Self Esteem

(Nathaniel Branden) Most of us are children of dysfunctional families. I do not mean that most of us had alcoholic parents or were sexually or otherwise abused or that we grew up in an atmosphere of physical violence. I mean that most of us grew up in homes characterized by conflicting signals, denials of reality, parental lying, and a lack of adequate respect for our minds and personalities. I am speaking of the average home.
I recall discussing this issue one day with the distinguished family therapist Virginia Satir, who offered an exquisite and appalling example of the kind of craziness with which so many of us grew up.
Imagine, she said, a scene among a child, a mother, and a father. Seeing a look of unhappiness on the mother's face, the child asks, "What's the matter, Mommy? You look sad." Mother answer's, her voice tight and constricted, "Nothing's the matter. I am fine." Then Father says angrily, "Don't upset your mother!" The child looks back and forth between mother and father, utterly bewildered, unable to understand the rebuke. She begins to weep. The mother cries to Father, "Now look what you've done!"
I like this story because of its ordinariness. Let us consider it more closely. The child correctly perceives that something is troubling Mother and responds appropriately. The mother acts by invalidating the child's (correct) perception of reality; she lies. Perhaps Mother does so out of the misguided desire to "protect" her child or perhaps because she does not know how to handle her unhappiness. If she had said, "Yes, Mommy is feeling a little sad right now; thank you for noticing," she would have validated the child's perception. By acknowledging her unhappiness simply and openly, she would have reinforced the child's compassion and taught something important concerning a healthy attitude toward pain; she would have decatastrophize the pain.
Father, perhaps to "protect" Mother or perhaps out of guilt because Mother's sadness concerns him, rebukes the child, thus adding to the incomprehensibility of the situation. If the mother is not sad, why would a simple inquiry be upsetting? If she is sad, why is it wrong to ask about it and why is Mommy lying? Now, to confound the child still more, Mother screams at Father, rebuking him for reproaching their child. Contradictions compounded; incongruities on top of incongruities. How does the child make sense of the situation?
The child may run outside, frantically looking for something to do or someone to play with, seeking to erase all memory of the incident as quickly as possible, repressing feelings and perceptions. And if the child flees into unconsciousness to escape the terrifying sense of being trapped in a nightmare, do we blame her well-meaning parents for behaving in ways that encourage her to feel that sight is dangerous and that there is safety in blindness?

Complex Factors Determine Our Self-Esteem
I do not wish to imply that how our parents treat us determines the level of our self-esteem. The matter is more complex than that. We have a decisive role of our own to play. The notion that we are merely pawns shaped and determined by our environment cannot be supported scientifically or philosophically. We are causal agents in our own right; active contestants in the drama of our lives; originators and not merely reactors or responders.
However, the family environment can have a profound impact for good or for ill. Parents can nurture self-trust and self-respect or place appalling roadblocks in the way of learning such attitudes. They can convey that they believe in their child's competence and goodness or they can convey the opposite. They can create an environment in which the child feels safe and secure or they can create an environment of terror. They can support the emergence of a healthy self-esteem or they can do everything conceivable to subvert it.

Obstacles To The Growth Of Self-Esteem
Parents throw up severe obstacles to the growth of a child's self-esteem when they :
• Convey that the child is not "enough."
• Chastise the child for expressing "unacceptable" feelings.
• Ridicule or humiliate the child.
• Convey that the child's thoughts or feelings have no value or importance.
• Attempt to control the child by shame or guilt.
• Over-protect the child and consequently obstruct normal learning and increasing self-reliance.
• Raise a child with no rules at all, and thus no supporting structure, or else rules that are contradictory, bewildering, undiscussable, and oppressive, in either case inhibiting normal growth.
• Deny a child's perception of reality and implicitly encourage the child to doubt his or her mind.
• Treat evident facts as unreal, thus shaking the child's sense of rationality for example, when an alcoholic father stumbles to the dinner table, misses the chair, and falls to the floor as the mother goes on eating or talking as if nothing had happened.
• Terrorize a child with physical violence or the threat of it, thus instilling acute fear as an enduring characteristic at the child's core.
• Treat a child as a sexual object.
• Teach that the child is bad, unworthy, or sinful by nature.
Today millions of men and women who have come out of such childhood experiences are searching for ways to heal their wounds. They recognize that they have entered adult life with a liability — a deficit of self-esteem. Whatever words they use to describe the problem, they know they suffer from some nameless sense of not being "enough," or some haunting emotion of shame or guilt, or a generalized self-distrust, or a diffusive feeling of unworthiness. They sense their lack even if they do not know what precisely self-esteem is, let alone how to nurture and strengthen it within themselves.

A Definition Of Self-Esteem
We who are psychotherapists or teachers seek to fan park in those we work with that innate sense of self-worth that presumably is our human birthright. But that spark is only the anteroom to self-esteem. If we are to do justice to those we work with, we need to help them develop that sense of self-worth into the full experience of self-esteem.
Self-esteem is the experience that we are appropriate to life and the requirements of life.

More specifically, self-esteem is:
1. Confidence in our ability to think and to cope with the challenges of life.
2. Confidence in our right to be happy, the feeling of being worthy, deserving, entitled to assert our needs and wants, and to enjoy the fruits of our efforts.

Self-esteem is a powerful human need. It is a basic human need that makes an essential contribution to the life process; it is indispensable to normal and healthy development; it has survival value.
Lacking positive self-esteem, our psychological growth is stunted. Positive self-esteem operates as, in effect, the immune system of consciousness, providing resistance, strength, and a capacity for regeneration. When self-esteem is low, our resilience in the face of life's adversities is diminished. We crumble before vicissitudes that a healthier sense of self could vanquish. We tend to be more influenced by the desire to avoid pain than to experience joy. Negatives have more power over us than positives.