A Woman in Your Own Right

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A Woman in Your Own Right Page 24

by Anne Dickson


  Anchored self-esteem survives the inevitable fluctuations of acceptance and rejection from others. You can recognise when your self-esteem is low: your inbox is empty, a friend forgets you never take milk in your coffee, a stranger scowls at you . . . and your feeling of worth plummets. You are left wondering what you have done wrong. What have you done to deserve this? This contrasts with those good days when everything you do feels right: you can dismiss a frown or a disapproving comment because you feel resilient and secure enough in yourself.

  Fluctuations of self-esteem in relation to others are connected to the extent to which we feel accepted and loved.

  Self-acceptance It is natural to want to belong, to fit in with those who are important to you. Problems occur only when how acceptable you are depends solely on how others see you and rate you. Then it’s more difficult to take the risk of trying something new: you won’t want to rock the boat. Consider the various roles you have in your life and see if you can identify the spoken and unspoken expectations of those roles. Are you aware of not meeting an important personal need because it would conflict with someone else’s view of you? Do you give a reflected image too much significance and let it undermine your self-esteem?

  You can make a positive decision for yourself and still be haunted by uncertainty. Davina looks in the mirror. She has started a job to make a life of her own which has meant employing someone else to care for her family some of the time. She discovers how much she has relied on reflected approval since she’s now feeling the effects of the disapproval from her particular circle of friends. It makes her question whether being a woman really should mean being a selfless and devoted mother.

  Hilary decided to stay at home and look after her children. Everywhere she sees mothers who manage a career as well. She is tired of feeling she has to justify not going out to work. She looks in the mirror and wonders if she should be doing both and worries that a real woman should be achieving everything at once. She looks at herself and experiences the discomfort of not knowing who she really is any more.

  Sam is single, in her mid-forties, doesn’t have children and has noticed a distinct coldness from her married friends. She has sensed a covert assumption that to have been married and divorced is preferable to remaining unmarried; at least if a man had chosen her once this might have upped her credibility in others’ estimation. All this takes its toll on her self-esteem.

  How much of our behaviour is based on a need for reflected approval and how much is it a choice we make for ourselves. Somewhere there is a balance. What do you see when you look in your mirror?

  Whose eyes reflect back your measure of acceptability? What standards do you have to measure up to? Whose standards do you need to reach in order to qualify for acceptance within each category of your life? Do you have to be happily married? A size 10? A perfect mother? A sparkling hostess? A sexually satisfying partner? A socially-conscious citizen? A charitable neighbour? A grateful daughter? A competent housewife? An inspiring leader? An inventive cook? A reliable employee? An uncomplaining saint? A tower of strength for others? Have a successful career? Boast a hundred friends? Conceal your age well?

  If you can get some idea of how much you depend on others for a feeling of acceptance, you can explore possibilities for building a sense of self-acceptance, not instead of, but alongside acceptance from outside sources. With more balance, you have more emotional room to manoeuvre.

  Lovability also matters. Being loved gives us a feeling of confidence which is unparalleled whereas feeling unloved and undesirable makes us feel miserable, wretched and useless. Feeling loved regenerates itself so that if we feel loved, we feel lovable. This makes us attractive and people warm to us, so we continue being lovable . . . but it works in reverse as well. We are all sensitive to rejection but however much we may try and prevent it happening, rejections, both slight and serious, occur throughout our lives. The following examples give an idea of the kinds of experiences which can rock our self-esteem:

  1 Someone forgets your birthday or an important anniversary.

  2 You are feeling very enthusiastic about something that has happened to you but your partner couldn’t care less.

  3 You reach out to give someone physical affection and they withdraw.

  4 One of your parents continually compares you unfavourably with others.

  5 Your partner criticises your appearance.

  6 You offer to do someone a favour and you are turned down. 7 You are turned down after a job interview.

  8 Someone you find very attractive tells you: ‘I want to keep this platonic’.

  9 You show something you have written or something you have made to someone important in your life and they are clearly unimpressed.

  10 You give someone a present you have chosen carefully but the response is one of indifference.

  11 You don’t get an invitation to a meeting or party to which everyone else seems to have been invited.

  12 You feel like making love but your partner isn’t in the mood.

  Our sense of rejection will be affected by the importance of the particular person rejecting us, our own individual ‘crumple buttons’ (see Chapter 13) and our mood at the time. Sometimes it takes a lot to shift our self-esteem but, at other times, a mere glance or a trivial gesture is enough to trigger a whole rush of past unresolved and unexpressed feelings of rejection. Given that we are bound to encounter rejection in some form or other throughout our lives, it is useful to know how to handle it assertively with long-term and short-term strategies.

  The long-term strategy is to learn the skill of loving yourself, something which we often find problematic. Learning how to be a friend to yourself day-by-day will stand you in good stead in an emergency. Once you have built up a reserve of self-sustenance on the inside, you can withstand many pressures and assaults from the outside. I see this like strengthening our immune system: building emotional immunity allows us to better survive the effects of various viruses – rejections, knocks, isolation, moments of disappointment or being misunderstood by others – to which we will inevitably be exposed in life. A weak emotional immune system makes the impact of such experiences all the greater.

  It can also be important to discover ways to explore and draw comfort from separateness. Do you enjoy your own company? Do you dread periods of solitude or look forward to them as a welcome relief? If you do have some time on your own, do you spend it doing what you enjoy doing – even if that happens to be nothing at all – or do you spend the time fretting and worrying about everyone else? Being on your own is also a good way of finding out what is actually happening on the inside, especially important when so much of our lives is taken up with concern for what is happening outside. Just a few minutes each day, a few hours each week can be enough to remind yourself that there is a part of you to be noticed, to be attended to, listened to and cherished. This part of you need not live up to any expectations: it is fine just as it is. Find out who you are essentially, apart from all the roles and responsibilities you have in your life.

  Short-term strategies for coping with rejection involve keeping afloat in the shallows rather than disappearing into the deep end. There is always a danger of allowing the experience of being rejected to become skewed psychologically into a conviction that somehow we deserved to be rejected because of being inherently rejectable. This makes it imperative to hold on to the knowledge that we are worth being loved, that we are still lovable, even though we may not feel loved at that precise moment.

  One way of doing this is to identify more specifically what you feel in relation to the particular rejection: in other words, to go beyond the word ‘rejected’ and find out what lies underneath. Very often, our deeper feelings are associated more with anger than grief: this realisation makes it easier to sidestep the trap of blaming oneself and to move on emotionally instead of clinging to the misery of it all.

  Then you can arrange to be good to yourself in some way. Here are some practical examples of tried
and tested antidotes:

  • A walk by the sea/in the country

  • A glass of wine

  • Music

  • Phoning a good friend who loves you

  • Being with people who love you

  • Sleep

  • Vigorous exercise

  • Writing out your feelings uncensored (not for sending!)

  • Having a good cry

  • A treat of some kind

  Following on

  1. Use the ideas in the chapter to find three things in your life you could say ‘no’ or ‘yes’ to for yourself. Remember to start with small goals.

  2. Write down a list of situations when you felt rejected. Then consider what exactly you felt at the time: ignored? unheard? unimportant? hurt? resentful? invisible? not good enough? Next, note down what you actually said at the time. Did you express those feelings or not? If not, why not? Finally, think how you would like to have handled what happened more assertively; how might you handle something similar in the future?

  3. Since self-esteem is so much tied up with our need for approval, it is interesting to explore this in more detail. Consider whether there is a person in your life whom you are aware of wanting to please so much that you cannot be yourself and worry constantly about what they might think. Perhaps you feel inhibited and uncomfortable in their company because you believe they don’t like you. With this in mind, answer the following questions: perhaps go through it out loud with a friend.

  a) What does this person like or not like about you?

  b) Is this based on impression or evidence? What sort of evidence?

  c) What difference would it make if this person were to like you?

  d) What do you need to do to get this person to like you? Are you honestly prepared to do it?

  The answers to these questions will tell you whether your worry is absurd or whether you are genuinely worried about the person’s opinion. If this is so, you can practise applying the skills of negative assertion and negative enquiry (see Chapter 13).

  4. Pleasure exercise. Take a large piece of paper and write down, on the left-hand side, a list of twenty pleasures – these can be very simple. Here are some examples: the taste of chocolate, the sound of the wind, sowing seeds, the delight of an ordinary flower like a daisy or pansy, the smell of coffee, an absorbing book, laughing with a close friend, sunshine on your back, the smell or sound of the sea, dancing, holding the hand of a small child, a long hot bath, a cat curled up on your lap, the smell of warm bread, strawberries in season, a sunset, an open fire, clean sheets, singing when you are by yourself, the feeling of peace when everyone has gone to bed, holding a baby, a favourite piece of music, a cuddle, looking at the stars, having your hair washed, silence, skinny-dipping, eating in the open air or watching the world go by.

  When you have written down at least twenty, the next step is to divide the rest of the page into three columns. In the first column put a T or an A which stand for Together or Alone. This means whether you enjoy the pleasure on your own, or whether you need someone else to enjoy it with. If it is a pleasure which can be enjoyed alone or together with someone, put T/A. In the second column put a £ sign – a large £ indicates an expensive pleasure, a small £ sign indicates that the pleasure costs a little money. In the last column, write down how long it is since you enjoyed that particular pleasure. This does not need to be precise – just an idea of whether it is hours, days, weeks or months. Then take the time to see what your list says about your approach to pleasure. Are there opportunities all around you in your everyday life? Are there some things you have not enjoyed for a long time with no good reason? Do you have more pleasure alone or with another person? Do all your pleasures cost money? What do you learn about yourself?

  21

  Assertiveness and Sexuality

  Sex, sex, sex . . . newspapers still titillate our Sundays with it, advertisers exploit it, magazines urge us to be better at it. Though there has been little change in the sensationalism associated with sex, social attitudes to sex have certainly altered since I first wrote this book when I was also running sexuality groups and working as a psycho-sexual counsellor. At that time, this was considered pioneering work. The topic of sexuality had previously been shrouded in more ignorance than information: better left alone, not talked about, hidden, denied, repressed and remaining a dark presence lurking in the cellar somewhere. Researchers in America had then only recently examined sexual behaviour in minute detail in a laboratory environment so that every aspect of the process of sexual arousal could henceforth be identified, measured, catalogued and labelled.

  Their results gave an enormous boost to the emphasis on mechanics of sexual performance. In the intervening years, encouraged by the proliferation of access to pornography through internet sites, the preoccupation with performance has gained so much ground that the idea of sex as an expression of love, warmth, celebration and reciprocal pleasure seems now almost quaint and old-fashioned. We are awash with sexual information but little or no contextual reference to relationship, intimacy, care, respect or love.

  I still believe that sex is one of the most important ways in which we can communicate with another person through our bodies: a loving embrace can afford us relief from tension (sexual and otherwise), reassurance and a feeling of physical and emotional well-being. But these relational aspects of human sexuality suffer from current cultural pressures which persuade us to see sex – like other activities we engage in with others – as an opportunity for showcasing our abilities and talents. The focus is now more on what we can achieve: when, with whom and how successful we can be.

  When I wrote my book on women and sexuality (The Mirror Within), I coined the term ‘Superlay’ to describe how this particular stereotype could pressurise us, as ordinary women, into believing we had to be superb performers in bed. Superlay, as a stereotype, was characterised by being endlessly turned on, always eager for sex, orgasming easily and many times over, hugely desirable and totally in control.

  What I explained then was that this image had been moulded perfectly from male fantasies: this was the kind of woman every man wanted, even if she could be a little disconcerting in the flesh. Superlay remained more in realms of fantasy: the women who commanded huge audiences in television series like Dynasty and Dallas were tough, glamorous, wealthy and powerful: liberated certainly but not overtly sexual.

  In the late 1990s, ‘Sex in the City’ spawned a whole new confidence in millions of women. These Superlay stereotypes came to life: they inspired and gave heart to many ordinary women who, despite having neither the glamour nor the wealth of the fictional heroines, felt permitted to be as raunchy and sexually independent as men. This was hailed as the apogee of female sexual liberation.

  Does it follow that women are now more assertive in sexual relationships? The answer appears to be no: there is certainly more evidence of aggression. A friend of mine, who has been an agony aunt over these decades, tells me that a major change in the vast correspondence she receives every week is now the proportion of boys and young men who write because they’re worried about the size of their penis, having been subjected to mockery or scorn by young women. It seems as ordinary now for young women to go out with the intention to score: to target potential males; to fragment them into ‘tight butts’, ‘six packs’ or ‘dreamy eyes’ and to use them for casual sex without any concern for the human being inside the body. This is one of the repercussions of the dominance of aggression in our culture and the belief that this is the only way to be seen to be powerful regardless of whether you are male or female.

  Has the legacy of Superlay enabled women to be more sexually independent? We may generally feel more permission to take the initiative, to express sexual needs and claim the right to sexual pleasure. However the uncertainty behind the phrase ‘I’d be lost without you’ doesn’t appear to have lost much of its psychological hold. Many women feel that when they do not have a partner, they automatically lose their sexu
al viability and are judged to be sexually unattractive. Only when they have a partner, usually a man, does their sexuality kick into life.

  In addition, you may find yourself hanging on to a relationship in spite of a lot of hurt and hassle simply because you don’t want to be left alone: if this happens your personal validity – as a woman – risks disappearing along with your partner. This uncertainty is evident from early on in our sexual lives: many young girls and young women throughout the world have sex for the first time (and many times after that), not through pride or celebration of their sexuality, but out of anxiety about not belonging or fear of disapproval (or worse).

  Declarations of sexual independence also sit uncomfortably with the fact that many women today feel pressurised to eradicate every wisp of hair and extra ounce of flesh from their bodies to guarantee a partner’s erection; to agree to experimentation with a threesome, for example, or to use pornography as the only way to keep a partner sexually satisfied.

  Finally, we can’t ignore the changes wrought by the development of new technologies in this period. These have enhanced the phenomenon of fragmentation, described in Chapter 19, not only by way of the exponential growth of pornography but also because our means of communicating has altered. On-line relationships offer little possibility of real intimacy: sharing your edited thoughts and pictures is not the same as face-to-face relating. There is no real contact, no possibility of person-to- person communication: you select the fragment of information you want to disclose and engage with someone else’s edited fragment: alter ago meets alter ego.

  Communication in sexual situations

  None of these changes has had much impact on the way we actually speak to each other in a face-to-face sexual context. All the aspects of assertive communication described in earlier chapters are as applicable in the bedroom as they are in the supermarket or office: difficulty with making clear and specific requests; saying ‘no’ clearly and firmly to sexual activity when you do not want it rather than conceding your needs and wants as less important than your partner’s; the need to recognise your feelings of anger, hurt and fear and to express them assertively; the need to be familiar with your body and your responses; not allowing your fear of criticism and disapproval to dominate your relationship; facing the difficulty of not knowing how to make a constructive change or initiate a constructive dialogue in a sexual relationship that has become stuck in a rut and unsatisfying.

 

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