Lucien’s question (#5)
After reading “The feeling of existence”, my friend Lucien had the following comment:
“I refer to your sentence: If I am ignored, it is désolation – If I am acknowledged, I am never totally reassured that I am completely so. It seems to me that our internal experience has a bias towards not being enough in others’ eyes and lacking existential legitimacy. Also, this bias seems so strong that even validating childhood experiences aren’t an absolute protection against that fear of unworthiness – it doesn’t take much to trigger it. So we settle for layers of protection against that feeling of unworthiness.”
This is a very interesting comment and it seems to me that this issue isn’t tackled very often. People who have what is called* a bad (or low) self-esteem often assume that something is wrong with them, that the default mode should be a good (high) self-esteem. Following this logic, having a bad self-esteem becomes a problem that has to be resolved. Many clients show up in therapy complaining that their bad self-esteem is an obstacle to carrying out their projects.
[* The reason what “is called” is in italics is that self-esteem is a concept. My friends from Radical Behaviorism would say that it is a useless concept. Some Eastern spiritual traditions say that the self doesn’t exist, that it is an illusion. My friends from ACT would say that the conceptual self is only one dimension of the self, and frequently not the most useful… But, for the moment (we’ll be back on this dimension in another post), we will use the construction that good and bad self-esteem exist.]
Feeling we are unworthy is an excruciating experience for most of us, which makes it hard to study on a large-scale level. If you ask overtly a person about its self-esteem, or if you give a questionnaire about it, you have no guarantee that the person will share a shameful secret that would trigger an unpleasant experience. Worst (as to the fact that you want to know), the person may have lost conscious contact with this excruciating feeling of unworthiness. She can’t share something she has lost contact with. What is called a narcissistic strategy is an excellent example of this process: a man compensates its bad self-esteem by presenting himself as an important or prestigious person. It would be quite surprising that he shares its vulnerabilities with you; they are simply too threatening to deal with.
Russ Harris, in The Happiness Trap, (Kindle Book, Chapter 22), advances that most people estimate they are not good enough on one or many dimensions: “unsuccessful, inadequate, unworthy, unlikable, unlovable, incompetent, inferior, unintelligent, unattractive…” He attributes it to an ancestral predisposition of the mind to comparisons with others in order to ensure that we have a place in the clan.
Brené Brown in her well-known appearance on TED points to the corrosive effect of this “I am not enough” on connection with others – we don’t feel we deserve it. She although attributes its origin to the way children are raised.
I know a lot of successful people (some internationally renown). I have very often noticed that it is not an absolute antidote to concerns with self-esteem. For some, there is even issues with what has been called the impostor syndrome: I am successful, but it is a question of time before my flaws become obvious to all – meanwhile, my accomplishments are short-lived relief from this anticipated catastrophe.
My personal conviction is that most of us harbor areas that are experienced as flaws. I have met very few people who, for example, wouldn’t feel hurt or threatened (instead of slightly annoyed) by negative feedbacks on their performance, appearance, opinions, etc. The consequent impetus to argument, to defend, to justify, to counter-attack, to denigrate or to self-denigrate are all indicators that this person has been significantly hit.
Besides, I have always been struck by the mobilization of our primary affective systems like rage or panic by simple words like “you’re stupid”. How is it possible that a survival system be triggered by words that have no immediate concrete effects apart from the fact that they have been shouted?
So, back to Lucien’s question. How come there seems to be a bias towards not being enough in others’ eyes and lacking fundamental existential legitimacy? Russ Harris, in The Happiness Trap, reminds a phylogenetic fact: the primary function of the brain is to ensure we remain alive – the longings for developing a good self-esteem and for being happy are late newcomers in the phylogenetic ladder. Would the easiness in noticing our flaws and in keeping it in some form of self-concept have a higher survival potential? Well, the question deserves consideration, and I’ll leave it to specialists in evolutional psychology. But, as mentioned in the previous paragraph, we can’t discard the observations that self-image issues have been linked through evolution to core affective systems like rage, panic, or joy – there should then be some associations with survival issues.
An important aspect of Lucien’s question refers to The feeling of existence’s post (the second one). Self-image, and consequently self-esteem, has to be constructed through interactions with significant others. For most of us, parents have been privileged significant others. Their influence on the way we will be processing our personal story (conceptual self) is very often decisive. From my point of view, the quality of their impact has to do with the three following variables: love, proper mirroring, and accompaniment of the child in the progressive development of sound self-appraisal.
1) Love is the primary ingredient. It tells you that you are valuable, that you deserve it. A regular experience with a loving and benevolent parent (even better with two!) would constitute an excellent training for eventual self-compassion, the most loyal ally you could have in life – comforting from others or self-comforting are then expected experiences.
2) The child needs to be told what she is. At the start, she has no means to do it by herself. What will be the quality (or truth) of that description? Will it be well-founded (proper mirroring: respectful of the child’s characteristics), or biased by the parents’ subjective expectations (for example, if you are not what I expect, you’re an unpleasant child)? A fair labeling of the child’s reactions or behaviors will create a coherent subjective experience. A distorted labeling will generate conflicts between the conceptual self and felt experience (for example, I am longing for this and it shows I am a bad person). Those conflicts will subvert self-esteem.
3) As an adult, you remain in a child position if your experience can’t be appraised without others’ evaluation. In order to learn self-appraisal, you have to be coached in the way to do so. A healthy self-appraisal is somewhat a balance between your primary adapted emotions (which tells you what is important to you) and what is possible in reality (interpersonal and physical). A parent who loves you (wishes the best for you), who is faithfully present to your experience (mirror), and who is realistic would be in an excellent position to do so. On a psychological level, a child becomes an adult when he demonstrates a sound self-appraisal capacity. He is then the ultimate judge of his experiences and actions (by its own authority).
How many persons do you know had the privilege of getting optimal love, mirroring, and accompaniment in the unfolding of their self-appraisal capacities from their parents? From my point of view, not that many; I would even dare to say very few (it may simply be life as it is, for the moment at least).
It is possible to work on what wasn’t given to us. For example, there is actually a lot of writing and research on self-compassion – the good news, is that you can work on it. In my point of view, this is the nicest gift you could give to yourself.
So back to this part of Lucien’s question:
“Also, this bias seems so strong that even validating childhood experiences aren’t an absolute protection against that fear of unworthiness – it doesn’t take much to trigger it. So we settle for layers of protection against that feeling of unworthiness.”
Just get back to points 1, 2, and 3 + have a thought for evolutional psychology. I think they give some validity to Lucien’s observation.
pcousineau
pcousineau 