Pocket principles: Self-esteem

 

Self-esteem can be defined simplistically as “feeling ok about oneself without having to prove anything to oneself or to anyone else.” Or more vaguely and reconditely as Alice Miller did: being comfortable with, accepting of all of one’s feelings. It can’t be defined as Nathaniel Branden, “the father of the self-esteem movement,” defined it: a sense of personal efficacy – feeling competent in the world. That can’t work, because feeling competent assumes being competent (otherwise the person is delusional), and competency suggests activity extrinsic to the self. Children who are loved, valued, accepted for who they are by their parents will have self-esteem. They will feel ok in their own skin, “in their bones,” will in a way feel complete, “arrived.” They’ll be comfortable in social settings, won’t be intimidated by – or feel less than – bullies or powerful adults. They may experience fear in dangerous situations, but they won’t have anxiety: Anxiety comes when a child can’t unload his fear and confusion to a caring parent and becomes a repository of pent-up apprehension, like breathing in and not being allowed to breathe out.

The bad – or deterministic – news is that if the child isn’t given, or can’t receive, the gifts of love and respect and full acceptance in her early formative years, she won’t develop self-esteem and will never have it. This is her fate because the suppression and repression of feelings is the loss of self. With no self, there can be no self-esteem. She then must grow, as time passes, a non-self that is an adaptive persona. The only way to prevent this de-evolution would be to immediately, seconds or minutes or maybe a day after the emotional shutting in and shutting down, open up to someone and let the pain flow out. Once time passes, and the persona becomes the person, the real feeling self must remain buried. In his teens he will say: “I don’t know what I want to do after high school; and thirty years later, “I don’t know who I am.”

My sixty-three-year-old client feels “melancholy” because after her retirement she no longer identifies herself as a productive, contributing member of society. It is not enough, she feels, to be just herself, a person who enjoys her life. Good things – her garden, her grandchildren, an old friend – will be pleasurable for a few moments, but they cannot overcome the empty feeling of a self lost sixty years earlier. I want her to feel it’s all right to live, to be a "human being not a human doing," but that would require having compassion for herself, and that would require knowing what she’s feeling compassion for: the hurt, buried child. Few people would want to regress to that depth, return to the beginning of their life and grieve the worst grief possible.

Of course, human beings want to feel good about themselves and unconsciously run away from this critical loss. So they define self-esteem in shallow and magical ways. I can positive- and rational-think my way to feeling good. I can “follow my bliss.” I can accomplish good works. I can love myself and help others. None of these manipulations will touch the core wound.

I suspect that real self-esteem may be so rare that humanity will always need second-tier definitions of it. It's not a real self that has conjured them.