been king over a huge empire, he was now king only over his walking stick (Sanhedrin 20b). Although he had lost everything, he did not lose his feeling that he was in fact a king, although his only "subject" was his walking stick.

Adversity may be depressing, but it should not reflect on one's self-concept.