Someone said that "self" is a scent riding on a breeze. The scent is not the flower, and it is not the essence of the flower, hidden somewhere inside and simply released into the air. Yet, scent is one of those things that distinguishes one flower from the next.

Self is the awareness of subjective experience-Freud's "I" (ego). It is the phenomenal attestation of one's existence, something Descartes approximated in his cogito ergo sum (yet fell short of by making it one's thoughts alone). It is the system of contacts and the agent of growth, but it is more than the sequence of our experiences, as Hume would have had it.

There is something more that distinguishes experience as being "mine" and that persists over time so that one knows what it is like to "be me" or to "not feel like myself."

John Searle, in his book, Mind, A Brief Introduction, claimed that we "…do not just have disordered experiences; rather, all of the experiences I have at any instant are experienced as part of a single, unified conscious field. Furthermore, the continuation of that conscious field throughout time is experienced by the possessor of that conscious field as a continuation of his or her own consciousness."

This unified, organised conscious sense of being, the personal subjective experience of being "me," develops an identity over time. It is the story we tell ourselves about who we are, what kind of person we are, and it is that which allows us to sense at any given time whether or not something is ego syntonic (like me/acceptable to me) or ego dystonic (not like me/not acceptable to me).

Some people do not tell themselves good stories about who they are, how they feel, what they want, and what they have a right to in life. In fact, the nagging negative elements of the stories they tell themselves about these things often produce painful emotions such as shame, social awkwardness and anxiety, and loneliness. These things often lead people to isolate or avoid contact with others, and that exacerbates the negative self-talk.

Sometimes the negative story concerns what a person looks like, so that it leaves a person doubting the shape of his or her body. Or, to be more accurate, it's not that a person doubts; they are positive their body is too much of this and too little of that, too hairy, too blotchy, too flabby, too malnourished, and so on.

Sometimes the negative story concerns how intelligent a person might be. This is often related to performance in school. When asked if they think they are average, above average or below average in intelligence, these people will choose below average even when they score in the superior range on standard measures of intelligence.

Self-esteem is often based on performance – how well we can do something. Sometimes it is based on our internal sense of mastery, the fact THAT we can do something. Self-esteem is also based on the reflection we see of ourselves in the eyes of other people. If, when we talk, others tend to look away, talk over us, ignore what we have to say or such things as that, then we begin to tell ourselves, "There is something boring, unimportant, passive, and inconsequential about me."

It may seem over time that people don't think much of us, so we in turn don't press issues, don't take up too much space with others, and don't put ourselves into situations in which people will, once more, remind us of the negative self-story we have begun telling ourselves.

In all these things however, and especially with regard to one's sense of self worth, what matters is the story we tell ourselves about ourselves, not the story others tell about us. The critical audience in such cases becomes nothing more than the chorus of our own projections.

What do you do when the story you have begun to tell yourself is so negative and debilitating? One of the most powerful and corrective experiences available is a therapeutic relationship in which a person can be seen and known deeply by a trusted and competent psychologist. While this experience is not reserved only for psychotherapy, it is not a commonplace resource to people in the general society – not even commonly available among family members.

It is also not the common experience when seeking counsel from the clergy, and why is that? That is because wherever one often goes to find a corrective experience, one often finds "solutions" designed to fix "it," and the "it" is often experienced to be the person him or herself who is seeking support and understanding and is seen as having something wrong with them that needs to be fixed. It reinforces the negative self-story.

When, though, a person is simply accepted as who he or she is and listened to, it provides a safe "place" in which to deconstruct the elements of negative narratives, which is done over time in a collaborative process with that trusted other person.

The experience of self is a scent riding on the wind; it comes up in a moment out of your presence in some situation, in contact with people in the world. What you tell yourself as this experience emerges can be informed by the unpolluted enjoyment of yourself, or you can edit yourself by minimising and altering the experience itself with the "official" story about who you are. If life has become a product of the latter process, maybe you can get some help to rediscover yourself-to stop and smell your roses.