The Six Pillars of Self-Esteem
Page 15
While what is appropriate self-expression varies with the context, in every situation there is a choice between being authentic or inauthentic, real or unreal. If we do not want to face this, of course we will deny that we have such a choice. We will assert that we are helpless. But the choice is always there.
What Self-Assertiveness Is and Is Not
1. In a class society, when we see a superior talking to an inferior, it is the inferior’s eyes that are lowered. It is the slave who looks down, not the master. In the South there was a time when a black man could be beaten for the offense of daring to look directly at a white woman. Seeing is an act of self-assertion and has always been understood as such.
The first and basic act of self-assertion is the assertion of consciousness. This entails the choice to see, to think, to be aware, to send the light of consciousness outward toward the world and inward toward our own being. To ask questions is an act of self-assertion. To challenge authority is an act of self-assertion. To think for oneself—and to stand by what one thinks—is the root of self-assertion. To default on this responsibility is to default on the self at the most basic level.
Note that self-assertiveness should not be confused with mindless rebelliousness. “Self-assertiveness” without consciousness is not self-assertiveness; it is drunk-driving.
Sometimes people who are essentially dependent and fearful choose a form of assertiveness that is self-destructive. It consists of reflexively saying “No!” when their interests would be better served by saying “Yes.” Their only form of self-assertiveness is protest—whether it makes sense or not. We often see this response among teenagers—and among adults who have never matured beyond this teenage level of consciousness. The intent is to protect their boundaries, which is not wrong intrinsically; but the means they adopt leaves them stuck at an arrested stage of development.
While healthy self-assertiveness requires the ability to say no, it is ultimately tested not by what we are against but by what we are for. A life that consists only of a string of negations is a waste and a tragedy. Self-assertiveness asks that we not only oppose what we deplore but that we live and express our values. In this respect, it is intimately tied to the issue of integrity.
Self-assertiveness begins with the act of thinking but must not end there. Self-assertiveness entails bringing ourselves into the world. To aspire is not yet self-assertion, or just barely; but to bring our aspirations into reality is. To hold values is not yet self-assertion, or just barely; to pursue them and stand by them in the world is. One of the great self-delusions is to think of oneself as “a valuer” or “an idealist” while not pursuing one’s values in reality. To dream one’s life away is not self-assertion; to be able to say, at the end, “While my life was happening, I was there, I lived it,” is.
2. To practice self-assertiveness logically and consistently is to be committed to my right to exist, which proceeds from the knowledge that my life does not belong to others and that I am not here on earth to live up to someone else’s expectations. To many people, this is a terrifying responsibility. It means their life is in their own hands. It means that Mother and Father and other authority figures cannot be counted on as protectors. It means they are responsible for their own existence—and for generating their own sense of security. Not fear of this responsibility but surrender to the fear is a chief contributor to the subversion of self-esteem. If I will not stand up for my right to exist—my right to belong to myself—how can I experience a sense of personal dignity? How can I experience a decent level of self-esteem?
* * *
My life does not belong to others and I am not here on earth to live up to someone else’s expectations.
* * *
To practice self-assertiveness consistently I need the conviction that my ideas and wants are important. Unfortunately, this conviction is often lacking. When we were young, many of us received signals conveying that what we thought and felt or wanted was not important. We were taught, in effect, “What you want isn’t important; what’s important is what others want.” Perhaps we were intimidated by accusations of “selfishness” when we attempted to stand up for ourselves.
It often takes courage to honor what we want and to fight for it. For many people, self-surrender and self-sacrifice are far easier. They do not require the integrity and responsibility that intelligent selfishness requires.
A man of forty-eight who has worked hard for many years to support his wife and three children dreams of quitting his demanding and stressful job when he turns fifty and taking a job that will earn less money but that will afford him some of the leisure he has never permitted himself. He has always wanted more time to read, travel, and think, without the pressure of feeling he was neglecting some urgent matter at work. When he announces his intention at a family dinner, everyone becomes agitated and has only a single concern: How will each one’s standard of living be affected if he takes a job that pays less money. No one shows interest in his context, needs, or feelings. “How can I stand against my family?” he asks himself. “Isn’t a man’s first duty to be a good provider?” He wants his family to think he is a good man, and if the price is to relinquish his own yearnings, he is willing to pay it. He does not even have to reflect about it. The habit of duty has been ingrained across a lifetime. In the space of one dinner conversation, he steps across a threshold into the beginning of old age. As a sop to the pain he cannot entirely bury, he tells himself, “At least I’m not selfish. Selfishness is evil—isn’t it?”
The sad irony is that when people cease to honor or even attend to their deepest needs and wants, they sometimes become selfish not in the noble but in the petty sense, grasping at trivia after they have surrendered their deeper yearnings, rarely even knowing what they have betrayed and given up.
3. Within an organization, self-assertiveness is required not merely to have a good idea but to develop it, fight for it, work to win supporters for it, do everything within one’s power to see that it gets translated into reality. It is the lack of this practice that causes so many potential contributions to die before they are born.
As a consultant, when I am asked to work with a team that has difficulty functioning effectively on some project, I often find that one source of the dysfunction is one or more people who do not really participate, do not really put themselves into the undertaking, because of some feeling that they do not have the power to make a difference, do not believe that their contribution can matter. In their passivity they became saboteurs. A project manager remarked to me, “I’d rather worry about handling some egomaniac who thinks he’s the whole project than struggle with some self-doubting but talented individual whose insecurities stop him from kicking in what he’s got to offer.”
Without appropriate self-assertiveness, we are spectators, not participants. Healthy self-esteem asks that we leap into the arena—that we be willing to get our hands dirty.
4. Finally, self-assertion entails the willingness to confront rather than evade the challenges of life and to strive for mastery. When we expand the boundaries of our ability to cope, we expand self-efficacy and self-respect. When we commit ourselves to new areas of learning, when we take on tasks that stretch us, we raise personal power. We thrust ourselves further into the universe. We assert our existence.
When we are attempting to understand something and we hit a wall, it is an act of self-assertiveness to persevere. When we undertake to acquire new skills, absorb new knowledge, extend the reach of our mind across unfamiliar spaces—when we commit ourselves to moving to a higher level of competence—we are practicing self-assertiveness.
* * *
Healthy self-esteem asks that we leap into the arena—that we be willing to get our hands dirty.
* * *
When we learn how to be in an intimate relationship without abandoning our sense of self, when we learn how to be kind without being self-sacrificing, when we learn how to cooperate with others without betraying our standards and c
onvictions, we are practicing self-assertiveness.
Fear of Self-Assertiveness
The American tradition is one of individualism, and some expressions of self-assertiveness are relatively more acceptable in the United States than in some other cultures. Not all cultures attach the value to the individual that we do. Not all cultures see equal merit in self-expression. Even in the United States, many forms of self-assertiveness are more acceptable for men than for women. Women are still often penalized when they practice the natural self-assertiveness that is their birthright as human beings.
In our society or any other, if one believes that it is more desirable to fit in than to stand out, one will not embrace the virtue of self-assertiveness. If one’s primary source of safety and security is through affiliation with the tribe, the family, the group, the community, the company, the collective, then even self-esteem can be perceived as threatening and frightening—because it signifies individuation (self-realization, the unfolding of personal identity), therefore separateness.
Individuation raises the specter of isolation to those who have not achieved it and do not understand that far from being the enemy of community, it is its necessary precondition. A healthy society is a union of self-respecting individuals. It is not a coral bush.
A well-realized man or woman is one who has moved successfully along two lines of development that serve and complement each other: the track of individuation and the track of relationship. Autonomy, on the one hand; the capacity for intimacy and human connectedness, on the other.
Persons with an underdeveloped sense of identity often tell themselves, if I express myself, I may evoke disapproval. If I love and affirm myself, I may evoke resentment. If I am too happy with myself, I may evoke jealousy. If I stand out, I may be compelled to stand alone. They remain frozen in the face of such possibilities—and pay a terrible price in loss of self-esteem.
In this country psychologists understand such fears, which are very common, but we (some of us) tend to see them as evidence of immaturity. We say: Have the courage to be who you are. This sometimes brings us into conflict with spokespersons for other cultural perspectives. When I wrote about the challenges of individuation in Honoring the Self, a Hawaiian psychologist objected, saying, in effect, “How American!” He argued that his culture places a higher value on “social harmony.”
While the term “individuation” is modern, the idea it expresses is at least as old as Aristotle. We think of the striving of the human being toward wholeness, toward completion, an internal thrust toward self-realization or self-actualization reminiscent of Aristotle’s concept of entelechy. The thrust toward self-realization is intimately associated with our highest expressions of artistic and scientific genius. In the modern world, it is also associated with political freedom, with the liberation of humankind from centuries of servitude to one kind of tribe or another.
Examples
Some people stand and move as if they have no right to the space they occupy. Some speak as if their intention is that you not be able to hear them, either because they mumble or speak faintly or both. Some signal at the most crudely obvious level that they do not feel they have a right to exist. They embody lack of self-assertiveness in its most extreme form. Their poor self-esteem is obvious. In therapy, when such men and women learn to move and speak with more assurance, they invariably report (after some initial anxiety) a rise in self-esteem.
Not all manifestations of non-self-assertiveness are obvious. The average life is marked by thousands of unremembered silences, surrenders, capitulations, and misrepresentations of feelings and beliefs that corrode dignity and self-respect. When we do not express ourselves, do not assert our being, do not stand up for our values in contexts where it is appropriate to do so, we inflict wounds on our sense of self. The world does not do it to us—we do it to ourselves.
A young man sits alone in the darkness of a movie theater, deeply inspired by the drama unfolding before him. The story touches him so deeply that tears come to his eyes. He knows that in a week or so he will want to come back and see this film again. In the lobby he spots a friend who was at the same screening, and they greet each other. He searches his friend’s face for clues to his feelings about the movie; but the face is blank. The friend inquires, “How’d you like the picture?” The young man feels an instant stab of fear; he does not want to appear “uncool.” He does not want to say the truth—“I loved it. It touched me very deeply.” So instead he shrugs indifferently and says, “Not bad.” He does not know that he has just slapped his own face; or rather, he does not know it consciously. His diminished self-esteem knows it.
* * *
Some people stand and move as if they have no right to the space they occupy.
* * *
A woman is at a cocktail party where she hears someone make an ugly racial slur that causes her inwardly to cringe. She wants to say, “I found that offensive.” She knows that evil gathers momentum by being uncontested. But she is afraid of evoking disapproval. In embarrassment she looks away and says nothing. Later, to appease her sense of uneasiness, she tells herself, “What difference does it make? The man was a fool.” But her self-esteem knows what difference it makes.
A college student goes to a lecture given by a writer whose work the student greatly admires. Afterward, he joins the group who surround the writer with questions. He wants to say how much this woman’s books mean to him, how much he has benefited from them, what a difference they have made in his life. But he remains silent, telling himself, “Of what importance would my reaction be to a famous writer?” She looks at him expectantly, but he remains awkwardly silent. He senses that if he spoke… who knows what might happen? Perhaps she would care. But fear wins, and he tells himself, “I don’t want to be pushy.”
A married woman hears her husband putting forth some view she regards as both misguided and objectionable. She struggles with an impulse to challenge him, to express her own idea. But she is afraid to “rock the boat” of their marriage, afraid her husband may withdraw approval if she disagrees with him. “A good wife,” her mother had taught her, “supports her husband—right or wrong.” She had once heard her minister declare in his Sunday sermon, “A woman’s relationship to her husband should be as man’s relationship to God.” The memory of these voices still resonates in her mind. She remains silent, as she has remained silent on such occasions in the past, and does not realize that the root of her vague sense of guilt is the knowledge of her self-betrayal.
A Personal Example
I have already mentioned the relationship that I began with Ayn Rand a month before my twentieth birthday and that came to an explosive parting of the ways eighteen years later. Among the many benefits that I received from her in the early years, one was an experience of profound visibility. I felt understood and appreciated by her to an extent that was without precedent. What made her response so important was the high esteem in which I held her; I admired her enormously.
Only gradually did I realize that she did not tolerate disagreement well. Not among intimates. She did not require full agreement among acquaintances, but with anyone who wanted to be truly close, enormous enthusiasm was expected for every deed and utterance. I did not notice the steps by which I learned to censor negative reactions to some of her behavior—when, for example, I found her self-congratulatory remarks excessive or her lack of empathy disquieting or her pontificating unworthy of her. I did not give her the kind of corrective feedback everyone needs from time to time; in its absence we can become too insulated from reality, as she did.
In later years, after the break, I often reflected on why I did not speak up more often—I who was (at least relatively) freer with her than anyone else in our circle. The simple truth was, I valued her esteem too much to place it in jeopardy. I had, in effect, become addicted to it. It seems to me in retrospect that she had a genius for inspiring just such addictions by the subtlety, artistry, and astonishing insightfulness with which she cou
ld make people feel better understood and appreciated than they had ever felt before. I do not deny personal responsibility; no one can be seduced without consent. In exchange for the intoxicating gratification of being treated as a demigod by the person I valued above all others and whose good opinion I treasured above all others, I leashed my self-assertiveness in ways that over time were damaging to my self-regard.
* * *
The temptation to self-betrayal can sometimes be worst with those about whom we care the most.
* * *
In the end, I learned an invaluable lesson. I learned that surrenders of this kind do not work; they merely postpone confrontations that are inevitable and necessary. I learned that the temptation to self-betrayal can sometimes be worst with those about whom we care the most. I learned that no amount of admiration for another human being can justify sacrificing one’s judgment.
Sentence Completions to Facilitate Self-Assertiveness
Here are sentence stems that can facilitate reaching a deeper understanding of self-assertiveness, as well as energizing its practice.
WEEK 1
Self-assertiveness to me means—
If I lived 5 percent more self-assertively today—
If someone had told me my wants were important—
If I had the courage to treat my wants as important—