I'm afraid I'm not a therapist, but here's what mine tells me.
My self-esteem/self-compassion problems are essentially caused by a few beliefs about myself and the world that are flatly wrong. I grew up "profoundly gifted" in a rural area, and as a result was basically socialized to believe that my entire identity and value as a person hinged on how intelligent I was perceived to be (belief #1). This resulted in my always being on high alert, even when it didn't outwardly look like it - I had to perform, had to show off, had to be right or close to it, all the time (belief #2). I couldn't _ever_ give myself a break or show myself basic self-compassion for fear that it would "go to my head" and make me an arrogant prick (belief #3).
More recently, the more I learned about the world and its atrocities, the more I felt like they were things that I couldn't look away from or stop thinking about, even to take care of myself, or I was functionally no different from an evil or amoral person (belief #4). But of course I was too busy having anxiety attacks every time I thought about it to actually _do_ anything about those things, so...
There's more where this came from, but I think you get the idea.
I've had to work on unlearning these beliefs through a lot of CBT and ACT (linked in my previous post). The basic practice is something you can do by yourself - there are plenty of personal workbooks for it, which will be turned up by a Google search for "cbt/act therapy workbook." See also [1], [2].
The specific problem I was having, outlined in my earlier post, is that I had become so attached to these beliefs that I believed them on a sub-thought level even as I fully intellectually understood that they were wrong and unhelpful. Thus, when they started to get to me I would _know_ that they were adversely affecting me, but when I reached out to people I just kept finding different "rationalizations"/ways to express the same thing. We usually ended up arguing in circles.
I think the aforementioned dissociative episode I had was induced by playing this game continuously with my partner and another very good friend of mine over a prolonged period, more than a therapy session would typically last. I don't really know what happened, but what I experienced is described pretty well in [3]. My brain stopped processing what I was seeing or relaying my thoughts to my body. It would've been scary had I been able to feel anything, but I came out of it more able to separate myself from my thoughts, which is key.
A mindfulness practice may also help you with doing the above. See [4].
To be able to move on, I also had to construct an identity that wasn't defined by these things, which I did/am doing by further exploring and asserting my gender. This is beyond the scope of this post, and anyway my experience in this area is probably not applicable to you unless you're trans.
