When I propose, without explanation, that clients experiment with the following stem, they typically respond with such endings as these, which speak for themselves.
If I were to admit how much I secretly like myself—
I couldn’t pretend to be helpless anymore.
I would no longer be my parents’ child.
My family would hate me. I’d be on my own.
I’d have to do something with my life.
I’d realize that the way I’m living is ridiculous.
I’d have more energy.
I’d take more risks.
I’d want more out of life.
I wouldn’t put up with being treated badly.
I’d have more ambition.
I’d have to change.
I’d have to be more vulnerable.
I’d be scared.
I’d be free.
As adults, there are many additional payoffs to self-blame. People can tell themselves that they have higher standards than others. They can manipulate others into feeling sorry for them and assuring them that they are better than they think. They can send out the signal (to themselves as well as to others) “Expect nothing of me—I’m inadequate.” They can remain where they are, stuck, paralyzed, passive, unresponsible, and unresponsive to the challenges of life.
Just as one of the greatest gifts a parent can give a child is projection of a belief in the child’s competence and worth, so one of the greatest gifts we can often give another human being is not to buy at face value his or her negative self-esteem. When we deal with human beings as if we expect them to be rational, we increase the probability that they will be honest. And the same principle holds true for self-responsibility or any other virtue we wish to encourage. If, on the other hand, we deal with people as if we expect the worst, we tend to get it.
This principle has been most intensively studied in the context of parent-child and teacher-student relationships. But it applies to all human encounters. Virtually everything discussed in this chapter describes principles that apply to all caring relationships. I might go farther and say to all truly human relationships.
One of the characteristics of good relationships—love relationships or friendships—is that they have a mutually enhancing effect on feelings of self-worth.
But sometimes people confuse the desire to feel seen, visible, understood, or appreciated with the desire to be “approved of” or “validated.” These are not quite the same thing. The desire to be validated, confirmed, approved of, in our being and behavior, is normal. I call such a desire irrational or pathological only when it gains such ascendancy in our hierarchy of values that we will sacrifice honesty and integrity in order to achieve it, in which case we clearly suffer from poor self-esteem.
I want to emphasize that the desire for visibility is not an expression of a weak or uncertain ego or of low self-esteem. On the contrary, the lower our self-esteem, the more we feel (at least in part) the need to hide, and the more ambivalent our feelings toward visibility are likely to be—we both long for and are terrified by it. The more we take pride in who we are, the more transparent we are willing to be. I might also add: the more transparent we are eager to be.
One of the characteristics of a self-esteem deficiency is an excessive preoccupation with gaining the approval and avoiding the disapproval of others, a hunger for validation and support at every moment of our existence. Some people dream of finding this validation and support in “love.” But because the problem is essentially internal, because the person does not believe in him- or herself, no outside source can ever satisfy this hunger, except momentarily. The hunger is not for visibility; it is for self-esteem. And this cannot be supplied by others.
To the extent that we have successfully evolved toward good self-esteem, we hope and expect that others will perceive our value, not create it. We want others to see us as we actually are—even to help us see ourselves more clearly—but not to invent us out of their own fantasies. Even if the other person’s fantasies concerning us are complimentary, we feel invisible, unseen; we feel unreal to the person who may be professing to adore us. In the responses of others, we long for appropriateness.
The unfortunate truth is that most human beings, from childhood on, are the recipients of many inappropriate responses. They are the survivors of many occasions when they were transparently lied to, when their person was not respected, their dignity not acknowledged, their thoughts met with indifference, their feelings denied or condemned. And because this state of affairs is so widespread, when we meet a person of high self-esteem we are probably looking at a heroic attainment. We are probably looking at a person who knows how to honor the self, even without support.
Some psychologists look for the “causes” of a person’s behavior exclusively in the person’s history, believing that there are a number of people in our past who made us what we are today. If they see a person with good self-esteem, they want to know who “made” him or her that way. And if they see a person with poor self-esteem, they want to know who is responsible, since they assume it is not the person they are looking at. They overlook that we are not merely passive reactors but active contestants in the drama of our lives.
Which leads me to the story with which I would like to conclude this chapter.
Once upon a time there were two brothers who aroused the interest of a psychologist. One brother was an alcoholic, while the other hardly touched liquor at all. The psychologist, curious as to the “causes” of this difference, undertook to interview each man separately.
To the alcoholic he said, “You’ve been an alcoholic for most of your adult life. Why do you suppose that is?” The man responded, “That’s easy to explain. You see, my father was an alcoholic. You might say I learned to drink at my father’s knee.”
To the man who hardly touched liquor at all the psychologist said, “You don’t like to drink. How come?” The man responded, “That’s easy to explain. You see, my father was an alcoholic. You might say I learned very early in life that alcohol can be poison.”
* * *
Ultimately, we are responsible for the life decisions we make. We are responsible for the conclusions we draw from our experience. The kind of decisions and conclusions we arrive at inevitably reflect the mental operations through which we process the events of our life. Those mental operations are the single most decisive factor to our level of self-esteem. Let us turn, therefore, to the internal sources of self-appraisal.
*Haim Ginott also stresses the need for limits if the child is to develop healthily and self-confidently, as contrasted with those psychologists who believe that the child’s well-being is best served by unrestricted permissiveness.28,29,30 Research does not support this latter assumption. Limits, provided they are reasonable, give the child a much-needed sense of security and stability, as Coopersmith’s study shows.
*I described some of my experiences in working with a somewhat shorter version of this list in Breaking Free. While Breaking Free does not in any important way reflect my approach to psychotherapy as I practice it today or have practiced it for some years past, the information generated by working with the list of questions continues to be valuable and is certainly supported by the research and findings of others.
*The sentence-completion technique is described in some detail in The Romantic Love Question & Answer Book and in If You Could Hear What I Cannot Say.
4
Generating Positive Self-Esteem
Since the need for self-esteem arises from the fact that the function of our consciousness is volitional, it follows that we should judge ourselves by that which is in our volitional control—for example, our rationality, honesty, integrity. To judge ourselves by that which is beyond our volitional control—for example, that which depends on the will and choices of others—is subversive to healthy self-esteem.
Recognizing that self-esteem pertains to the issue of our fundamental appropriateness to life and, therefore, to our mental operatio
ns, we can readily appreciate the error of measuring our worth by such standards as our popularity, influence, affluence, material possessions, or good looks.
Since we are social beings, some measure of esteem from others is necessary; but to tie our self-assessment to the good opinion of others is to place ourselves at their mercy in the most humiliating way. And what are we to do when the persons whose esteem we desire have different expectations, so that to gain the approval of one of our significant others is to risk the disapproval of another?
Or again, we may take pleasure in an attractive appearance, but to tie our self-esteem to our appearance is to be in growing terror with every passing year as the marks of age inevitably advance upon us. And if our good looks are far superior to our behavior, they will hardly heal the psychic wounds inflicted by dishonesty, irresponsibility, or irrationality.
In choosing to focus on and emphasize the volitional function of consciousness, I have no wish to ignore or deny the powerful role of the subconscious, by which I mean the wide range of mental processes and contents that lie outside awareness. Clearly the self includes more than that of which we are consciously aware, and we are influenced in any number of ways by factors operating beneath explicit awareness. This is one of the reasons why our free will is not unlimited. Nonetheless, our psychological freedom is a powerful force within our psyche. If conscious intentions and goals counted for nothing, we would all be existentially and intellectually impotent. Admittedly, our freedom exists within limits. Admittedly, we can be under the sway of forces we do not recognize or understand. But in the possibility of self-awareness and self-monitoring lies the possibility of change and evolution—and some reasonable measure of control over our existence.
A commitment to awareness—the will to understand—is the central pillar of positive self-esteem.
The potential range of our awareness depends on the extent of our intelligence, on the breadth of our abstract capacity. But the principle of commitment to awareness, or the will to understand, remains the same on all levels of intelligence. It entails the behavior of seeking to integrate, to the best of our knowledge and ability, that which enters our mental field—as well as the effort to keep expanding that field.
The beginning of self-assertion is the assertion of consciousness itself, the act of seeing and of seeking to grasp that which we see, of hearing and of seeking to grasp that which we hear—of responding to life actively rather than passively. This is the foundation of honoring the self.
We have already seen that many children undergo experiences that place enormous obstacles in the way of the healthy development of this attitude. A child may find the world of parents and other adults incomprehensible and threatening. The self is not nurtured but attacked. After a number of unsuccessful attempts to understand adult policies, statements, and behavior, some children give up—and take the blame for their feelings of helplessness. Often they sense, miserably, desperately, and inarticulately, that there is something terribly wrong—with their elders, or with themselves, or with something. What they often come to feel is: “I’ll never understand people; I’ll never be able to do what they expect of me; I don’t know what’s right or wrong, and I’m never going to know.”
The child who continues to struggle to make sense out of the world and the people in it, however, is developing a powerful source of strength, no matter what the anguish or bewilderment experienced. Caught in a particularly cruel, frustrating, and irrational environment, he or she will doubtless feel alienated from many of the people in the immediately surrounding world, and legitimately so. But the child will not feel alienated from reality, will not feel, at the deepest level, incompetent to live—or at least he or she has a relatively good chance to avoid this fate.
The growing individual who retains a commitment to awareness learns subjects, acquires skills, accomplishes tasks—reaches goals. And of course these successes validate and reinforce the choice to think. The sense of being appropriate to life feels natural.
A commitment to awareness, then—a commitment to thinking as a way of life—is both a source and an expression of positive self-esteem. But often we associate positive self-esteem only with the final result—with knowledge, success, the admiration and appreciation of others—and miss the cause: all the choices that, cumulatively, add up to what we call a commitment to awareness, the will to understand. Thus we can deceive ourselves about the actual sources of positive self-esteem.
The concept of the will to be efficacious is an extension of the will to understand. It places its emphasis on the aspect of perseverance in the face of difficulties: continuing to seek understanding when understanding does not come easily, pursuing the mastery of a skill or the solution to a problem in the face of defeats, maintaining a commitment to goals while encountering many obstacles along the way. The will to be efficacious is the refusal to identify our ego or self with momentary feelings of helplessness and defeat.
All of us know times of bewilderment, despair, and a painful sense of impotence or inadequacy. The question is, Do we allow such moments to define us?
I remember as a child being enormously bewildered by the behavior of adults, by what I perceived as the strangeness and superficiality of their values, by the lack of congruence between statements and feelings, by an anxiety that seemed to saturate much of the atmosphere around me, and by the overwhelming sense that often the adults did not know what they were doing, that they were lost and helpless while pretending to be in control. This experience was painful and at times frightening. I desperately wanted to understand why human beings behaved as they did. Somewhere in my mind, at quite a young age, there must have been the conviction that knowledge is power, safety, security, and serenity. Doubtless this conviction played a significant role in my choice of profession.
Many years ago I witnessed an encounter between two colleagues, a psychologist and a psychiatrist, that was important for my own understanding of the issue I am discussing. The two men were first cousins and had grown up in similar environments. They shared many painful memories of the behavior of their elders and other relatives. “You survived all that in a way I didn’t,” the psychiatrist said to the psychologist. “They didn’t get to you. I always wondered what made you persevere. Because I didn’t. I gave up in some way.”
The psychologist answered, “I do recall feeling quite overwhelmed many times. But somewhere deep in my body was a voice saying, ‘Don’t give up. Hang on.’ Hang on to staying conscious, I suppose. Hang on to trying to understand. Don’t give up the conviction that it’s possible to be in control of your life. Obviously those weren’t the words I used as a child, but that was the meaning. That’s what I clung to.”
“The will to be efficacious,” I volunteered impulsively. The will to be efficacious—here was a concept that helped me explain something I had observed in my clients and students, the principle to help me understand the difference between those who felt fundamentally defeated by life and those who did not.
The will to be efficacious—the refusal of a human consciousness to accept helplessness as its permanent and unalterable condition.
It is impressive to see a person who has been battered by life in many ways, who is torn by a variety of unsolved problems, who may be alienated from many aspects of the self—and yet who is still fighting, still struggling, still striving to find the path to a fulfilling existence, moved by the wisdom, of knowing, “I am more than my problems.”
Having the will to be efficacious does not mean that we deny or disown feelings of inefficacy when they arise; it means that we do not accept them as permanent. We can feel temporarily helpless without defining our essence as helplessness. We can feel temporarily defeated without defining our essence as failure. We can allow ourselves to feel temporarily hopeless, overwhelmed, while preserving the knowledge that after a rest, we will pick up the pieces as best we can and start moving forward again. Our vision of our life extends beyond the feelings of the moment. Our concept of
self can rise above today’s adversity. This is one of the forms of heroism possible to a volitional consciousness.
At this point a question might arise: Can one be of modest intelligence and still enjoy good self-esteem?
No study has ever suggested that good self-esteem correlates with IQ. And this is not surprising. Self-esteem is a function, not of our native endowment, but of our manner of using our consciousness—the choices we make concerning awareness, the honesty of our relationship to reality, the level of our personal integrity.
To repeat, self-esteem is neither competitive nor comparative. Its context is always the individuals relationship to self and to the choices of self. A person of high intelligence and high self-esteem does not feel more appropriate to life or more worthy of happiness than a person of high self-esteem and more modest intelligence.
An analogy may prove helpful. Two persons may be equally healthy and physically fit, but one is stronger than the other; the one who is stronger does not experience a higher level of physical well-being; one can merely do some things the other cannot. Looking at them from the outside, we may say that one enjoys certain advantages over the other. But this does not mean that there is a difference in the internal feeling of wellness and aliveness.
Just as brain endowment is far from the most significant issue with regard to the will to understand and the will to be efficacious, so is it far from the most significant consideration relative to another of the key pillars of healthy self-esteem: independence.
Intellectual independence is implicit in the commitment to awareness or the will to understand. A person cannot think through the mind of another. We can learn from one another, but knowledge entails understanding, not mere repetition or imitation. We can either exercise our own mind or pass on to others the responsibility of knowledge and evaluation and accept their verdicts more or less uncritically. The choice we make is crucial for the way we experience ourselves and for the kind of life we create.
Honoring the Self Page 6
