www.getnewvisions.com/selfesteem/course
A Course in Self-Esteem
9.The Barriers to Self-Esteem
by Channing Grigsby
Outline
While our low self-esteem may be the result of a false belief system, replacing that system with a true belief system is not always an easy task.
That false belief system has been created over a long period of time. It is the result of numerous experiences and consequences, some severe, some good, some bad. It is familiar and known territory to us. Often we have considerable investments -- time, money and energy -- in those beliefs. Frequently, we hold those false beliefs with what is called "primary certainty" -- something we take for granted, an absolute sense that this is the way it is, in the same way we believe the sun will appear at dawn tomorrow morning. As a result, we can and do sometimes work against ourselves. And because we perceive this as a veritable survival issue, we can be very wiley, cunning, and sneaky about it.
In my class, members wanted to know why self-esteem seems so hard to change, why genuine change seems to require so much intensity. They wanted to look at the obstacles, the things that got in the way and prevented self-esteem enhancement. Some of this material is based on Joy Miller and Marianne Ripper's work in Following the Yellow Brick Road,* a book for Adult Children of Alcoholics. These are some of the techniques and strategies we use to maintain our uncomfortable comfort and block our own efforts. These are the things we do to prevent ourselves from recovering and prevent the strengthening of our self-esteem. These are some of the detours and distractions, false moves, and genuine barriers to increasing our self-esteem. To know about them is to gain some power over them.
This is probably the major barrier to self-esteem or recovery of any kind. In twelve-step groups, there is a saying: "Walk the talk." It's a handy way to remember that the easiest way to deal with a problem is to talk about it, and to remind ourselves that the only real way problems get handled is if we do something about them. The twelve-step saying not only reminds us we have to do something, but that what we do needs to be cosistent with all this great talk we've been yakking. It's simply a demand that we put to work what we're learning. Intellectualizing about a problem is the talking, thinking, analyzing, reading, mulling, even obsessing about something that allows us not to act. We use it as a subsitute for making changes in our behavior. It is the great distraction that lets us believe at the same time that we are accomplishing something. Thought is important. Our mind is the major tool we can use to regain our lost self-esteem. But if we only think, if we only use our minds, we're really standing still -- staying stuck -- and we don't really do anything.
This is the process by which we make the abnormal a normal part of our lives. It is also the process by which we exaggerate our abilities and exaggerate our shortcomings. We think of ourselves as either the best or the worst. Small mistakes become catastrophic disasters. We also project our personal fears or desires onto others and therefore cloud our own vision of them. We participate in a great deal of wishful thinking, seeing what we want to see. We adopt false maps of the way things are, or we distort the maps we make. We generate unrealistic expectations, allowing our needs to block our vision. Reality distortions are driven by fear and purpose that is intended to protect us. When we can take a deep breath and relax a little and realize we dont need all that protection we can observe it, detect it, refuse to let it control, and set it aside.
If we're dishonest with ourselves and with others, it is nearly impossible to recover or strengthen our high self-esteem. Dishonesty creates innacurate perceptions of the real world. For instance, rationalizing why we did something -- finding good reasons for it -- prevents us from discovering the real reasons. Dishonesty is primarily a self-deception, an attempt to make sense of nonsense. We can also be involved in manipulating others, or emotional blackmail, whose purpose is to get people to do what we want them to do rather than what they want to do. We can also get into numerous games and power plays: "I win, you lose." We can try to bribe, or threaten, or simply lie to win: the result is abuse: verbal, physical, emotional, or sexual.
We have a job interview that's really important to us and we know we have to be on time, but on the way our car mysteriously runs out of gas. Such sabotage is a form of protection, usually of the self image and self-esteem we already hold. It is primarily a fear response, sometimes a failure of nerve or of imagination. If I can't conceive of myself having the job I'm interviewing for, it is not real for me. That important job becomes a mirage, something unreal, and we treat is as such. When we sabotage ourselves, we are in the process of proving a point, either to ourselves or to others. From the distorted reality of our past, it is hard to entertain the prospect of, much less enjoy, prosperity or peace or success now. We may, through sabotage, be injecting some drama or crisis into our lives, if only to prove how difficult life is. We sabotage to demonstrate and prove a negative expectation, either about us or about the world.
A guaranteed program for failure. Impatience is based on hugely distorted expectations that say something like "I should have had this handled years ago. What's wrong with me?" This kind of impatience is especially absurd when it is applied to a new insight. Now that we can see it, it seems we should have seen it before, though we didn't. Impatience stems from perfectionism, and account-keeping of sucesses and failures. Our goals tend tobe unrealistically high -- our allowances for the time or money or energy it might take to accomplish what we want to achieve (for instance, new and high self-esteem in a single weekend) may be wildly inaccurate and bizarre. We also think we should know everything already and never have to learn. I've had students who felt they should simply already possess competence -- they shouldn't have to learn to do something that would result in such a sense of competence. When we bump into reality, we may get very discouraged and fall into self-pity.
On the radio and television show Dragnet, Detective Joe Friday laconically interviewed witnesses and his tag line was, "Just give me the facts, ma'm." One of the ways some people avoid doing the work involved in changing themselves is by scrupulously getting all the facts. They are involved in a continuous search for the facts, every last one of them, as if real change is not possible until absolutely every relevant fact and explanation has been put together into a total and complete picture. They have been in therapy for years and know all the reasons why they behave the way they do, yet all their knowledge does not change their behavior or the quality of their lives. Having the facts, without the skills to do something with them, yields no positive response. Having all the facts is also a passive position which permits the person not to do any real work at all. Having the facts is a position of invincible superiority -- no one can think worse of us than we do. It is the therapeutic equivalent to "You can't fire me, I quit." It's like telling someone they're behaving like a jerk and their response is to agree with you but do nothing about it.
We are capable of using anthing as an escape. Food, the telephone, television, music, partying, busy-ness, a new science ficton or romance book, it doesn't matter. Some relaxation is desirable, but when it is used to avoid dealing with low self-esteem, it becomes a squirrel's wheel that goes nowhere.
Since people with low self-esteem are preoccupied with other people and their behavior, this is one of the easiest techniques to get involved with. We wind up paying more attention to them than to ourselves, which is precisely the purpose. We assist others endlessly in an effort to fix them. It can also be an ego-trip abour our niceness. This is one of our major illusions, because, of course, it is not possible to fix someone else: we can fix only ourselves. Our attempts can even become tyrannical and covert ("I'll fix her in spite of herself.") If you stop to consider it, the idea of fixing someone else is superior, hostile, and arrogant. There is also the question of "Who controls whom?" Often in our attempts to control others we become controlled by them, because we forefeit our own power to think, feel and act in accord with our own best inerests.
Take, for instance, the Karpman drama triangle. It only takes two people, but it has three positions. Victim, Rescuer and the Persecutor. We perceive someone has been victimized, so we rush to their rescue. This can be a very simple thing, like giving someone a ride home. But if we don't have a lot of time, or gas, and home is out of our way by some distance, and we're worried abour the situation we will find in our own home when we get back (an angry partner, say), we may find ourselves resenting our good deed. If we do, the degree of appreciation by the victim becomes important to us; after all, look how far we've had to go out of our way. If the appropriate amount of appreciation is not forthcoming, we may get angry, and while the victim may blithly get out of the car with a quick thanks, we may drive away quietly seething, swearingto ourselves that we will never do a favor for so-and-so ever again. The Rescuer has become the Victim and then becomes the Persecutor, all in one neat fell swoop within half an hour or so.
In participating in this triangle, we are, perhaps surprisingly, expressing hostility: our generosity is not freely given but contingent upon some reciprocal gratitude; we demonstrate what a superior, nice person we are which also demonstrates a covert disrespect for others (see "To, For and With"). It is possible to do someone a favor without all this drama, but if you get yourself into a Karpman triangle, that is, start feeling abused and angry, look carefully at what you've been doing --the person you've been doing the favor for is you, not the other person. Doing someone a favor in the mode of the drama triangle is a hostile act toward the other. As is any other attempt to fix them, for it says you know better than they do about what's good for them. And when someone does that to you, you get insulted and angry.
The same urgency that's involved in our impatience pushes us to work intensely and often, or even constantly, to fix our problem. After some period of this, it's easy to become saturated with it. "If I hear the term 'self- esteem' one more time, I'm going to scream!" So scream. And then back off some. If you can't face one more reading, one more thought, take a small vacation.
Saturation is only a barrier when it drives us away from this work and we don't come back to it. People who are subject to burn-out in their jobs are equally subject to burn-out in recovery processes and for the same reasons: the same dynamics are involved in both. It is possible to complete this task reasonably and sanely, without perfectionism or burn-out. Slow and easy does it.
A term from John Bradshaw that describes how we get preoccupied by the thoughts of judgments of others. If we worry about whether other people will think we're doing well, we are depending on the wrong source of information. The right source is our internal reality and how it feels and not some external source. To stop, simply refocus your attention on you and your insides.
11. Fear of Failure/ Sense of Defeat
Both of these feed each other. We can become so preoccupied with fear of failing that we pay attention to that instead of the real work we want to do. Noticing that, we also begin to fear that we are losing the battle and defeat is once again, and one more time, just over the horizon. The unreasonable demand that we make on ourselves to fix this stuff right now! plus the fact that it cannot happen that fast (not for anyone in the universe) adds to this sense of looming defeat. It feels like time is running out (as if we are in a contest) and we're not done yet. In one class, a member and I had a running joke: he would say at the beginning of each class, "Am I well yet?" To which the class would respond, "No, but you're a lot better." To the fear of failure and its looming sense of defeat, add a dash of saturation, add a touch of fatigue, a little bit of a built-in negative expectation ("I'm not sure I can do this"), and you have a brilliant program for failure. What the hell -- if you can't win anyway, why bother?
The classic example is the glass of water half-filled. Do you see it as half-empty or half-filled? As old and as tired as this analogy is, this is important, because perceptually it is not possible to see it as both at one time: you really do see it as one or the other. And what interpretation you attach to it? If we're working on what we define as faults or flaws, we're likely to view ourselves as if we are a road full of potholes that need filling and repair. If all you care about is potholes, if all you are attending to is potholes, you will see only potholes and you will forget about the stretches of good roads that are smooth and serviceable. And if you've worked on one particular pothole a lot and it hasn't smoothed out yet, the tendency is to get discoouraged and feel it will never get fixed -- it is one of those ever-gobbling sinkholes -- which is a false conclusion.
You may also have to examine your standards. Remember that repair is not brand new, unblemished, never damaged. There is likely to still be a small bump there. If you want a broad, deep pothole to be repaired so that it doesn't show or will never again be a problem, you have created another program for failure. Maybe that particular pothole cannot be smoothed quite as nicely as some others, but if necessary, you can flag it, barricade it, put bright flashing lights on it, and learn to go around it. Our purpose is to be able to move down the road safely and to pass by without falling into the hole.
It's also important to remember we function daily in a negative environment. It bombards us with how deficient and inadequate we are, treats us as if we are idiots most of the time, constantly tells us what is good for us (usually in terms of someone else's profit), constantly reminds us we are not doing the right thing, buying the right stuff, saving enough, spending enough, etc, etc, etc, etc. It isn't hard for these messages to slide into our unconscious and operate upon us. Become aware of them, shut the noise down or off, stop listening, resist, reject, refuse. As Zig Ziglar has warned, be careful what you allow into your consciousness.
Old habits die hard. We can easily become afraid, gripped by that old strong fear that may have been the source of the problem in the first place. Maybe we will lose our new awareness, our new consciousness, for a while. Maybe we overestimated ourselves or our resources. Maybe, heaven forbid, we were just wrong. We may also be running a false equation that says "If I don't have it together, and keep it together every moment, than I have failed." Our ego arrogance -- the idea that I wish it so and so that's the way it should be -- takes over. As one person put it, "How dare this show up in my life again?" As if we are a car: "Hey, I fixed the fuel pump last week. It can't be bad again." And please notice the power of the expectations and judgments involved in all of this. (And the mechanical metaphor -- we are not machines.)
Several years ago, shortly before his death while ocean-kayaking in his 70's, philosopher and mystic Robert de Ropp, author of The Master Game, published his final book called Self Completion(2). de Ropp noticed that in spite of all the self-esteem and recovery and twelve-step and group and spiritual group work going on, most people were still struggling hard in their life journeys. And the question he raised was this -- if there's so much work going on, why isn't it paying off? His conclusion was that too much of the "work" being done was not real work, but what he called"pseudo-work."
Pseudowork is activity that gives the appearance we're busy and occupied with the right things, often devoting considerable time or money or energy to them -- like therapy sessions or meetings or seminars. When we're doing "pseudo-work," we're doing something that makes us feel better but isn't moving us along. It is activity, but not healing activity. In fact, "pseudo-work" is an evasion, an avoidance of the real work we need to do. It's as if we have said, "Well, I don't like it where I am and I want to change, but I don't want it to hurt too bad or make me too uncomfortable or cost too much in personal terms, so I'll do this and I will at least be doing something."
While our low self-esteem may be the result of a false belief system, replacing that system with a more truly accurate belief system is not always an easy task, especially if we're doing the easy stuff of merely being busy instead of the real work of healing.
(2)Robert S. de Ropp: Self Completion, Gateway/IDHHB, Inc. (Nevada City, Ca.,) 1988
© 1997, C. Grigsby, All Rights Reserved. 2 Aug 1988
Comments? E-mail to: Channing