self esteem course: 1. who do you think you are?

www.getnewvisions.com/selfesteem/course

A Course in Self-Esteem

1. Who Do You Think You Are?

by Channing Grigsby

It's not who we are, but who we think we are that matters.

It's not who we are, but who we feel we are that matters.

You've seen it hundreds of times: someone whom you admire, who you think is strong and powerful, falls apart in front of some challenge you thought they would breeze through.

In your own ears, you can hear you put yourself down.

You can feel the anxiety, the fear, over stuff you think you should be able to handle easily, but don't.

We all have a mental image of ourselves, a picture of who we are and what we are like. That internal picture is tremendously important because it controls our behavior. As Virginia Satir, one of the founders of Family Therapy, said: we are able to act only at the level of our awareness and our self-image is the level of our awareness.

Our self-esteem is the bedrock foundation that underlies almost all of our behavior, feelings, thoughts, attitudes. In many ways, it is possible to say that the level of our self-esteem controls our lives; it controls not so much the world but our experience of the world. And our experience of the world is our reality.

Snell and Gail Putney, in The Adjusted American, argue we need a self-image that is both accurate and acceptable. If our self-image is inaccurate, we run the risk of becoming confused about what's real and what is not. That confusion, if chronic, can result in self-contempt. There is a danger that out of that confusion and its failure to usefully guide us in our lives, we will begin to experience contempt for ourselves as being unable to function well. On the other hand, if our self-image is unacceptable, we must hide it. We then begin to experience a fear we will be found out. The tension of living that lie, along with the knowledge and feeling we aren't okay, results in depression, that if not checked, can lead to despair, a feeling of hopelessness.

A further complication: in the real world, accuracy and acceptability frequently are not the same. Often we have to trade accuracy, a sense of who we really are, for acceptance. We strive to become someone others could or would approve of. Many times, when faced with having to choose between accuracy or approval, we choose approval, acceptability. Nice girls, for instance, don't pick their noses. Good little boys don't play with themselves. (Or the other way around) So we opt for acceptance and approval instead of accuracy. After years of such choices, and the behavior that reinforces them, it is not surprising that we might be confused about who we really are or what we really feel. Nor is it surprising that we might be fearful about finding out.

Please, note this well

First: our sense of self-esteem is a judgment we have made about ourselves that constitutes a primary belief system.

That judgment is based on information from and interpretations by other people.

Consequently, the origins of that image of ourselves comes from outside of us, comes from someone else, from information we received from other people.

Someone attached a meaning to us or what we did and told us what they thought of us and what they found acceptable. Then, we internalized that meaning. In other words, someone else made a judgment about us we learned to live with.

Second: judgments actually express only approval or disapproval. Whether or not we approve of something depends upon our purpose. An obvious example: a father does not like the fact his daughter is growing up and becoming interested in boys or sex, and so he makes judgments about her potential boyfriends: he disapproves of them, "to protect her " but really to reduce his own anxieties.

Rarely are we, or anyone else, the neutral, objective, rational observer we claim to be. We want to believe judgment is a weighty, rational affair. We may even bring to mind an image of courts, trials, and judges, who are supposed to be neutral when hearing evidence and coming to a decision. Hopefully, judges in courts strive mightily to keep their own biases out of their decisions,but that is not the case in daily life. Our judgments tend to be quick and simple positive or negative responses: "This is good," or "This is bad."

Stop for a moment and watch yourself making a judgment about what you are reading now. In my classes, many people had a very hard time with the idea that judgments only express approval or disapproval. They wanted judgments to be noble and weighty, to involve responsible evaluation, to be rational and sane. They wanted judgments to be fair and just, and "right" and so they resisted this idea. In fact, their judgment would be disapproving and negative about it. Our reaction to a world in which judgments only express approval or disapproval at first is that it seems to make the world chaotic. We often feel there is or ought to be some absolute quality, some inherent rightness about the judgments we make. But it also seems to be true, if you will observe your own behavior, that our judgments tend to fall heavily on the negative, disapproving side most of the time.

The issue is that the self-image we have is a judgment: it approves of us or disapproves of us. If it approves of us, we have high self-esteem. If it disapproves of us, our self-esteem is low. In other words, we are walking around, approving or disapproving of ourselves almost constantly. "That was good thing to do." "Uh, oh, that's worrisome." "Well, that was pretty stupid of me."

Another point: all these judgments are based on very old news. The picture of you that you carry around is ancient history, a picture of you as you were, not as you are. The vision is ancient, and with regard to you now, both inaccurate and false. It is thus an illusion, a mirage. The person that old image refers to doesn't even exist anymore. You do.

We can carry that old person who we were into the present if we wish. We are at choice about this. We can hold ourselves in bondage to that image simply by believing that image is true and accurate. If you believe you are not a creative person and you encounter a problem which requires a creative solution, you will say to yourself, " I can't do this." And you will be right.

If your mother said you could do anything, and your father told you you could do nothing, you felt crazy until you decided which message was accurate. Often in that kind of conflict, the negative message wins. Or, we act as if we can do anything, in order to please our mother, but we secretly believe our father, so that even if, in some miraculous and mysterious way, we do somehow succeed, our success has the taste of ashes. It has to have been an accident and not the result of our own efforts.

The picture we have of ourselves is a belief, a belief we hold with a sense of primary certainty. It is a conviction. (Have you ever tried to argue a friend out of their own low self-esteem?) It becomes an unquestioned assumption, something we take for granted about the way it is, like the assumptions we make that the night will end and dawn will come, and that the sun rises in the east. Beliefs we hold with primary certainty describe reality: the way things are. "This is the way I am." And it is this sense of primary certainty that makes our self-esteem seem to be cast in concrete and so unchangeable, and why our efforts to change it are so frequently and sometimes spectacularly unsuccessful. After such a failed effort, we conclude, once again, "This is the way I am (and will always be)."

Wrong! False! That is nonsense! Our certainty is an illusion. Our beliefs can be false beliefs. Someone can have sold us a bill of goods about ourselves. We accepted other people's judgments about us as if they were both true and accurate, and in our best interest, for a long, long time. What if those judgments aren't true about us? What if the information we got from other people as we were growing up was neither true nor accurate? What if it was more in their best interest than ours? It's time to check things out.

Since a judgment is a made thing, it's clear it can be unmade. If it is humanly created, it can be humanly changed. Have you ever changed a belief? Of course. Have you ever believed in Santa Claus? Or that democracy and the Soviet Union were contradictory and incompatible ideas? Or that you'd never learn to swim, or dive, or drive a car, or get an A, or graduate, or get a raise, or a promotion?

Answer this question quickly:

Are you a good person or a bad one?

If you could not quickly say a good one, your self-esteem is at issue.

Low self-esteem is false; it is an unjustified illusion. It is a lie about us. It is not true.

We can find out the truth about ourselves.

Like most of what we know or think we know, the level of our self-esteem has been learned.

Since we learned low self-esteem, it can be unlearned.

If low self-esteem is learned, it comes from outside of us.

We can discover the sources of our low self-esteem and regain it..

If low self-esteem comes from outside of us, it is not our fault.

We are not responsible for our low self-esteem. (But we are responsible for perpetuating it.)

Low self-esteem is learned over a long period of time.

It is unreasonable to expect to regain high self-esteem instantaneously, but it can be done over time.

As young children, we had high self-esteem; somewhere along the way, we lost it.

We can regain it.

This concept is not that we are ill, but that we have lost something we used to possess. We can find and regain a high level of self-esteem with the investment of some time, energy, attention, and a little courage and determination.

This approach is not "All you need to do is a little positive thinking; take two affirmations daily." Nor is it "This course will change your life." Always remember this: courses don't change lives, people do. Sometimes, though, people need a little help, a little encouragement, a little information, a direction in which to move.

Comments? E-mail to: Channing