Most likely translation: The only way to protect my relationship to them, the only way to remain their child and to keep a sense of belonging, is to accept their judgment and allow them to define me.
Or: “I feel guilty over making a success of my life.”
Implication: Not only do I deserve no moral credit for my achievements, but they represent an injustice against all those who, for whatever reason, did not achieve equally. Furthermore, I am in the moral debt of all those who have made less of their lives than I have made of mine.
Most likely translation: If I do not give any indication of feeling proud of what I have accomplished, if I conceal my feelings of pride not only from others but from myself, then perhaps people will forgive me and like me.
Perhaps I should acknowledge that in an age in which egalitarianism appears to be running amok and in which there are some people who believe that inequality of any kind—intelligence, character, wealth, physical attractiveness—implies an injustice on the part of someone toward someone else, certain of the instances of guilt listed above may not be regarded as irrational. Perhaps not only will the above examples resonate to some readers, but some may feel that they represent sound thinking. I will point out that when these attitudes are explored in the context of psychotherapy, what surfaces is not a process of moral reasoning but an uncovering of a deep fear of autonomy, a fear of not “belonging.”
There is a paradox in the acceptance of unearned guilt. Very often the result is the creation of real guilt. If, for example, I am afraid to assert my right to exist or be happy, if I lack the courage to be honest about my pride in my achievements or my pleasure in whatever benefits I enjoy, then somewhere deep within there is the uneasy sense of self-betrayal, a surrender of integrity, a capitulation to values and standards I do not honestly respect. And when my self-esteem is undermined, I may go on to perform actions that conflict with principles I do respect.
Just as learning to accept and express feelings of resentment can cause the disappearance of that which a person calls “guilt,” a similar procedure with feelings of pride and happiness can dispel feelings of self-reproach that have no valid reason for being. Just as courage may be needed in order for a person to be truthful about feelings of resentment, so too may it be needed before he or she can admit to feelings of pride and happiness. In my experience, more courage seems needed for the latter than for the former.
That guilt, rational or irrational, can have a damaging effect on self-esteem is obvious. Before concluding this discussion, therefore, I want to say a little more about the correction of rational, or realistic, guilt.
Let us suppose that I have done something genuinely wrong by my own standards—say, betrayed a secret entrusted to me by a friend, or claimed credit for an achievement not my own, or been financially dishonest with my employer. Allowing for the fact that sometimes there are special circumstances requiring special considerations, there are, generally speaking, fairly specific steps I can take to free myself of the resultant guilt.
The first is to own the fact that it is I who have taken the action.
The second is to acknowledge explicitly to the relevant person or persons the harm I have done and convey my understanding of the consequences of my behavior, assuming that this is possible.
The third is to take any and all actions available to me that might make amends for or minimize the harm I have done.
Finally, as indicated above, I need to make a firm commitment to behave differently in the future.
In the absence of all of these steps, a person may continue to feel guilty over some wrong behavior, even though it happened years ago, even though his or her psychotherapist has offered the assurance that we all make mistakes, and even though the wronged person may have offered forgiveness.
Sometimes we try to make amends without ever really owning and facing what we have done. Or we keep saying, “I’m sorry.” Or we go out of our way to be nice to the person we have wronged without ever dealing with the wrong act itself. Or we ignore the fact that there are specific actions we could take that would undo some of the harm we have done. Sometimes, of course, there is no way to undo the harm, and we must accept that; we cannot do more than is possible. But if we do not do that which is possible and appropriate, guilt tends to linger on.
If we attempt to avoid, disown, and repress our negative feelings, rather than deal with them honestly, all we succeed in doing is driving them underground, and then guilt spreads and diffuses through the entire sense of self. Again, then, we are led back to the importance of awareness—awareness and appropriate action that flows from that awareness.
Action is essential. If we take actions that have damaged our self-esteem, then only by taking the appropriate counteractions can we repair our self-esteem.
I am reminded of a scene in Sir Richard Attenborough’s film Gandhi. * A Hindu comes to Gandhi in great despair and announces, in effect, that he is morally irredeemable because in a fit of rage he has murdered a Muslim child. When asked why he did it, he replies that the Muslims murdered his own child. “I am in hell,” the man tells Gandhi. Gandhi replies that there is a way out of hell. He instructs the man to find a child whose own parents have been killed and to raise that child as his own. Then Gandhi adds that the man should be certain that the child is a Muslim—and should raise the child as a Muslim. To a devastating problem Gandhi thus provides an exquisite response, a metaphor for the process I have been describing.
We deceive ourselves if we imagine that we can redeem our self-esteem merely by suffering—or by telling ourselves that there is no way to redeem our self-esteem. With relatively rare exceptions, there is always a way, and it is our responsibility to find it. The challenge is not to surrender to passivity. Passivity—the abdication of the responsibility of action—is the ultimate enemy.
*I think I should mention that I am not an admirer of Gandhi.
6
Motivation by Fear
To the extent that a person suffers from poor self-esteem, his or her consciousness is ruled by fear: fear of other people, fear of the real or imagined facts about the self that have been evaded or repressed. There is fear of the external world and fear of the internal world.
Feelings of anxiety, insecurity, and self-doubt, the nameless sense of being unfit for reality, inappropriate to the challenges of life, arise inevitably when and if a person fails to attain a reasonably satisfying level of self-confidence and self-respect. Fear thus becomes the central motivating force within the personality.
A man of low self-esteem, for example, becomes a husband and father. He rules his home by evoking fear in his wife and children, using the same fear that motivates him as his chief source of energy and action. He avoids the expressions of pain and unhappiness in their eyes; he avoids their efforts to communicate with him; he becomes sullen and withdrawn when they refuse to obey him. The years go by, and he sees whatever love or respect they once felt for him vanishing. His spirits drop lower and lower. At the age of fifty, he is worn out, depressed, occasionally suicidal in his fantasies. He is the casualty of an uncorrected low self-esteem.
Fear sabotages mind, clarity, efficacy. Fear undermines the sense of personal worth. And actions motivated by fear rather than by confidence are generally the kind of actions that leave an individual feeling diminished in stature.
When a person who suffers from low self-esteem institutes various defenses, or reality-avoiding strategies, to escape facing the feeling of deficiency, distortions are inevitably introduced into thinking. The person’s mental processes are regulated, not by the goal of apprehending reality clearly, but, at best, by the goal of gaining only such knowledge as is compatible with the maintenance of the defenses.
The individual attempting to counterfeit a healthy self-esteem makes perception of reality conditional; certain considerations supersede reality, facts, and truth in their importance. Thereafter, consciousness is pulled, to a significant and dangerous extent, by the strings of wishes and fears—abo
ve all, fears; they become the masters; it is to them, not to reality, that the individual has to adjust. The individual is thus led to perpetuate and strengthen the same kind of antirational, self-defeating policies that occasioned loss of self-confidence and self-respect in the first place.
Consider, for instance, such a person who possesses the near-delusional image of himself as a daring and shrewd operator who is just one deal away from a fortune. He keeps losing money and suffering defeat in one get-rich-quick scheme after another, always blind to the evidence that his plans are impractical, always brushing aside unpleasant facts, always boasting extravagantly, his eyes on nothing but the hypnotically dazzling image of himself as a brilliantly skillful businessman. He moves from one disaster to another, dreading to discover that the vision of himself that feels like a life belt is, in fact, a noose choking him to death.
Or consider a middle-aged woman whose sense of personal value is crucially dependent on the image of herself as a glamorous, youthful beauty and who therefore perceives every wrinkle on her face as a metaphysical threat to her identity. She plunges into a series of sexual relationships with men more than twenty years her junior, rationalizing each relationship as a grand passion, avoiding the characters and motives of the young men involved, repressing the humiliation she feels in the company of her friends. She constantly seeks the reassurance of fresh admiration, running faster and faster from the haunting, relentless pursuer, which is her own emptiness.
There is no way to preserve the clarity of our thinking so long as there are considerations in our mind, chiefly governed by fear, that take precedence over the knowable facts of reality. There is no way to preserve the uncontaminated power of our intelligence so long as we are implicitly committed to the belief that the maintenance of our positive self-esteem (or our pretense at it) requires that certain facts not be faced.
The misery, the frustration, the terror that characterize the psychological state of so many people testify to two facts: that positive self-esteem is a basic need without which we cannot live the life appropriate to us, and that positive self-esteem is intimately related to honesty and integrity. This is why, in psychotherapy or in life, it is so important to create a context in which a person discovers that it is safe to be truthful—truthful about thoughts, feelings, and behavior. Any time we admit a difficult truth, any time we face that which we have been afraid to face, any time we acknowledge, to ourselves or to others, facts the existence of which we have been evading, any time we are willing to tolerate temporary fear or anxiety on the path to better contact with reality, our self-esteem increases.
Anxiety in general is a psychological alarm signal warning of real or imagined danger to the organism. In varying degrees of intensity, the experience of such anxiety is a human condition.
The anxiety of which I am speaking here, generally described as neurotic or pathological anxiety, is of a very special kind. I prefer to call it self-esteem anxiety.
Self-esteem anxiety differs not only from those rationally warranted fears affecting the world at large, such as fear of war or of economic breakdown, but from the ordinary fears of everyday life, such as of standing in the path of an oncoming car. Ordinary fear is a proportionate and localized reaction to a concrete, external, and immediate danger. It differs, also, from objective or normal anxiety in which, like ordinary fear, feelings of apprehension and helplessness are directed toward a specific source, but in which the danger is less immediate and the emotion is more anticipatory, such as the feeling that might overcome a person confronted with signs of some serious illness or might strike parents whose child is in the hands of kidnappers. Fear and objective anxiety vanish when the danger is removed.
On the other hand, self-esteem anxiety is a state of dread experienced in the absence of any actual or impending objectively perceivable threat. Such anxiety does not always appear in an intense or violent form. Many sufferers know it, not as an acute attack of panic or a chronic sense of dread, but only as an occasional uneasiness, a diffuse sense of nervousness and apprehension, coming and going unpredictably, pursuing some incomprehensible pattern of its own—and they are oblivious to how many of their responses are motivated by the desire to escape it.
Whenever a person feels fear, any kind of fear, the response reflects an estimate of some danger, some threat to something valued. In the case of self-esteem anxiety, the thing of value being threatened, ultimately, is the sufferer’s ego.
By ego, to repeat, I mean the unifying center of awareness, the center of consciousness; the ultimate sense of “I”; that which perceives reality, preserves the inner continuity of one’s own existence, and generates a sense of personal identity.
Any threat to a human being’s ego—anything that he or she experiences as a significant danger to the mind’s efficacy and control—is a potential source of self-esteem anxiety. Anything that threatens to collapse the sense of personal worth is a source of self-esteem anxiety.
Certain characteristics link the mildest form of this anxiety to the most extreme. The person feels afraid of nothing in particular and of everything in general. If the fear-struck sufferer tries to offer a rational explanation for the feeling, grasping at some external sign to prove the danger, the resultant explanations are transparently illogical. And the person acts as though reality is the “object” of fear, rather than anything specific or concrete. This is why the anxiety is sometimes described as “free-floating.”
This anxiety is a powerful force in the lives of countless millions of human beings. We cannot understand their behavior if we cannot understand how much of their energy they use to defend against a dread they do not understand. They are the ones who cannot bear to be alone; who cannot live without sleeping pills; who jump at every unexpected sound; who drink too much to calm a nervousness that comes too often; who constantly feel a pressing need to be amusing and to entertain; who flee to too many movies they have no desire to see and to too many gatherings they have no desire to attend; who sacrifice any vestige of independent self-confidence to an excessive concern with what others think of them; who long to be emotional dependents or to be depended upon; who succumb to periodic spells of unaccountable depression; who submerge their existence in the dreary passivity of unchosen routines and unchallenged duties and, as they watch their years slip by, wonder, in occasional spurts of frustrated anguish, what has robbed them of their chance to live; who run from one meaningless sexual affair to another; who seek membership in the kind of collective movements that dissolve personal identity and obviate personal responsibility. This is the vast, anonymous assemblage of men and women who have accepted fear as a built-in, not-to-be-wondered-about fixture of their soul, often dreading even to identify that what they feel is fear or to inquire into the nature of that which they seek to escape.
Such anxiety is a response to an unconsciously perceived threat to self-esteem—to the sense of control, efficacy, and worth. The fear seems to be metaphysical, directed at the universe at large, at existence as such. It implies that “to be” is to be in danger—beyond any ordinary, rational sense in which this may be said to be true. There is a feeling of shapeless but impending disaster, a sense of helplessness. Sometimes there is, in addition, a metaphysical guilt; the person feels wrong as a person, wrong in some fundamental way that is wider than any particular defect he or she can identify.
The threat and the danger lie within. The threatening demons are disowned perceptions, thoughts, memories, feelings or emotions against which the individual has barricaded him- or herself in order to preserve psychological equilibrium.
If self-esteem is the conviction that we are competent to grasp and judge the facts of reality and that we are worthy of happiness, then self-esteem anxiety, in its extreme form, is the torment of a person who is crippled or devastated in this realm, who feels cut off from reality, alienated, powerless.
Behind a fear that may be experienced as existential lies a problem that is internal, cognitive: an inappropriatene
ss in the functioning of consciousness itself.
If a person defaults on the responsibility of awareness, the result is self-distrust: the feeling that his or her mind is not a reliable instrument. Refusing to give thought to issues that require attention, we may evade the fact of the evasion, but we cannot escape the contradiction between knowledge and performance nor the issues themselves. Taking actions contrary to what we believe to be right, we may escape the implications of the actions but not their existence. We are left with self-distrust: the implicit knowledge that mind, judgment, convictions are expendable under emotional pressure.
So much has been written, from the time of Freud23 on, about the relationship between anxiety and defenses against it on the one hand and consequent emotional and behavioral disorders on the other—from phobias to obsessive-compulsive reactions to depression—that I shall not dwell on that aspect of the issue. I am not concerned here with the clinical manifestations of self-esteem anxiety so much as with the consequences for personality, life course, and general level of fulfillment.
The ability to feel anxiety, self-distrust, or guilt is an asset: these are alarm signals warning of danger to our well-being. Such emotions can be painful, even devastating, but if they cause a person to stop, to question his or her policies, perhaps to seek professional help, then they serve a useful purpose in protecting the person’s life. If they are ignored, however, they wreak havoc with the persons life.
The experience of self-esteem anxiety always involves and reflects a particular kind of conflict, and the acute anxiety attack is occasioned by the ego’s confrontation with this conflict.
Suppose, for example, that a man aspires for years to a position for which he secretly feels inadequate. Shortly after he is promoted to that position, he awakens in the middle of the night with queer sensations in his head and a painful tightness in his chest. He experiences a state of violent anxiety. In the days that follow, he begins to express worry and concern about his children’s school grades; then he begins to moan that his house is underinsured; finally he begins to cry that he is going insane. But the fact of his promotion does not enter his conscious mind.
Honoring the Self Page 9
