Temporal Self Appraisal Theory posits that people engage in downward comparisons to their past selves, even when no true improvement has occurred, in order to maintain positive self-regard in the present (Wilson & Ross, 2001). Nevertheless, little research has been conducted on the role of past selves in self-esteem maintenance. We hypothesized people would denigrate past selves more following a self-esteem threat, and that this process would be facilitated by abstraction. People perceive unfavorable past selves as more psychologically distant (Ross & Wilson, 2002) and abstraction promotes psychological distance (Trope & Liberman, 2010). Participants (N = 113) were randomly assigned to an intelligence threat manipulation. They then completed a packet including the State Self-Esteem Scale (Heatherton & Polivy, 1991), an open-ended writing about a memory of their past self, ratings of how well a list of traits described their past self, and the Behavior Indentification Form (BIF; Vallacher & Wegner, 1989) as a measure of their construal level. Controlling for likeability ratings, those in the threat condition denigrated their past selves more, rating them as less knowledgeable, b= -.43, t(109)= -2.3, p= .023. Participants in the control condition displayed greater abstraction on the BIF the higher their self-esteem was; while high self-esteem in the threat condition led to lower levels of abstraction, b= -.15, t(109)= -2.2, p= .028. These findings suggest that while people do denigrate their past selves more following threats to their self-esteem, maintenance strategies leading to high self-esteem following a threat are associated with more concrete construal.