Esteem Groups Help Students Boost Their Self-Image

By Michael David Lawrience, Residential Coach III, RCYCP

“Codependency and addiction are, in fact, symptoms of low self-esteem.”
Carolyn Ball

Does your teenage girl often feel “not good enough?” Does she have a lot of critical thoughts about herself and her accomplishments?

At Copper Canyon Academy boarding school for girls, your daughter can learn new tools to strengthen her self-esteem, as well as methods to begin recovery from codependent relationships that may be causing her much unhappiness. At the boarding school, students gain the ability to create higher esteem within themselves and to recognize and change their critical thoughts.

Copper Canyon Academy has offered a self-esteem group to students for more than three years. About 20 students participate in each group, which lasts 12 weeks. Through the groups, students learn basic concepts about self-esteem, take quizzes to identify their level of esteem and degree of codependent behaviors, practice esteem-building exercises and take part in group discussions.

They also discover that other teens have similar challenges and issues with self-esteem. In fact, 90 percent of the students in the groups have below average to poor esteem.

Some of the main esteem-building exercises students learn in the groups include the “Mirror Exercise,” which involves girls saying, “I love myself,” for 21 days and using the “Reprogramming Technique”to identify and change habitual negative self-talk. In addition, the group emphasizes strengths rather than flaws. Students also gain greater awareness of the main codependent roles dominant in most families.

A major shift for students occurs weeks into the groups when they begin to realize that high esteem comes from how they feel inside rather than how people see their outer image. At the end of the 12 weeks, most students boost their esteem to average or above average, as determined by 40-question quizzes taken at the beginning and end of the 12 weeks.

Student comments from the self-esteem groups indicate how much the groups help the girls look inward and start thinking more positively:

• “I am learning about being the real me.”
• “I have discovered happiness within myself instead of looking outwards for others to make me happy.”
• “I loved the mirror exercise. As I continued doing it, my image of myself improved immensely.”   

Students begin to glimpse good self-esteem as the foundation for overcoming codependency, as well as doing well in school, with relationships and for future success. As renowned therapist Nathaniel Branden says, “How a person judges his or her self-esteem affects how that person operates … in every important aspect of existence.”