If I Could Help One Person — Part Forty-Seven  ·  By Kristen

What They Saw

On self-esteem, the slow erosion of abuse, and the whiteboard that gave me back what I had forgotten

May 1, 2026  ·  10 min read

Thirty people who had known me for thirty days could see it. I could not.

The Toll

I want to talk about self-esteem.

Not the kind you read about in self-help books. Not the kind that comes with a morning routine and a gratitude journal, though I have nothing against either of those things. I want to talk about what happens to your sense of self when someone spends years — systematically, methodically, and sometimes without even knowing they are doing it — convincing you that you are less than you are.

Because that is what abuse does. It does not arrive with a label. It arrives as a comment here, a dismissal there, a look across a room that tells you you have said the wrong thing again. It arrives as the slow, quiet replacement of your own voice with someone else's. And after enough years of that, you stop being able to hear yourself at all.

By the time I walked into treatment in 2019, my self-esteem was not low. Low implies there was still something measurable. It was gone. I had been in a relationship for years that had taken everything I had built about myself and quietly dismantled it, piece by piece, until I could not remember who I was before him. I could not remember what I had liked. What I had been proud of. What I had believed about myself.

I was not dramatic about it. That is the thing about this kind of damage — it does not look like damage from the outside. I was still functioning. I was still showing up. I was still making dinner and going to work and answering emails. But inside, there was almost nothing left.

The Process

Treatment had a structure to it that I did not expect.

I had imagined it would be mostly about the drinking. And it was, in part. But Harmony Place was a dual-diagnosis facility, which meant they treated the whole picture — the substance use and the mental health conditions that so often travel alongside it. They understood that most people do not drink because they enjoy drinking. They drink because something is broken underneath, and the drinking is the only thing that makes the noise stop.

They gave us thirty days. And those thirty days had a shape to them.

By the end, you were required to have your entire life plotted out on paper. A plan. A structure. A map of where you were going and how you intended to get there. You had to stand in a room in front of everyone — the other patients, the counselors, the people who had watched you fall apart and put yourself back together over the course of a month — and tell them your story.

Mine was not the most dramatic story in that room. I want to be honest about that. There were people there who had lost more than I had. Who had come from harder places. Whose stories made mine feel small by comparison. And yet my counselor reminded me, more than once, that pain is not a competition. That the erosion of a person's sense of self is its own kind of devastation, regardless of what caused it.

I told my story. I stood in that room and I said the things out loud that I had never said to anyone. And something shifted. Not everything. Not all at once. But something.

You don't know how much this meant to me. It was the biggest gift I had ever received.

Starting to regain my confidence.

The Whiteboard

But the thing I want to tell you about is the whiteboard.

At the end of your thirty days, they set up a whiteboard in the room. And every person you had met during your time there — every patient, every counselor, every person who had sat across from you at breakfast or cried next to you in group or walked the grounds with you at night — had a chance to write something on it. Something they had seen in you. Something they had learned about you during your time together.

I stood in the back of the room and watched them write.

I did not expect what happened next.

The board filled up. It filled up with words I had not heard anyone use to describe me in years. Words I had stopped believing applied to me. Words that felt like they belonged to someone else — someone I used to be, or someone I had never quite managed to become.

I stood there and I read every single word.

And I cried. Not because the words were kind, though they were. I cried because I had forgotten all of them. Every single one. I had been in a relationship that had spent years telling me, in a hundred different ways, that none of those things were true. And I had believed it. I had believed it so completely that I had stopped being able to see myself at all.

Thirty people who had known me for thirty days could see it. I could not.

What Abuse Does to the Mirror

This is what I want you to understand, if you are reading this and any part of it sounds familiar.

Abuse — emotional abuse, the kind that does not leave marks you can photograph — works by replacing your internal mirror with someone else's. It is gradual. It is patient. It does not happen in a single conversation or a single incident. It happens over months and years of being told, directly or indirectly, that your perception is wrong. That your feelings are too much. That your needs are unreasonable. That the version of yourself you believe in is not the real one.

And eventually, you stop trusting your own reflection. You start seeing yourself only through the eyes of the person who has been distorting the image. And when that image is small and broken and unworthy, you begin to believe that is the truth.

Recovery — real recovery — is not just about stopping the drinking. It is about getting your mirror back. It is about learning, slowly and with enormous effort, to trust your own perception again. To believe that what you see when you look at yourself might actually be real.

The whiteboard was the beginning of that for me.

My first ever sobriety chip. This milestone meant more than you know. I couldn't have done it without the people at Harmony Place.

What I Carry

I took a photo of that whiteboard before I left.

I have looked at it more times than I can count. On the days when the old voice comes back — and it does come back, even now, even years later — I look at that photo. I read the words. I try to remember that thirty people who had no reason to lie to me saw all of those things in thirty days.

I try to remember that the person who told me none of it was true was the one who was wrong.

Self-esteem, once it has been taken from you, does not return all at once. It comes back in pieces. In moments. In the slow accumulation of evidence that you are, in fact, the person you used to believe you were. It comes back in therapy, and in sobriety, and in the faces of people who love you without condition. It comes back when you stop spending your energy managing someone else's reality and start living in your own.

It is coming back. Slowly. Imperfectly. But it is coming back.

And I want you to know — if you are somewhere in the middle of this, if you are in the place I was in when I walked through those doors — that it does come back. That the things written on that whiteboard are still true. That they were always true.

You just forgot. And forgetting is not the same as losing.

Doing things I wouldn't have done while drinking. Ballet class. I made a complete ass out of myself but f#$k it. YOLO.

Kristen Shepherd is the editor of GenXFemHealth and the author of the "If I Could Help One Person" sobriety memoir series.