18-07-2025
How to recognize - and overcome
You're inferior. Incompetent. Unattractive. Everyone else is better than you are. If there are moments in your life when this is how you feel, it wouldn't be unusual.
For some people, however, self-doubt colours all of their thinking and actions. They believe they're "good for nothing," "worthless" or "unloved." This can be an indication of an inferiority complex.
"'Inferiority complex' isn't a medical term, but rather an everyday one," says Dr Gregor Müller, an instructor at the Institute of Psychological Psychotherapy (IPP) in Bochum, Germany.
As he explains it, an inferiority complex is "a fundamental lack of self-assurance." You have no confidence in yourself, constantly see yourself as a failure and think you never do anything right.
Psychological psychotherapist Eva Maria Klein prefers the term "self-esteem issues" to "inferiority complex." For people who have them, there's a discrepancy between their "ideal self and reality," she says. It arises when they place excessively high demands on themselves, often because of high performance expectations from their parents during childhood.
If reality is at odds with what they come to expect of themselves, they suffer.
Part of the problem, she says, is that people who expect and demand a lot of themselves continually compare themselves with others. While such comparisons aren't unusual, "drawing them constantly, and then feeling inferior, can weigh heavily on them."
Feeling you don't measure up is often accompanied by further negative feelings. "Low self-esteem can also manifest itself in a fear of facing certain situations" and sometimes in a feeling of shame as well, which can make matters worse, Klein says. Depression can result.
To determine whether you have an inferiority complex, simply consider your self-image. What knowledge and skills do you have? What are your strengths, your physical attributes? If you don't see much that's positive, but weaknesses and deficits instead, you might have a problem with your self-perception.
"The more negatively you see yourself, and the stronger you believe that others see you negatively too, the more likely it is that you have an inferiority complex," Müller says.
Feelings of inferiority and the negative thoughts underlying them can often be overcome. "In milder cases, even positive encouragement from friends or some positive feedback at work can be productive," says Müller. Apart from this, you can - and should - take steps yourself to pull up your low self-esteem.
"Although the process may take a while, it can be successful," Klein says. There are several ways to do this, beginning with self-acceptance.
"A first step can be accepting yourself as you are," leaving aside whether your self-perception is positive or negative, Müller says.
In the second step, examine what it is you don't like about yourself, "for instance that you think you're unkempt or too fat." Then you make a plan to address the problems, such as washing your hair more often and always wearing clean clothes, or losing five to 10 kilograms in a certain amount of time.
"Simply raising your awareness about a problem and planning to solve it can begin to boost your self-esteem," Müller says, since you've abandoned your passivity and taken action.
"It can help to take your strengths and successes into account," Klein says. If you give it some thought, you'll surely come up with things about yourself that others find positive too. You can make a note of them, regularly add to the list, and - in phases of self-doubt - go over it to pick up your self-esteem.
Know your own worth. Inferior? Worthless? People are never that, which is something you need to realize. Everyone has strengths and weaknesses.
You can compare yourself with others, of course, and conclude there are certain things you don't do as well. "But that doesn't mean you're of less worth," Müller says. And perhaps you can do things that others can't.
In some cases it can be difficult to overcome self-esteem issues on your own, particularly if they're linked with other symptoms and adversely affect your life. "Psychotherapy can then be effective," Klein says.
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