Addiction and Low Self Esteem: How Substances Hinder Self-Love
Self-love begins with self-acceptance. In order to achieve self-love, you must be willing to accept the parts of yourself that you feel are not acceptable. You need to love your whole self, warts and all, in order to achieve self-love. Once you accept the parts of you that you may not like, or be willing to accept all of you as you are, you are on your way to self-love, which opens new doors, full of positive energy, for you to explore.
However, there are hurdles to clear before reaching those doors. One of them is low self-esteem., and with low self-esteem, you can become vulnerable to things like drugs and alcohol. People seek out drugs and alcohol when they are not ready, or able, to face their true selves. They don’t want to feel the negative feelings that may have entered their lives, so they obliterate them with drugs and alcohol. Eventually, this lead to addiction. 
Everything Becomes Overwhelming
Someone with low self-esteem perceives life as drudgery. These feelings are the breeding ground for self-destructive behavior. Drugs and alcohol are an easy, effortless way to take a lack of self-esteem or self-worth and drink it away into a blackout, or smoke, snort or shoot it into oblivion. Everything becomes overwhelming. The potential for destructive behavior and escaping to a world where judgment is non-existent becomes a very powerful lure.
Drug use and addiction occurs when people, for one reason or another, are unable to love themselves. Many think of self-love is unattainable, when the truth is that they simply do not understood how to get there. Often they perceive the effort as being too hard. It is easier to just not feel negative feelings by drinking or doing drugs.
Achieve Self-Love
You cannot achieve self-love without a proper sense of self-care. You need to find ways that you can look after, and accept, yourself on all levels. When you are able to achieve self-love and self-care, they will eventually help you ride out the wave of addiction and crush any negative patterns it may be causing in your life.
In order to achieve self-love, you need to realize that you are not defined by what others think, but rather how you feel about yourself. When you look to others for validation and do not find it, it is then that you start looking somewhere else for that validation, like a bottle of liquor bottle, or a bottle of pills.
Once you are able to grasp the concept of self-care, and self-love, you will begin looking at the world with a much less dismal outlook. This in turn leads to you feeling better about yourself and others around you, and lessens the likelihood that you will turn to drugs and alcohol for a release from the negative feelings that you have about yourself.
The bottom line is that having a low self-esteem is one of the many things that can drive you to drinking and doing drugs. However, you have the power to change your self-esteem for the better, and when you are able to do that, you can keep addiction out of your life.
