Self-Esteem, Body Image
and Identity Therapy
Sydney
Therapy for self-esteem, body image and identity with Chauncey Sjostedt, PACFA certified Gestalt Therapist in Surry Hills. I work with people who find it hard to feel good enough, who have a difficult relationship with their body, or who feel unclear or disconnected from who they really are.
PACFA Certified Practicing Member #29367 · LGBTQ+ Affirming · Surry Hills & Online
When you do not feel
good enough
Low self-esteem is not the same as occasional self-doubt or temporary discouragement. It is a persistent, underlying sense that you are somehow fundamentally lacking or unworthy of the things you want, a state that colours your perception of yourself and the world even when external circumstances give you no obvious reason to feel that way.
Low self-esteem is one of the most pervasive and quietly damaging experiences a person can carry. It does not always look like overt distress from the outside. More often it shows up as a constant low-level sense that you are somehow lacking, a voice that questions your worth regardless of evidence, a pattern of putting others' needs before your own, or a difficulty accepting care, love or recognition.
Low self-esteem is rarely about a lack of achievement or capability. Many high-functioning, capable people struggle profoundly with feeling enough. It is usually rooted in experiences and messages absorbed in childhood and adolescence that settled into the background of daily life as facts rather than interpretations.
Therapy does not try to replace self-criticism with positive thinking. It works at a deeper level: exploring where the inner critic came from, what it is protecting you from, and developing a more honest and compassionate relationship with yourself. This kind of change tends to last because it is built from genuine self-knowledge rather than willpower.
Personal growth and self-understanding
Body image
and dissatisfaction
The relationship between a person and their body is one of the most intimate and often most troubled relationships in a human life. It is shaped by how we were responded to physically as children, by the cultural messages we absorbed about what bodies should look like, by experiences of illness, injury, trauma, pregnancy, transition or simply ageing, and by the way our body has been seen or commented on by others throughout our lives.
A difficult relationship with your body can affect almost every area of life: how you dress, how you move through the world, how present you can be in intimate relationships, and how much energy you spend managing or avoiding the way you look. It can be quietly exhausting, and it is often invisible to others.
Relationship with Your Body
The body is not just an appearance to be managed. It is the ground of all experience. Therapy works with the body not as something to be fixed or optimised, but as something to be known and inhabited more fully. This might involve noticing how you feel in your body, what your physical experience is telling you, and developing a more respectful and curious relationship with the body you actually have.
Societal Pressure and Unrealistic Standards
We live inside a culture that is relentless and highly specific in its messages about what bodies should look like, and those messages are damaging to almost everyone they touch. They are particularly intense and often contradictory for women, LGBTQ+ people, people of colour and those in bodies that fall outside narrow and shifting beauty standards. Therapy offers a space to examine the relationship between these cultural messages and your personal inner critic, to disentangle what you actually think and feel from what you have absorbed from the outside, and to build a more grounded and genuinely self-defined relationship with the body you actually live in.
Body Image and Gender or Sexuality
For LGBTQ+ people, body image can intersect with gender dysphoria, the experience of having a body that is misread or misgendered by others, or the specific beauty standards of queer communities. I bring both personal community experience and clinical training to this work. Learn more on the gender identity therapy page.
Identity,
who am I?
Identity is not a fixed destination. It is something we are always in the process of constructing, negotiating and sometimes having disrupted. Therapy is one of the few contexts in which these questions can be explored properly, without the pressure to perform certainty or arrive at neat conclusions before the work is done.
Questions of identity, who you are, who you are allowed to be, who you are becoming, are at the heart of much therapy work. They are also often the hardest to name. People sometimes arrive at therapy knowing something is wrong but not having the language for it yet, feeling somehow false or unclear in a way they cannot articulate. This is a completely valid starting point.
Feeling Lost or Disconnected from Yourself
A sense of not knowing who you are, of performing rather than being, of feeling like a stranger in your own life, is more common than people realise and more painful than it might sound from the outside. It can come with a particular quality of loneliness, the sense of being surrounded by people who think they know you while feeling deeply unknown even to yourself. Therapy offers a space to come into closer contact with your actual experience, values and ways of being, gradually and without forcing clarity that is not yet ready to arrive.
Identity Shifts After Parenthood, Career Change or Life Transition
Major life transitions involve a reorganisation of identity that can be disorientating even when the change was chosen and wanted. Becoming a parent, losing or leaving a career, moving countries, ending a long relationship, completing a significant project or stepping into a new life chapter can all leave you feeling uncertain about who you are outside the old role or context. The self that was organised around what you were doing may not fit what comes next. Gestalt therapy is particularly well suited to supporting this kind of transition work because it works with who you actually are rather than who you think you should become.
Cultural and Community Identity
Identity is always shaped by culture and community. For people navigating multiple cultural contexts, living between cultures, or carrying the tension between inherited cultural values and their own emerging sense of self, this dimension of identity can be a rich and sometimes painful area of exploration. I approach cultural identity with genuine curiosity and without imposing a framework of what integration or resolution should look like.
How I work with
self-esteem
Gestalt, Self-Awareness Not Self-Criticism
Gestalt therapy does not try to override the inner critic with positive affirmations. Instead it gets curious about the inner critic: where it came from, what it is protecting, and what it sounds like when you slow down and actually listen to it. This kind of awareness, genuinely felt rather than just understood, is what allows a different relationship with yourself to develop. It is not about becoming uncritical. It is about developing discernment rather than self-attack.
Much of the work on self-esteem is also the work of grief: grieving the childhood in which different messages might have been possible, the experiences that shaped the inner critic, the years spent believing things about yourself that were never really true. There is something important about being able to mourn this rather than moving straight to fixing it.
Self-awareness in the Gestalt sense is not about navel-gazing. It is about coming into closer contact with what is actually true for you: what you feel, what you need, what you value and what you have been suppressing in order to be acceptable to others. This is often where the real work of self-esteem begins.
Body-Focused, Reconnecting with Your Body
This is not about forcing a positive attitude toward your body or making peace through affirmations. It is about developing a more curious and truthful relationship with your physical experience.
For many people, the difficulty is not a lack of insight. They can describe their patterns clearly and often have a good intellectual understanding of where they came from. The challenge is that this understanding alone does not produce change. Gestalt and body-aware approaches work at the level where change can actually happen: in felt experience, in the body, in the moment.
Low self-esteem and difficult body image are not just cognitive. They live in the body as tension, avoidance, disconnection or a general quality of being at war with one's own physical presence. A body-aware approach to this work involves bringing the body back into the room: noticing physical sensations as they arise, tracking how the body responds to different experiences, and gradually developing a more inhabitable relationship with your physical self.
Sessions are available in person in Surry Hills on Saturdays, or online on Wednesday afternoons (Glebe) and Saturday mornings (Surry Hills). You do not need a GP referral. Full details on the appointments page. For LGBTQ+ specific contexts, see the LGBTQ+ affirming therapy page.
Book a Session
Common questions
Questions about self-esteem and body image therapy. More on the full FAQ page.
Book a session
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Therapy helps with low self-esteem by exploring where it came from rather than just trying to think your way out of it. Low self-esteem is usually rooted in experiences and messages absorbed early in life, many of which now operate below conscious awareness as apparently settled facts. Gestalt therapy works with these patterns experientially, in the present moment rather than through analysis, helping you develop a more compassionate and accurate relationship with yourself from the inside out. This kind of change tends to be more lasting than change built from willpower or positive thinking alone.
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No. Body image therapy addresses your relationship with your body more broadly: how you feel about it, how you inhabit it and how those feelings affect your life. It does not require an eating disorder diagnosis. If you are experiencing a clinical eating disorder, I am happy to discuss whether my practice is appropriate for your specific situation or whether a referral to specialist eating disorder support would be more suitable.
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Identity work involves exploring who you actually are, not who you feel you should be. This includes examining the stories you carry about yourself, the roles you have taken on, the parts of yourself you have hidden or suppressed, and the gap between the self you present to others and the self you know privately. It often involves a kind of careful archaeology: noticing what is genuinely you and what has been accumulated in order to be acceptable or safe. Gestalt therapy is particularly well suited to this because it works with the whole person in the present moment rather than applying a framework from the outside.
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Yes. LGBTQ+ people often carry particular body image challenges related to gender dysphoria, the specific beauty standards of queer communities, the experience of living in a body that has been scrutinised or misread by others, or the relationship between gender identity and physical self. I bring both personal community experience and clinical training to this work. See also the gender identity therapy page.
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Yes, absolutely. Not knowing why is a completely normal and valid place to start therapy. Many people carry low self-esteem without a clear story about where it came from, often because it has been present for so long it simply feels like the truth about them. Therapy does not require you to arrive with an explanation. It is a space for that understanding to develop, gradually and often in surprising directions, as we pay closer attention to your actual experience rather than your theory about it.
Take the first step
towards feeling better
Book a self-esteem, body image or identity therapy session in person in Surry Hills on Saturday mornings, or online via secure video on Wednesday afternoons (Glebe) and Saturday mornings (Surry Hills). Sessions are 50 minutes. No GP referral or Mental Health Care Plan required. A free introductory call is available before the first session. I respond to all enquiries within 48 hours.