NeverMind, here are some more suggestions or remarks about helping a person strengthen their self-esteem. As I see it, to do precisely this daily is probably the most essential thing by far that a spouse or partner should be doing. As I understand it, it’s also very important in creating and maintaining a good quality friendship, and also good parenting, and also good teamwork and also good supervision in any work situation.
Let me start by describing a lesson one of my past spiritual teachers once gave – and was then forever talking about. He found a kitten that had probably been abused, and was certainly terrified of people. He also got a full set of encyclopedia volumes and put them all on a boardroom table. Then he put the kitten at one end of the books. It immediately found a “cave” somewhere in the gaps between the volumes and tried to hide. He placed a finger close to the kitten, artificially created a sensation of fear, then quickly pulled his finger away from the kitten. He did that a few times. Soon the kitten got the message that there was some fairly strong fear that the kitten could sense and that fear wasn’t its own, so it had to belong to somebody else. Not only that, but the kitten soon deduced that it itself must be very scary as far as that finger, and even the person attached to that finger, was concerned. In this way, after ten minutes or so the kitten had turned into a tiger. It became convinced that it could successfully attack any human, despite being less than one twentieth the size. It became a damn nuisance, because it wouldn’t give up, and those claws are quite sharp and quite strong.
That demonstration is a kind of template for how to empower a person to have greater self-esteem. Almost every spiritual teacher I’ve had has used it, extensively. I always use it in any counselling work I do. In a way you could say it seems dishonest. I mean, young kittens don’t really have the strength to capture and control adult humans. However, the way to use it is to be very observant – if not creative—and become aware of genuine strengths that the person you are trying to help has. Then you make sure you validate their concrete demonstration of one of those strengths or abilities immediately after it happens – at least once a day, or on each occasion when you see them. The psychologist Carl Rogers sometimes referred to this as “prizing” the person, i.e., expressing why they are so valuable and important and strong and even unique. Even though your friend may not be enthusiastic if you “prize” her for her healing abilities, there are obviously many other qualities she has. For instance, being a natural psychic healer myself, I happen to know that any such healer always has strong psychic abilities (clairvoyance, telepathy, etc) as well – but may not know it.
I could go on for pages about the method of building a person’s self-esteem through genuine appreciation and through compliments which identify genuine, real, specific potentials or already existing qualities of that person. This is known as “person-centred psychology”. The term “strengths approach” also covers at least parts of it. You mentioned your hope that ideally there was some “miracle cure” for your friend. Well, in fields such as nursing and social work and allied health, the person-centred approach has been taking over quite a lot as the preferred approach over the last decade. This followed the discovery that it works more tangibly and quickly than behaviour modification (or cognitive behaviour modification), which used to be the preferred approach in those fields for some decades until recently. (Carl Rogers also proved that it is also the basis of most ancient Eastern psychotherapy and of humanistic and existential psychotherapy, but I guess you’re not concerned with the theoretical foundations.)