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A Course in Self-Esteem
3. The Symptoms of Low Self-Esteem
by Channing Grigsby
Outline
blame self & others — complain
are chronic victims, take stuff personally
Reactive: behave at level of defenses, not of needs (Satir)
Carry a lot of unidentified pain, and therefore avoid the present moment
Often have body-image problems and so are not in their bodies
Tend to be perfectionistic (to create perfect safety) Also try to control (same reason)
Live within a closed circle -- can't admit negatives, especially fears, so it is impossible to reassure them. They stay on a treadmill.
Resentment/ Fault-finding/critical
Hypervigilant (for safety), A "good person," often selfless in behavior; a caretaker
Prone to accidents and physical stress disorders (headache, colitis, ulcers, TMJ, constipation or diarrhea)
Minimize — things are not so bad; they'll be better tomorrow for sure
Confused in behavior — don't know what to do first or how to do it.
Create a powerful, detailed false self; afraid of being wrong
Grandiosity plus or minus: they are either the greatest or the worst
2. Addicted/Compulsive Behavior
PRIMARY ADDICTION: to powerlessness and nonlife (Schaef)
Drugs: legal and illegal; prescription and nonprescription
Process and compulsive behaviors
suicidal thoughts; shyness
depression don't laugh or cry much
panic/anxiety attacks chronic frustration (can't make it OK)
chronic global anxiety don't know what they feel
phobias and fears wonder if they're crazy (they're not)
excessive distrust; unable to feel; unable to express feelings
experience high levels of guilt, shame, fear, sorrow, hurt, anger
Nobody loves me, not even me: bereft, abandoned, rejected
an idealist with great disappointments: have "high hopes and great fears "(Va. Satir's term)
feels like an imposter — discounts praise; feels/acts invisible
expects disappointment; trusts no one
difficulty sharing and communicating, especially their fears
feel defective and flawed (why else are they an orphan?)
Isolated and alone; Frustrated in quest for intimacy
5. Undifferentiated Dependency Needs
Indirect Self Acceptance: If you like me, I must be OK
Otheration: Poor separation from parents, intimate others
Can't draw line between my problem and your problem; Has not achieved whole and equal relationship
Don't know what they're responsible for and not responsible for
Difficulty saying No, asserting oneself
Excessive need for attention
stinkin thinkin (AA & Schaef); Perceptions distort reality
Ruminate and mull matters endlessly; Worry obsessively
Destructive inner dialogue: run a constant critical commentary against themselves
Constantly scheme and plan mentally to get safe, in control
Lack of objective capacity; Lack of healthy critical sense; bad judgement
Difficulty concentrating, focusing attention: scattered
Confused in thinking-sequence; what first or most important, priorities
Dishonesty
Like the oil in the engine of car, our self-esteem is only a problem when it is low.
One summer, I employed a college student to help me get my notes together for this course. After typing notes for this section into the computer, he sighed loudly, and said, "Wow." When I asked him what that was all about, he said, "When I came here, I was sure my self-esteem was fine, but after typing this section on the symptoms of low self-esteem, I recognized an awful lot of me. I've got to do some thinking about this stuff."
We don't have to be a basket case to want to improve our self-esteem. We don't have to be depressed to want to feel better. We don't have to feel we're the worst person alive to want to be more loving toward ourselves. As Nathaniel Branden says, "It is not not necessary to hate ourselves before we can learn to love ourselves more; we do not have to feel inferior in order to want to feel more confident. We do not have to be miserable to want to expand our capacity for joy."(1) We can recognize that we put ourselves down without concluding we are a terrible person. We are entitled to want more vitality, more pleasure, deeper and richer feeling, a greater sense of purpose and joy in our lives.
If you wish to assess your own level of self-esteem, look at this list of symptoms of low self-esteem. (But don't be like the medical student who was certain she had the symptoms of every major disease she studied.)
We try to protect ourselves and our low self-esteem, and the primary means is denial. We simply reject the idea that there is anything wrong with our self-esteem, our behavior, our lives. The evidence of our experience to the contrary can be overwhelming, but we will refuse to accept that anything is wrong. This defense is most obvious in the case of the drunk who denies she has a drinking problem.
Blame
A person with low self-esteem is full of blame. He blames himself, secretly, sometimes publicly, but also blames others. Such people experience themselves as victims most of the time. Their tendency is to complain, often loudly and at great length, about how badly they have been treated by almost everyone in the universe. They also respond to events by taking whatever happens personally.
As Virginia Satir has said, people with low self-esteem spend most of their time reacting to things: they "behave at the level of their defenses, and not at the level of their need."(2) In other words, we spend more time protecting ourselves from getting hurt than allowing ourselves to be loved.
Gunny-Sacking Feelings
People with low self-esteen tend to put painful experiences and feelings away into a big black sack they carry with them . In therapy it's called "gunny-sacking" feelings. It's as if we say to ourselves "This is too painful to deal with now. I'll put it away and deal with it later." Or, "I don't want to deal with this at all." And we do put it away, refusing to feel it. And our sack gets larger: we can feel its heft and its bulk. The simple fact it is there and we know it is scarey. But the idea of sticking our hand inside that writhing black bag and pulling something out into the light to look at it gives us the willies. We can even forget what's in that sack. All we know is that it's bad and we don't want anything to do with it. I call the contents of that bag unidentified pain.
Generally, when we have the courage to look at our pain, or our fears, we find the anticipation of it is worse than the experience of it. Once we identify our pain, it loses its power over us. I knew a boy who had been given his grandfather's ring by his father. One day at a lake, while showing it to someone on a raft, he got bumped and the ring flew away into some forty or fifty feet of water. Gone. No way to retrieve it. Gone forever. A family heirloom. He was mortified, and terrified of telling his father, afraid his father would get hugely angry. So in the weeks afterward, he kept silent. In the meantime, he lived in fear that his father would notice the ring wasn't on his finger and inquire about it. Some months later, he finally summoned the courage to tell his father the ring was lost. His father merely shrugged and said that was too bad. He hadn't much liked the ring himself anyway and that was the reason he had given it to him. And that was the end of it. He couldn't believe he'd agonized so long over something that turned out so well.
Numbed Out
Another result of unidentified pain is that we have so much bad feeling within us, we're unable to feel what's going on here and now. The huge sack of unidentified pain keeps us numb and out of touch with this present moment.
People with low self-esteem often attach that low self-esteem to their bodies. They have a body image problem . They are too big, too small, too short, too tall, too light, too heavy. Their defense is to stay out of their bodies, to not be in their bodies, as if to say, "This isn't me. I don't exaclty know who this is, but it isn't me. " As a consequence, because feeling has a physiological correlate, it is hard to feel anything, even physical pleasure.
Control Needs and Perfectionism
People with low self-esteem experience a high degree of insecurity and jeopardy. They do not feel safe most of the time. One defense is to become a perfectionist. After all if you do something perfectly, you are beyond criticism and no one can hurt you. Perfectionism is an attempt to create perfect safety (which is, needless to say, unattainable). The other safety attempt is to become a control freak and try to control everything. If we can control everything, nothing will ever jump up and surprise or hurt us.
People with low self-esteem tend to live in a closed system that is hard to break. Because they have difficulty admitting negatives, either about themselves or their behavior, it is hard to reach them. It is especially difficult for someone with low self-esteem who is defensive or in denial to admit that they are afraid. As a result, it is difficult, occassionally impossible, to reassure them that it is okay to be afraid or to be in pain. Their major fear is that it is all their fault. That's a lie. It is not all their fault, but it's a lie that's hard to surrender.
Hypervigilance
Imagine it is late evening and you're a seven-year-old child in bed at home. Your father, who drinks and often comes home drunk, and often comes home angry-drunk, is out of the house but expected home any minute now. In the past, on occassion, he has come into your bedroom when you were asleep and started to yell at you for leaving your bicycle outside by the front stairs. He almost fell over the damned thing. His rage was terrifying. And he hit you several times. Hard. You now hear the front door open and the shuffling step of your father coming down the hall. He's mumbling to himself, out-loud. Lying in your bed, how are you feeling? What is your emotional, psychic, mental condition? Would you not be almost literally holding your breath, straining to hear every sound for some indication of his condition, his mood, whether or not he's coming to your room? It's called hypervigilance, that condition of intense, very acute alertness.
Some people know, and need to know, where everyone is, what they are doing, and sometimes they even claim to know what other people are thinking and feeling. Often they are right, because they have learned to read other people carefully and very well. They are hyper-alert to people. They read expressions, body language, words, striving mightily to know exactly what is going on. They watch, listen, interpret, and they wonder and ponder and figure and scheme, all toward the end of being able to protect themselves if something bad starts to happen.
Victimization
Because it is never possible to prevent bad stuff from happening to us, we sometimes become the classic victim, innocent and angry. We not only blame, we also feel resentment because that other person let us down or treated us badly. In fact, to further our protection, we get into heavy-duty fault-finding with others, becoming critical, sometimes hypercritical, of what they do, say, think, or feel. And we can become so obssessed with the other guy we neglect ourselves.
One mode of protection is to become the super-good person, the good little boy or girl, the thoughtful child. We become almost literally selfless in our efforts to take care of others in the hope that if we can keep them happy then we will be happy. Such people become superlative caretakers.
Another form of our victimization is being accident or illness prone, which succeeds in putting a great deal of our personal responsibility out into the world of fate and chance and accident. We can also become vulnerable to stress disorders like chronic headaches, colitis, ulcers, tempero-mandibular joint (TMJ) pain, constipation or diarrhea.
Minimizing
We think magically that if we refuse to admit how bad things were, then they can't really have been that bad. So we minimize: "Things weren't really so bad in my family." "I didn't have a great childhood, but it was okay." Scarlet O'Hara, the heroine of Gone With The Wind, was a great minimizer: "I'll think about that tomorrow." What we're doing, of course, is minimizing our own experience of how bad it was. In other words, more bluntly, we're lying to ourselves. People who are particularly concerned with appearances and the judgment of others minimize to protect themselves and those they care about from criticism. Caretakers especially minimize the bad behavior of those they take care of. We can see this in parents whose children can do no wrong, or in people acting codependently with a substance-abuser whose behavior could be "much worse." While it may appear to be a kind of tolerance or forgiveness, in fact it is a refusal to hold oneself or the other person responsible for bad behavior. "He didn't hit me that hard." (Yes, he did, and it hurt like hell, physically and emotionally.) "She didn't really want to hit me that hard." (Oh, yes she did.)
Becoming Confused
One of the best defenses is confusion, in behavior, thought or feeling. A confused person can't be held responsible for what happens. After all, a confused person doesn't know what to do first, what to think, or what to feel, or even how to do what's necessary. If asked what they want, they can't tell you, and they can't tell you because they literally do not know and can't allow themselves to find out.
Creating a False Self
One of the hallmarks of low self-esteem is a powerful, highly-detailed false self. Our false self is the creation we made in order to hide. It is the good little girl or boy persona we present to the world. The stronger that false self, the more detailed, the greater the attempt to persuade ourselves and others the false self is the real self. And also the greater the fear that real self will be seen and rejected.
Another sign of low self-esteem is a lot of fear about being wrong. A person with low self-esteem is really afraid of being wrong. The operative perception is that people who make mistakes are inferior, and they must be disciplemed, corrected, criticised, punished, made fun of, condemned as dumb or ineffective. Who would willingly invite that?
When I was growing up, the term "addict" was almost equivalent to the term "fiend" as in "dope-fiend." There was a sense of demons and craziness about it, and no one wanted to be called an addict. But we have learned a lot about addiction and the addictive process since then. One of the things we have learned is that addictions are extraordinarily common, we might even say pervasive in our society, and that they happen in the best of families. It is no shame, as many have since learned, to acknowledge having been addicted. Indeed, such acknowledgement is the first step toward recovery.
The primary, objective symptom of low self-esteem is a substance or a process addiction, or dependence on multiple addictions. There are many kinds, and they start with the substances: alcohol, nicotine, caffeine, illegal drugs like heroine or cocaine, plus a whole raft of legal drugs, like stimulants, and tranquilizers such as Valium, etc. Addictions continue through what are called "process" addictions: being hooked on a form of behavior, like shopping, gambling, eating. There are also compulsive behavior addictions like sex addiction, or an addiction to romance or being in love, or needing to have a relationship, or workaholism, or being addicted to extreme emotion, like being what is called a rage-a-holic. I had a student in one class who worked for a man who raged regularly, sort of like an old faithful geyser, between three and four o'clock, every day. My student said it was easy to see her boss working himself into his rage, and people in the office would make bets on whether his rage would go off at 3:00 or 3:15, or 3:30, or 3:45 or 4:00 PM.
One of the things we've learned about addiction is that it is a response, usually to pain or fear, and its purpose is always to make us feel better. We find, for instance, that a drink relaxes the tension or insecurity we're feeling, so if one is good, several will be better. Eventually, there really aren't quite enough drinks to really do the trick, so we wind up drinking most, if not all the time. Therapist and lecturer John Bradshaw says the purpose of the addiction is to alter our mood, needless to say, for the better.(3) The trouble arises when our relationship to that which alters our mood becomes pathological, when we cannot do without it, and, as Bradshaw says, it has "life-damaging consequences."
Our addictions are designed to take us out of the present moment in a flight from feeling and consciousness which we are experiencing as uncomfortable or painful. An argument can also be made that behind all addictions is a bigger, more significant primary addiction: that of our addiction to powerlessness and nonlife.
People with low self-esteem have a lot of trouble with their feelings. In fact, it may precisely be their feelings that people with low self-esteem are trying to avoid. This society does not teach us how to live with negative emotions like fear, depression, panic or anxiety attacks, phobias, guilt, shame, sorrow or anger. As a result, we frequently elect to try not to feel these things by shutting them down, or going into denial, or sacking them away.
Consequently, people with low self-esteem experience a lot of isolation, a lot of distrust, a lot of anxiety, shame, guilt, and fear. They are frequently very shy, in part because their experience of other people is that other people cause pain and they have learned to be fearful. We also become numb, choosing not to laugh or cry much, for fear we'll get hysterical or never stop crying. I've frequently heard people say, "If I ever start crying, I'll never stop." And we tend to experience chronic frustration because we're unable to make things okay. Sometimes we're so successful at shutting down our feelings, we don't know what we feel. We wonder if we're crazy (we're not), but we wind up being unable to feel and unable to express our feelings. Which merely means we're missing the richest, juiciest parts of life
An orphan has been truly abandoned, and feels bereft and rejected. One of the most powerful feelings of a person with low self-esteem is "Nobody loves me... not even me." And like orphans since time immemorial, to use a term from Virginia Satir again, people with low self-esteem have "high hopes and great fears." As she says, a person with low self-esteem has "high hopes about what he can expect from others, but he also has great fears; he is only too ready to expect disappointment and to distrust people."(2) We are always optimistic it will all be made right by someone soon, but we're terrified that the someone will let us down (as almost everyone else has), and it won't be made right, or we won't be good enough to deserve it, and so it won't come about.
We use our False Self heavily, to hide how much of an orphan we really are, but then we have become an imposter. Should we do something that results in praise, that praise is discounted because the real us is not being discussed. We learn to expect disappointment. We are, as Carol Pearson describes Orphans in The Hero Within, "a disappointed idealist, and the greater the ideals about the world, the worse reality appears."(4) We shrink from life, become invisible, trusting no one. We have difficulty sharing our reality and communicating it with others, especially those realities which show us to be less than good, or showing us to be fearful or "weak." We also feel defective, as if we are flawed. The reasoning goes backward: we feel like orphans, why are we orphans if not because there is something wrong with us? This is what I call the "emotional logic" that children practice, and it is impeccable, but very wrong.
Feeling essentially isolated and alone, we have great trouble connecting intimately with others, and so our relationships don't work well much of the time. We are thus further frustrated in our quest for love and approval and we will go to great lengths and through much weirdness to try to get it, including choosing very badly our prospective partners. Terry Gorski, a therapist who works in the field of Adult Children and relationship addiction, gave a talk in which he spoke of his own experience with bad choices: "When I was single and dating in my early twenties, I dated four consecutive women who attempted suicide in one year. Try it! I would lay money that you could not do that if there were a million dollars on the line. Do you know how hard it is to find someone who is suicidal and fall in love with them? Much less four in a row?"
Boundary Problems: Undifferentiated Dependency Needs
Although there may be times when we desperately would like to be so, we are not self-sufficient. We depend on others for essential human needs — touch, companionship, friendship, communication, mirroring, feed-back, etc. But people with low self-esteem tend to be either/or about dependency, and have either a hard time admitting they are dependent at all, or they have a tendency to be dependent like a moist blanket. In both cases, our own genuine dependency need is confused with other people's reality. One of the most obvious examples occurs when we look to others for approval. The phenomenon is called indirect self acceptance, or "If you like me, I must be okay." And frequently we will go to great lengths to get other people to like us. For instance, by pleasing them and doing everything we think they want.
Our Self has a boundary: there is a place in the world where me changes into not-me. You also have a boundary. But our boundaries can become confused. If, in relating to you, I merge my boundary thoroughly with yours, then I cannot tell where my problem ends and your problem begins. Some people call it living in the other guy's hip pocket. The implication, and the feeling reality, is that without you in my life I have no life. Me and you are so thoroughly confused I don't know the difference between where you end and I begin.
The major arena in our lives where this can be seen is in our relationship with our parents. Frequently, we have not achieved genuine separation, which is defined as having achieved a genuine position of equality. Often, parents do not want their children to grow up into fully-fledged, independent adults who are their equal. They continue to treat their children as if they are children, no matter what their age. Nor may a parent achieve separation from their child: they don't want to relate as adults, they wish to remain Mommy or Daddy. A person can be forty, and still be treated like a child by Mommy. It is also true that many children do not achieve adequate separation so that it is impossible for them to see their parent as a separate human being with human flaws who is their equal. The test of separation is whether you can see your parent as a separate, whole, intact, and equal person, with both strengths and weaknesses, with characteristics we like and some we don't.
If we have not achieved separation in the relationship with our parents, it is difficult to feel equal in our love relationship with our partner, our intimate other. One reason is that if our boundaries are blurred with another's, we do not know what we are responsible for and what we're not responsible for. Fixing a relationship problem thus becomes very difficult.
In addition, we may have real trouble saying "No!" when we wish to, or trouble asserting ourselves in the relationship. If we don't want someone to do something, we can't simply say "Because I don't want you to." For people with low self-esteem, that's not usually a good enough reason: we have to get into a whole lot of explanation and justification about why doing that is a really bad idea.
Without having achieved separation or good boundaries, we have little protection and so are terribly vulnerable and insecure. We may develop an excessive need for attention, a constant, insatiable need for reassurance that everything is okay, and yes, she really does still love you, as hard as that may be to believe. It is as if we have a hole inside that we cannot seem ever to quite fill. The problem, of course, is that the reassurance never lasts and we need it again and again.
In Alcoholics Anonymous, it's called "stinkin' thinkin', and it is "abnormal thought processes" designed to achieve safety. As an attempt to achieve safety, such thinking fails, of course, and then it becomes a problem itself, because it leads to dishonesty and creates unreality. We allow our perceptions to distort reality. We see only what we wish to see. It is like the line from Simon and Garfunkels' song, The Boxer:
"Still, a man hears what he wants to hear
And disregards the rest."
The most prevalent thought disorder is the critical internal conversation we have with ourselves and what we say. This running, critical commentary goes on constantly, working against us, a destructive inner dialogue that puts us down and reinforces our low self-esteem. The voice belongs to our Inner Critic, about which more later.
There are a number of other thought disorders which will be discussed later, but for now attend to how they are used. We ruminate and mull matters endlessly, sometimes worrying obsessively. Did they or didn't they? And we go around in circles.
We scheme and plan mentally to get safe, to get control over situations which threaten us or feel out of control. We are so intent on our own purpose in this that we lose any objective capacity or healthy critical sense, and so we frequently make bad judgment after bad judgment. Often we have trouble concentrating, focusing our attention, and we appear scattered and flaky to others. Often, our thinking is confused, out of sequence. We don't remember accurately about what happened first, or what was most important, and so we can't establish effective priorities about what to deal with first and the result is more circles, of thought or behavior.
Ultimately, the biggest problem with our disordered thinking is that it is dishonest. It prevents us from knowing or learning what is real and what isn't. It cripples and renders ineffective the major tool we have for achieving improvement: our minds.
(2)Virginia Satir: Conjoint Family Therapy, Science & Behavior Books (Palo Alto, Ca,) 1964, 1983, p.10
(3)John Bradshaw: Bradshaw on: The Family, Health Communications Inc, 1988, p. 5
(4)Carol Pearson: The Hero Within, Harper & Row, 1986, p. 27
© 1997, C. Grigsby, All Rights Reserved. 2 Aug 1988
Comments? E-mail to: Channing