Self Esteem Part One
A Definition Of Self-Esteem
We who are teachers seek to fan a spark in those we work with — that innate sense of self-worth that presumably is our human birth right. But that spark is only the anteroom to self-esteem. If we are to do justice to those we work with, we need to help them develop that sense of self-worth into the full experience of self-esteem.
Self-esteem is the experience that we are appropriate to life and to the requirements of life. More specifically, self-esteem is . . .
1. Confidence in our ability to think and to cope with the challenges of life.
2. Confidence in our right to be happy, the feeling of being worthy, deserving, entitled to assert our needs and wants and to enjoy the fruits of our efforts.
A Powerful Human Need
Self-esteem is a powerful human need. It is a basic human need that makes an essential contribution to the life process; it is indispensable to normal and healthy development; it has survival value.
Lacking positive self-esteem, our psychological growth is stunted. Positive self-esteem operates as, in effect, the immune system of consciousness, providing resistance, strength, and a capacity for regeneration. When self-esteem is low, our resilience in the face of life’s adversities is diminished. We crumble before vicissitudes that a healthier sense of self could vanquish. We tend to be more influenced by the desire to avoid pain than to experience joy. Negatives have more power over us than positives.
Complex Factors Determine Our Self-Esteem
I do not wish to imply that how our parents treat us determines the level of our self-esteem. The matter is more complex than that. We have a decisive role of our own to play. The notion that we are merely pawns shaped and determined by our environment cannot be supported scientifically or philosophically. We are causal agents in our own right; active contestants in the drama of our lives; originators and not merely reactors or responders.
Clearly, however, the family environment can have a profound impact for good or for ill. Parents can nurture self-trust and self-respect or place appalling roadblocks in the way of learning such attitudes. They can convey that they believe in their child’s competence and goodness or they can
convey the opposite. They can create an environment in which the child feels safe and secure or they can create an environment of terror. They can support the emergence of healthy self-esteem or they can do everything conceivable to subvert it.
Obstacles To The Growth Of Self-Esteem
Parents throw up severe obstacles to the growth of a child’s self-esteem when they . .
• Convey that the child is not “enough.”• Chastise the child for expressing “unacceptable” feelings.
• Ridicule or humiliate the child.
• Convey that the child’s thoughts or feelings have no value or importance.
• Attempt to control the child by shame or guilt.
• Over-protect the child and consequently obstruct normal learning and increasing self-reliance.
• Raise a child with no rules at all, and thus no supporting structure, or else rules that are contradictory, bewildering, undiscussable, and oppressive, in either case inhibiting normal growth.
• Deny a child’s perception of reality and implicitly encourage the child to doubt his or her mind.
• Treat evident facts as unreal, thus shaking the child’s sense of rationality — for example, when an alcoholic father stumbles to the dinner table, misses the chair, and falls to the floor as the mother goes on eating or talking as if nothing had happened.
• Terrorize a child with physical violence or the threat of it, thus instilling acute fear as an enduring characteristic at the child’s core.
• Treat a child as a sexual object.
• Teach that the child is bad, unworthy, or sinful by nature.
Today millions of men and women who have come out of such childhood experiences are searching for ways to heal their wounds. They recognize that they have entered adult life with a liability — a deficit of self-esteem. Whatever words they use to describe the problem, they know they suffer from some nameless sense of not being “enough,” or some haunting emotion of shame or guilt, or a generalized self-distrust, or a diffusive feeling of unworthiness. They sense their lack even if they do not know what precisely self-esteem is, let alone how to nurture and strengthen it within themselves.
Addiction And Self-Esteem
These observations help us to understand addictions.
When we become addicted to alcohol or drugs or destructive relationships, the unconscious intention is invariably to ameliorate anxiety and pain. What we become addicted to are tranquilizers and anodynes. The “enemies” we are trying to escape are fear and pain. When the means we have chosen do not work and make our problems worse, we are driven to take more and more of the poison that is killing us.
Addicts are not less fearful than other human beings, they are more fearful. Their pain is not milder, it is more severe. We cannot drink or drug our way into self-esteem anymore than wecan buy happiness with toxic relationships. We do not attain self-esteem by practices that evoke self-hatred.
If we do not believe in ourselves — neither in our efficacy nor in our goodness — the universe is a frightening place.
Valuing Ourselves
This does not mean that we are necessarily incapable of achieving any real values. Some of us may have the talent and drive to achieve a great deal, in spite of a poor self-concept — like the highly productive workaholic who is driven to prove his worth to, say, a father who predicted he would amount to nothing. But it does mean that we will be less effective — less creative — than we have the power to be; and it means that we will be crippled in our ability to find joy in our achievements. Nothing we do will ever feel like “enough.”
If we do have realistic confidence in our mind and value, if we feel secure within ourselves, we tend to experience the world as open to us and to respond appropriately to challenges and opportunities. Self-esteem empowers, energizes, motivates. It inspires us to achieve and allows us
to take pleasure and pride in our achievements. It allows us to experience satisfaction.
In their enthusiasm, some writers today seem to suggest that a healthy sense of self-value is all we need to assure happiness and success. The matter is more complex than that.
We have more than one need, and there is no single solution to all the problems of our existence. A well developed sense of self is a necessary condition of our well-being but not a sufficient condition. Its presence does not guarantee fulfillment, but its lack guarantees some measure of anxiety, frustration, despair.
Self-esteem proclaims itself as a need by virtue of the fact that its (relative) absence impairs our ability to function. This is why we say it has survival value.
And never more so than today. We have reached a moment in history when self-esteem, which has always been a supremely important psychological need, has also become a supremely important economic need — an attribute imperative for adaptiveness to an increasingly complex, challenging, and competitive world.
Psychological Resources For The Future
The shift from a manufacturing society to an information society, the shift from physical labour to mind-work as the dominant employee activity, and the emergence of a global economy characterized by rapid change, accelerating scientific and technological breakthroughs, and an
unprecedented level of competitiveness, create demands for higher levels of education and training than were required of previous generations. Everyone acquainted with business culture knows this. But what is not equally understood is that these developments also create new demands on our psychological resources.
Specifically, these developments ask for a greater capacity for innovation, self-management, personal responsibility, and self-direction. This is asked not just “at the top,” but at every levelof a business enterprise, from senior management to first-line supervisors and even to entry-level personnel.
A modern business can no longer be run by a few people who think and a great many people who do what they are told (the traditional military, command-and-control model). Today organizations need not only an unprecedentedly higher level of knowledge and skill among all those who
participate, but also a higher level of personal autonomy, self-reliance, self-trust, and the capacity to exercise initiative — in a word, self-esteem. This means that people possessing a decent level of self-esteem are now needed economically in large numbers. Historically this is a new phenomenon.
Intelligent Choices Require Self-Esteem
In a world where there are more choices and options than ever before, and frontiers of limitless possibilities face us in whatever direction we look, we require a higher level of personal autonomy. This means a greater need to exercise independent judgment, to cultivate our own resources, and to take responsibility for the choices, values, and actions that shape our lives; a greater need for self-trust and self-reliance; a greater need for a reality-based belief in ourselves.
The greater the number of choices and decisions we need to make at a conscious level, the more urgent our need for self-esteem.
To the extent that we are confident in the efficacy of our minds — confident of our ability to think, learn, understand — we tend to persevere when faced with difficult or complex challenges. Persevering, we tend to succeed more often than we fail, thus confirming and reinforcing our sense of efficacy. To the extent that we doubt the efficacy of our minds and lack confidence in our
thinking, we tend not to persevere but to give up. Giving up, we fail more often than we succeed, thus confirming and reinforcing our negative self-assessment.
High self-esteem seeks the stimulation of demanding goals, and reaching demanding goals nurtures good self-esteem. Low self-esteem seeks the safety of the familiar and undemanding, and confining oneself to the familiar and undemanding serves to weaken self-esteem.
The higher our self-esteem, the better equipped we are to cope with adversity in our careers or in our personal lives, the quicker we are to pick ourselves up after a fall, the more energy we have to begin anew.
The higher our self-esteem, the more ambitious we tend to be, not necessarily in a career or financial sense, but in terms of what we hope to experience in life — emotionally, creatively, spiritually. The lower our self-esteem, the less we aspire to, and the less we are likely to achieve.
Either path tends to be self-reinforcing and self perpetuating.
The higher our self-esteem, the more disposed we are to form nourishing rather than toxic relationships. Like is drawn to like, health is attracted to health, and vitality and expansiveness in others are naturally more appealing to people of good self-esteem than are emptiness and dependency.
Attraction To Those Whose Self-Esteem Level Matches Our Own
An important principle of human relationships is that we tend to feel most comfortable, most “at home,” with people whose self-esteem level resembles our own. High self-esteem individuals tend
to be drawn to high self-esteem individuals. Medium self-esteem individuals are typically attracted to medium self-esteem individuals. Low self-esteem seeks low self-esteem in others. The most disastrous relationships are those between two persons both of whom think poorly of themselves; the union of two abysses does not produce a height.
I am thinking of a woman I once talked with who grew up feeling she was “bad” and undeserving of kindness, respect or happiness. Predictably, she married a man who “knew” he was unlovable and felt consumed by self-hatred. He protected himself by being cruel to others before they could
be cruel to him. She did not complain about his abuse, since she “knew” that abuse was her destiny.
He was not surprised by her increasing withdrawal and remoteness from him, since he “knew” no one could ever love him. They had spent twenty years of torture together, “proving” how right they were about themselves and about life. When I commented to the wife that she had not known much happiness, she looked at me astonished and said, “Are people ever really happy?”
The higher our self-esteem, the more inclined we are to treat others with respect, benevolence, good will, and fairness — since we do not tend to perceive them as a threat, and since self-respect is the foundation of respect for others.
The Time-Bomb Of Poor Self-Esteem
While an inadequate self-esteem can severely limit an individuals aspirations and accomplishments, the consequences of the problem need not be so obvious. Sometimes the consequences show up in more indirect ways. The time-bomb of a poor self-concept may tick silently for years while an individual, driven by a passion for success and exercising genuine ability, may rise higher and higher in his profession. Then, without real necessity, he starts cutting corners, morally and/or legally, in his eagerness to provide more lavish demonstrations of his mastery. Then he commits more flagrant offenses still, telling himself that he is “beyond good and evil” as if challenging the fates to bring him down. Only at the end, when his life and career explode in disgrace and ruin, can we see for how many years he has been moving relentlessly toward the final act of an unconscious life script he may have begun writing at the age of three.
Self-Efficacy And Self-Respect
Self-esteem has two interrelated aspects:
1. A sense of personal efficacy (self-efficacy)
2. A sense of personal worth (self-respect).
As a fully realized psychological experience, it is the integrated sum of these two aspects.
Self-efficacy means confidence in the functioning of my mind, in my ability to think, in the processes by which I judge, choose, decide; confidence in my ability to understand the facts of reality that fall within the sphere of my interests and needs; cognitive self-trust; cognitive self
reliance.
Self-respect means assurance of my value; an affirmative attitude toward my right to live and to be happy; comfort in appropriately asserting my thoughts, wants, and needs; the feeling that joy is my natural birth right.
Consider that if an individual felt inadequate to face the challenges of life, if an individual lacked fundamental self trust, confidence in his or her mind, we would recognize the presence of a self-esteem deficiency, no matter what other assets he or she possessed. Or if an individual lacked a basic sense of self-respect, felt unworthy or undeserving of the love or respect of others, unentitled to happiness, fearful of asserting thoughts, wants, or needs — again we would recognize a self-esteem deficiency, no matter what other positive attributes he or she exhibited.
The Dual Pillars Of Self-Esteem
Self-efficacy and self-respect are the dual pillars of healthy self-esteem. Lacking either one, self-esteem is impaired. They are the defining characteristics of the term because of their fundamentality. They represent not derivative or secondary meanings of self-esteem but its essence.
The experience of self-efficacy generates the sense of control over one’s life that we associate with psychological well-being, the sense of being at the vital centre of one’s existence — as contrasted with being a passive spectator and a victim of events.
The experience of self-respect makes possible a benevolent, non-neurotic sense of community with other individuals, the fellowship of independence and mutual regard — as contrasted with either alienated estrangement from the human race, on the one hand, or mindless submergence into the tribe, on the other.
Within a given person, there will be inevitable fluctuations in self-esteem levels, much as there are fluctuations in all psychological states. We need to think in terms of a persons average level of self-esteem.
Our Choices Affect Our Self-Esteem
The choices we make concerning the operations of our consciousness have enormous
ramifications for our lives in general and our self-esteem in particular. Consider the impact on our
lives and on our sense of self entailed by the following options:
- Focusing versus nonfocusing.
- Thinking versus nonthinking.
- Awareness versus unawareness.
- Clarity versus obscurity or vagueness.
- Respect for reality versus avoidance of reality.
- Respect for facts versus indifference to facts.
- Respect for truth versus rejection of truth.
- Perseverance in the effort to understand versus abandonment of the effort.
- Loyalty in action to our professed convictions versus disloyalty — the issue of integrity.
- Honesty with self versus dishonesty.
- Self-confrontation versus self-avoidance.
- Receptivity to new knowledge versus closed-mindedness.
- Willingness to see and correct errors versus perseverance in error.
- Concern with congruence versus disregard of contradictions.
- Reason versus irrationalism; respect for logic, consistency, coherence, and evidence versus disregard or defiance of.
- Loyalty to the responsibility of consciousness versus betrayal of that responsibility.
If one wishes to understand the foundations of genuine self-esteem, this list is a good place to begin. No one could seriously suggest that our sense of our competence to cope with the challenge of life or our sense of our goodness could remain unaffected, over time, by the pattern of our choices in regard to the above options.
Consciousness, Responsibility, Moral Choices
The point is not that our self-esteem “should” be affected by the choices we make, but rather that by our natures it must be affected. If we develop habit patterns that cripple or incapacitate us for effective functioning, and that cause us to distrust ourselves, it would be irrational to suggest that we “should” go on feeling just as efficacious and worthy as we would feel if our choices had been better. This would imply that our actions have or should have nothing to do with how we feel about ourselves. It is one thing to caution against identifying oneself with a particular behaviour; it is another to assert that there should be no connection between self-assessment and behaviour. A disservice is done to people if they are offered “feel good” notions of self-esteem that divorce it from questions of consciousness, responsibility, or moral choice. It is the fact that we have choices such as I have described, that we are confronted by options encountered nowhere else in nature, that we are the one species able to betray and act against our
means of survival, that creates our need for self-esteem — which is the need to know that we are functioning as our life and well-being require.
Supporting Self-Esteem
We cannot work on self-esteem directly, neither our own nor anyone else’s, because self-esteem is a consequence — a product of internally generated practices — such as that of living consciously, responsibly, purposefully, and with integrity. If we understand what those practices are, we can commit to initiating them within ourselves and to dealing with others in such a way as to facilitate or encourage them to do likewise. To encourage self-esteem in the family, the school, or the workplace, for instance, is to create an environment that supports and reinforces the practices that strengthen self-esteem.