The Six Pillars of Self-Esteem

by Branden, Nathaniel

  When we think of child abuse we think of children who are physically abused or sexually molested. That such abuse can be catastrophic for a child’s self-esteem is widely recognized. It evokes the experience of traumatic powerlessness, the feeling of nonownership of one’s own body, and a sense of agonizing defenselessness that can last a lifetime.

  However, a more comprehensive examination of what constitutes child abuse would have to include the following items, all of which throw up severe obstacles to the growth of a child’s self-esteem. Parents perpetrate child abuse 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.

  Overprotect the child and consequently obstruct normal learning and increasing self-reliance.

  Underprotect the child and consequently obstruct normal ego development.

  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.

  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.

  When a child’s basic needs are frustrated, as they invariably are when subjected to the above treatment, the result is acute pain. Often embedded in that pain is the feeling: Something is wrong with me. Somehow I am defective. And the tragedy of a destructive self-fulfilling prophecy is set in motion.

  Urgent Issues

  As I said earlier, my goal in this chapter has not been to offer a course on child-rearing. My goal has been to isolate certain issues that my experience as a psychotherapist has taught me are often fateful for a young person’s self-esteem.

  When we listen to the stories of adults in therapy, noting the historical circumstances under which tragic decisions were sometimes made, it is not difficult to see what was missing and needed during the childhood years. By extrapolating from wounds, as it were, we can deepen our understanding of what prevents wounds from occurring.

  Over two decades ago, in Breaking Free, I published a list of questions I used in psychotherapy to facilitate explorations into the childhood origins of poor self-esteem. I include here a revised and slightly expanded version of that list, as a kind of summing up of some, although not all, of the issues we have been addressing. They can be useful stimulants to self-examination for individuals as well as evocative guides for parents.

  1. When you were a child, did your parents’ manner of behaving and of dealing with you give you the impression that you were living in a world that was rational, predictable, intelligible? Or a world that was contradictory, bewildering, unknowable? In your home, did you have the sense the evident facts were acknowledged and respected or avoided and denied?

  2. Were you taught the importance of learning to think and of cultivating your intelligence? Did your parents provide you with intellectual stimulation and convey the idea that the use of your mind can be an exciting adventure? Did anything in your home life suggest such a perspective, if only implicitly? Was consciousness valued?

  * * *

  Were you encouraged toward obedience or toward self-responsibility?

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  3. Were you encouraged to think independently, to develop your critical faculty? Or were you encouraged to be obedient rather than mentally active and questioning? (Supplementary questions: Did your parents project that it was more important to conform to what other people believed than to discover what is true? When your parents wanted you to do something, did they appeal to your understanding and give you reasons, when possible and appropriate, for their request? Or did they communicate, in effect, “Do it because I say so?”) Were you encouraged toward obedience or toward self-responsibility?

  4. Did you feel free to express your views openly, without fear of punishment? Were self-expression and self-assertiveness safe?

  5. Did your parents communicate their disapproval of your thoughts, desires, or behavior by means of humor, teasing, or sarcasm? Were you taught to associate self-expression with humiliation?

  6. Did your parents treat you with respect? (Supplementary questions: Were your thoughts, needs, and feelings given consideration? Was your dignity as a human being acknowledged? When you expressed ideas or opinions, were they taken seriously? Were your likes and dislikes, whether or not they were acceded to, treated with respect? Were your desires responded to thoughtfully and, again, with respect?) Were you implicitly encouraged to respect yourself, to take your thoughts seriously, to take the exercise of your mind seriously?

  7. Did you feel that you were psychologically visible to your parents, seen and understood? Did you feel real to them? (Supplementary questions: Did your parents seem to make a genuine effort to understand you? Did your parents seem authentically interested in you as a person? Could you talk to your parents about issues of importance and receive concerned, meaningful understanding from them?) Was there congruence between your sense of who you were and the sense of who you were conveyed by your parents?

  8. Did you feel loved and valued by your parents, in the sense that you experienced yourself as a source of pleasure to them? Or did you feel unwanted, perhaps a burden? Did you feel hated? Or did you feel that you were simply an object of indifference? Were you implicitly encouraged to experience yourself as lovable?

  9. Did your parents deal with you fairly and justly? (Supplementary questions: Did your parents resort to threats to control your behavior—either threats of immediate punitive action on their part, threats in terms of long-range consequences for your life, or threats of supernatural punishments, such as going to hell? Were you appreciated when you did well, or merely criticized when you did badly? Were your parents willing to admit it when they were wrong? Or was it against their policy to concede that they were wrong?) Did you feel yourself to be living in a rational, just, and “sane” environment?

  10. Was it your parents’ practice to punish you or discipline you by striking or beating you? Was fear or terror intentionally evoked in you as a means of manipulation and control?

  11. Did your parents project that they believed in your basic competence and goodness? Or that they saw you as disappointing, ineffectual, worthless, or bad? Did you feel that your parents were on your side, supporting the best within you?

  12. Did your parents convey the sense that they believed in your intellectual and creative potentialities? Or did they project that they saw you as mediocre or stupid or inadequate? Did you feel that your mind and abilities were appreciated?

  13. In your parents’ expectations concerning your behavior and performance, did they take cognizance of your knowledge; needs, interests, and circumstances? Or were you confronted with expectations and demands that were overwhelming and beyond your ability to satisfy? Were you encouraged to treat your wants and needs as important?

  14. Did your parents’ behavior and manner of dealing with you tend to produce guilt in you? Were you implicitly (or explicitly) encouraged to see yourself as bad?

  15. Did your parents’ behavior and manner of dealing with you tend to produce fear in you? Were you encouraged to think, not in terms of gaining values or satisfaction, but in terms of avoiding pain or disapproval?

  16. Did your parents respect your intellectual and physical privacy? Were your dignity and rights respected?

  17. Did your parents project that it was desirable for you to think well of yourself—in effect, to have self-esteem? Or were you cautioned against valuing yourself, encouraged to be “humble”? Was se
lf-esteem a value in your home?

  18. Did your parents convey that what a person made of his or her life and what you, specifically, made of your life, was important? (Supplementary questions: Did your parents project that great things are possible for human beings, and specifically that great things were possible for you? Did your parents give you the impression that life could be exciting, challenging, a rewarding adventure?) Were you offered an uplifting vision of what was possible in life?

  19. Did your parents instill in you a fear of the world, a fear of other people? Were you given the sense that the world is a malevolent place?

  20. Were you urged to be open in the expression of your emotions and desires? Or were your parents’ behavior and manner of treating you such as to make you fear emotional self-assertiveness and openness or to regard it as inappropriate? Were emotional honesty, self-expression, and self-acceptance supported?

  21. Were your mistakes accepted as a normal part of the learning process? Or as something you were taught to associate with contempt, ridicule, punishment? Were you encouraged in a fear-free approach to new challenges and new learning?

  22. Did your parents encourage you in the direction of having a healthy, affirmative attitude toward sex and toward your own body? A negative attitude? Or did they treat the entire subject as nonexistent? Did you feel supported in a happy and positive attitude toward your physical being and evolving sexuality?

  23. Did your parents’ manner of dealing with you tend to develop and strengthen your sense of your masculinity or femininity? Or to frustrate and diminish it? If you were male, did your parents convey that that was desirable? If you were female, did they convey that that was desirable?

  24. Did your parents encourage you to feel that your life belonged to you? Or were you encouraged to believe that you were merely a family asset and that your achievements were significant only insofar as they brought glory to your parents? (Supplementary question: Were you treated as a family resource, or as an end in yourself?) Were you encouraged to understand that you are not here on earth to live up to someone else’s expectations?

  Strategic Detachment

  Many children undergo experiences that place enormous obstacles in the way of the development of self-esteem. Everyone knows this. A child may find the world of parents and other adults incomprehensible and threatening. The self is not nurtured but attacked. The will to be conscious and efficacious is assaulted. After a number of unsuccessful attempts to understand adult policies, statements, and behavior, many children give up—and take the blame for their feelings of helplessness.

  Often they sense, miserably, desperately, and inarticulately, that something is terribly wrong—with their elders, or with themselves, or with something. What they often come to feel is: “I’ll never understand other people. I’ll never be able to do what they expect of me. I don’t know what’s right or wrong, and I’m never going to know.”

  * * *

  To persevere with the will to understand in the face of obstacles is the heroism of consciousness.

  * * *

  The heroic child who continues to struggle to make sense out of the world and the people in it, however, is developing a powerful source of strength, no matter what the anguish or bewilderment experienced along the way. Caught in a particularly cruel, frustrating, and irrational environment, he or she will doubtless feel alienated from many of the people in the immediately surrounding world, and legitimately so. But the child will not feel alienated from reality, will not feel, at the deepest level, incompetent to live—or at least he or she has a decent chance to avoid that fate. To persevere with the will to understand in the face of obstacles is the heroism of consciousness.

  Often children who survive extremely adverse childhoods have learned a particular survival strategy. I call it “strategic detachment.” This is not the withdrawal from reality that leads to psychological disturbance, but an intuitively calibrated disengagement from noxious aspects of their family life or other aspects of their world. They somehow know, This is not all there is. They hold the belief that a better alternative exists somewhere and that someday they will find their way to it. They persevere in that idea. They somehow know Mother is not all women, Father is not all men, this family does not exhaust the possibilities of human relationships—there is life beyond this neighborhood. This does not spare them suffering in the present, but it allows them not to be destroyed by it. Their strategic detachment does not guarantee that they will never know feelings of powerlessness, but it helps them not to be stuck there.

  We admire such children. But as parents we would like to offer our own children happier options.

  Parenting as a Vehicle of Personal Evolution

  In an earlier chapter I outlined the key ideas or beliefs most consequential for self-esteem. It follows that a family in which these ideas are communicated, as well as exemplified in the adult’s practice, is one in which children’s self-esteem is nurtured. A child who grows up in this philosophical context has an enormous developmental advantage.

  However, ideas and values are most powerfully communicated when they are embedded into family life, rooted in the being of the parents. Regardless of what we think we’re teaching, we teach what we are.

  This fact can be turned around and looked at from another perspective.

  Almost any important task can be used as a vehicle for personal development. Work can be a path for personal growth and development; so can marriage; so can child-rearing. We can choose to make any of them a spiritual discipline—a discipline in the service of our own evolution. We can take the principles that build self-esteem and use our work as an arena in which to apply them—with the result that both performance and self-esteem will rise. We can take the same principles and apply them in our marriage—with the result that the relationship will flourish (other things being equal) and self-esteem will rise. We can take the principles that raise self-esteem in ourselves, and apply them to our interactions with our children.

  We need not pretend to our children that we are “perfect.” We can acknowledge our struggles and admit our mistakes. The likelihood is that the self-esteem of everyone in the family will benefit.

  If we choose to bring a (5 percent!) higher level of consciousness to dealings with our children—to what we say and how we respond—what might we do differently?

  If we choose to bring a higher level of self-acceptance to our life, what might we convey to our children about self-acceptance?

  If we choose to bring a higher level of self-responsibility to our parenting (rather than always blaming our mate or our children), what example might we set?

  If we are more self-assertive, more authentic, what might our children learn about being genuine?

  If we operate at a higher level of purposefulness, what might our children learn about goal achievement and an active orientation toward life?

  If we bring a higher level of integrity to the task of parenting, in what ways might our children benefit?

  And if we do all of this, in what ways might we benefit?

  The answer to this last is simple: In supporting and nurturing the self-esteem of our children, we support and nurture our own.

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  Self-Esteem in the Schools

  To many children, school represents a “second chance”—an opportunity to acquire a better sense of self and a better vision of life than was offered in their home. A teacher who projects confidence in a child’s competence and goodness can be a powerful antidote to a family in which such confidence is lacking and in which perhaps the opposite perspective is conveyed. A teacher who treats boys and girls with respect can provide enlightenment for a child struggling to understand human relationships who comes from a home where such respect is nonexistent. A teacher who refuses to accept a child’s negative self-concept and relentlessly holds to a better view of the child’s potential has the power—sometimes—to save a life. A client once said to me, “It was my fourth-grade teacher who made me
aware a different kind of humanity existed than my family—she gave me a vision to inspire me.”

  But for some children, school is a legally enforced incarceration at the hands of teachers who lack either the self-esteem or the training or both to do their jobs properly. These are teachers who do not inspire but humiliate. They do not speak the language of courtesy and respect but of ridicule and sarcasm. With invidious comparisons they flatter one student at the expense of another. With unmanaged impatience they deepen a child’s terror of making mistakes. They have no other notion of discipline than threats of pain. They do not motivate by offering values but by evoking fear. They do not believe in a child’s possibilities; they believe only in limitations. They do not light fires in minds, they extinguish them. Who cannot recall encountering at least one such teacher during one’s school years?

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  Of any professional group it is teachers who have shown the greatest receptivity to the importance of self-esteem.

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  Most teachers want to make a positive contribution to the minds entrusted to their care. If they sometimes do harm, it is not by intention. And today most are aware that one of the ways they can contribute is by nurturing the child’s self-esteem. They know that children who believe in themselves, and whose teachers project a positive view of their potential, do better in school than children without these advantages. Indeed, of any professional group it is teachers who have shown the greatest receptivity to the importance of self-esteem. But what nurtures self-esteem in the classroom is not self-evident.

  I have stressed that “feel good” notions are harmful rather than helpful. Yet if one examines the proposals offered to teachers on how to raise students’ self-esteem, many are the kind of trivial nonsense that gives self-esteem a bad name, such as praising and applauding a child for virtually everything he or she does, dismissing the importance of objective accomplishments, handing out gold stars on every possible occasion, and propounding an “entitlement” idea of self-esteem that leaves it divorced from both behavior and character. One of the consequences of this approach is to expose the whole self-esteem movement in the schools to ridicule.