self esteem course: 7. some helpful ideas: your rights

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A Course in Self-Esteem

7. Some Helpful Ideas: Your Rights

by Channing Grigsby

People with low self-esteem are in a silent, undeclared war with the world and with others to get what they think they want and what they think they need. Often, they are losing, both the battle and the war. In the midst of such chaos and confusion, it is useful to look at some basic facts about people and what we are legitimately entitled to expect.

The Three Rules of Claudia Black

Claudia Black, in her landmark book on the problems of children from alcoholic families who have become adults, "It Will Never Happen To Me," argues that dysfunctional families teach children three central messages:

Don't Talk

Don't Trust Don't Feel
Children from such families learn early that they are not allowed to talk about what's really going on. Reality is not accurately described, the true terms are not used: Daddy is not drunk, he's "tired." Momma isn't stoned, she's "not feeling good." If someone has created a traumatic event the night before, like drunken Daddy threatening to burn the house down, no one mentions it the next morning. No one mentions it, partly in fear, partly in embarrassment, partly in protection, partly in denial. There is a resulting conspiracy of falsehood. One writer calls it the problem of "The Elephant in the Livingroom": everyone knows it's there but no one will admit it, and needless to say, everyone goes through great gymnastics trying live around it and trying to avoid it. The consequence of the rule, don't talk, is a dedication, a fundamental commitment, to unreality and falseness and a crazy-making environment in which it's hard, especially for a child, to know what's real and what isn't.

It's fairly obvious that if you don't know what someone is going to do next, it is very hard to trust them. Trust is based on a bottom-line stability which is regularly violated in dysfunctional families. Parental affection ranges from profuse and sloppy when they're drunk one day to non-existent or even violent when they're drunk the next, with periods of arid chilliness or sentimental regret in the middle. Honesty, which is crucial to trust, is non-existent. Promises are made that are never kept and not remembered. Neither safety nor security, both of them essential ingredients for trust, is available in such a home. While trust may be a stated value, dysfunctional families in fact teach distrust.

In the midst of chaos, it's better if you shut your feelings down, so the third lesson is don't feel. Often, don't feel because it will hurt and be painful. Also don't feel because demonstrations of feeling, if they are undesired ones, will generate rage: "Don't you laugh at me!" "What are you crying for, I didn't hurt you. Shut up!" Children in dysfunctional families are prisoners, and they know it. They also know they must tough it out and that it is inappropriate to express the fear, the anger, the humiliation, the betrayal they feel. In order to survive, don't feel.

The Five Freedoms of Virginia Satir

Family therapist Virginia Satir states that all children are entitled to five basic human freedoms.

The first is to see and hear what's really going on, rather than have to participate in some fantasy reality about the past and the wonderful way it was before Mommy started drinking so hard or the future and how great that will be when Mommy gets better.

The second is to be able to think one's own thoughts, instead of the family's "party line" and for those thoughts to be allowed and recognized rather than made fun of or prohibited. The morning after Daddy has come home drunk and the car winds up on the front lawn and Mother has called in to work to make excuses for him, she says, "We Joneses are responsible people."

Third is the freedom of your feelings, to be able to feel what you feel. So-called negative feelings, like anger, sadness, sorrow, are so threatening to many parents that their children are prevented from having them, by explicit command. "I'm feeling really sad right now." And the response is, "Don't feel sad." Often the response is based on a kind of sympathy that assumes that feeling sad is terribly unpleasant and needs to be fixed right away. But as three young Southern California therapists said some years ago, the command nature of the comment teaches "reasonable insanity"(1) "I'm not supposed to have or express 'bad' feelings." When we surrender our real feelings in favor of not feeling at all, or feeling what we're supposed to feel, we lose touch with ourselves and the major source of our energy in our lives.

Fourth, all children have the freedom to want what they want. You have probably heard it a lot in stores: a child with parents says, "I want that." The parents says, "No, you don't want that." The message is that there are obviously some things the child should want, like good grades in school, and some things the child should not want, like the toy or the candy in the store. It's true that not everything a child wants is good for them, any more than everything an adult wants is good for them, but all of us have the right to want those things, though we may not have the right to get them.

Finally, we are entitled to the freedom to be ourselves -- to be who we are, rather than who our parent or uncle or teacher or priest may want us to be. This also means we are entitled to pursue our own lives according to our own judgments, instead of the judgments of others. We need to be free to step out of family roles, like the caretaker, in order to take care of ourselves.

Three Personal Rights

In order to reinforce these notions, I put together a list of basic rights we all have and are entitled to.

Number One: The Right to Exist

This may seem strange, but many people with low self-esteem are so overpowered by others and their expectations that they forget the have the right to their own existence and the right to live. Another's permission is not required. This right contains within it the right to meet your own basic needs. Children in physically abusive families do not believe they have a right to their own body.

We have the right to develop and become human. We have the right to achieve language, the right to know the values of our culture and our society and also our own values and how they might differ.

We also have the right to significance -- we have the right not to be invisible, not to be the extension of some other person's ego or expectations. We are entitled to our own boundaries -- that line between us and others -- and also to our own space. We also have the right to have impact on others, so that we make a difference with them and with ourselves.

We have the right to separate from our parents, to achieve our own identity, to became not only an individual but our own individual.

Number Two: The Right to Be Conscious

We have the right to perceive reality accurately, here and now, according to our own perceptions instead of through some notion of "how it should be" that distorts reality. We also have the right to expect help in our growing up with this process of learning how to perceive what's really going on.

We also have the right to be sane as opposed to being "reasonably insane." We have the right to know ourselves truly instead of some sanitized social version of ourselves. We have the right to be able to make sense of things, to understand what's happening. This implies that we not be caught in double binds, not to be "damned if we do and damned if we don't," not to be constantly caught between a "rock and a hard place," or "hell and high water." We have a right to win, and to be right, at least some of the time.

We have the right to be able to solve the problems in our lives. We have the right not to be stuck. We have the right to perceive what's happening, to think clearly and cleanly about it, to learn how to respond, and we have the right, indeed -- we have the personal duty -- to make mistakes (the greatest teachers of all).

We have the right to have access to the Truth. That means a right to accurate information, to honesty from the important people in our lives, to a reasonable expectation that they will to the best of their ability live up to their own values and ethics.

Number Three: The Right To Do

We have the right to feel what we feel instead of what we think we feel or what we ought to feel. We have the right to know, to experience, and to express our feelings.

We have the right to our own enabled will -- that personal mechanism that lets us work toward and achieve what we want.

We have the right to competence, to a sense that we can in fact handle whatever we encounter in life. We have the right to the experiences, the ideas, and the tools that will teach us that we can cope with life's requirements. We can keep a job, earn a living, have a rewarding relationship. That we have the "know-how" for living.

We have the right to act in accord with our needs in order to fulfill them. For instance, I have the right to need for you to be there for me some of the time and to complain to you if you're not. As a child or an adult, I may not know this and my conclusion if you're not there for me in this way is that I am not worth your being there.

We have the right to be different and to assert our needs. We have the right to stand up to conflict and to resolve that conflict. Which is to say, we have the right to fight in productive, problem-solving ways and to resolve differences.

The Adult Children of Alcoholics Bill of Rights

Right after a class discussion of this subject, one of the women in the class pulled out a hand-out from the local twelve-step program for Adult Children of Alcoholics. I do not know the author, nor even whether it originated in Northern California, but it is a telling document about what our society in general demands of us and of the necessity of what we have to remind ourselves about.

"I have the right . . .

1. To make other choices besides the choice merely to run away.

2. To say "no" when I feel unready or unsafe.

3. Not to be molested by fear.

4. To feel all my feelings, both good and bad.

5. To believe I'm probably not guilty.

6. To make mistakes.

7. Not to have to smile when I'm in pain and crying or feel hurt.

8. To end conversations with people who put me down or humiliate me.

9. To be healthier than those around me.

10. To grow and change.

11. To be relaxed, playful, and frivolous.

12. To get angry, even at someone I love, without fearing that I, the other person, or the relationship, or the world will dissolve.

13. To do stupid things without having to believe I'm stupid.

14. Not to be ashamed for what I don't know or can't do.

15. To set limits of what I will do and not do, of what I will accept and not accept, and to be selfish."

Even those people with generally high levels of self-esteem find themselves in momemnts or situations when one or the other of those above realities impinge on us, whether it's about simply not feeling guilty for something we did or didn't do, or saying "No" to someone when we don't really want to do what they ask, or simply being comfortable with ourselves.

(1)Jospeh Hart, Richard Corriere, and Jerry Binder: Going Sane: An Introduction to Feeling Therapy, Jason Aronson )Publisher) New York, 1975

Comments? E-mail to: Channing