The Six Pillars of Self-Esteem

by Branden, Nathaniel

  Once, stepping into the street with my last client of the day and noticing how chilly it had become, I said to the young man, impulsively and quite untypically, “What! You came out without a sweater?” Before my startled client could reply, I said, “Stop. Don’t answer. I didn’t say that. My mother said that.” We both laughed. For a brief moment, my mother-self had taken over my consciousness.

  In more serious ways, of course, this happens all the time. Long after our mother may have died, we play her messages in our head and often imagine they are our own, failing to realize that the voice is hers, not ours, and that it is her perspective, her values, her orientation that we have internalized and allowed to take up residence in our psyche.

  The father-self is the component of the psyche containing an internalization of aspects of the personality, perspective, and values of an individual’s father (or other older male “father figures” who had an influence and impact during childhood).

  I once had a client who, when he was kind and compassionate with his girlfriend, later complained of feeling “guilty” about it, which was a puzzling and unusual reaction. What we learned was that the source of his “guilt” was an unrecognized father-self who sneered at him and said, in effect, “Women are to be used, not treated as persons. What kind of man are you?” The client’s struggle became to distinguish his own voice from that of his father-self’s.

  This list of subpersonalities is not meant to be exhaustive but merely to indicate the ones we work with most often in our practice. What each of these subselves needs from us is understanding, acceptance, respect, and benevolence, and in our therapy we have developed techniques to achieve this result.

  A few years ago, Devers identified two other subpersonalities that we find it productive to work with. Technically they are not subpersonalities in quite the same sense as those listed above, but functionally they can be addressed the same way. They are the outer self and the inner self.

  The outer self is the component of the psyche that is expressed through the self we present to the world. Very simply, the outer self is the self other people see. It may be a highly congruent and appropriate vehicle for the expression of the inner self in the world, or it may be a highly armored and defended distortion of the inner self.

  The inner self is the self only we can see and experience; the private self; the self as subjectively perceived. (A powerful sentence stem: If my outer self expressed more of my inner self in the world—.)

  A central aspect of our therapy is balancing or integrating subpersonalities. This is a process of working with subselves toward a number of interrelated ends, which include:

  1. Learning to recognize a particular subpersonality, to isolate and identify it within the totality of one’s experience.

  2. Understanding the relationship that exists between the adult conscious self and this particular subpersonality (for example, conscious, semiconscious, or unconscious, accepting or rejecting, benevolent or hostile).

  3. Identifying the salient traits of the subpersonality, such as chief concerns, dominant emotions, characteristic ways of responding.

  4. Identifying unmet needs or wants of the subpersonality relative to the adult conscious self (for example, to be heard, listened to, accepted with respect and compassion).

  5. Identifying destructive behavior on the part of the subpersonality when important needs and wants are ignored or unmet by the conscious adult-self.

  6. Developing a relationship between the adult conscious self and the subpersonality of consciousness, acceptance, respect, benevolence, and open communication.

  7. Identifying the relationship existing between a particular subpersonality and the various others in the psyche and resolving any conflicts between them (through dialoguing, sentence-completion work, and mirror work).

  Devers developed a particularly effective way to allow clients to have dialogues with their subselves. Mirror work with subpersonalities is a form of psychodrama, entailing an altered state of consciousness, in which the client/subject sits facing a mirror, enters the consciousness (ego state) of a particular subpersonality, and in that state speaks to the adult conscious self seen in the mirror, almost always using sentence completions (for example, As I sit here looking at you—; One of the ways you treat me as Mother did is—; One of the things I want from you and have never gotten is—; If I felt accepted by you—; If I felt you had compassion for my struggles—).

  * * *

  We sometimes find that the process of self-acceptance is blocked and we do not know why.

  * * *

  Whether working with a younger self, an opposite-gender-self, or a parent-self toward the end of integration and a greater overall experience of wholeness, the steps are always the same, in principle, and are indicated above. Through this process we convert disowned subselves from sources of turmoil and conflict into positive resources that can energize and enrich us.

  Can we become accomplished at the practice of self-acceptance without learning about subpersonalities? Of course. If we learn to accept and respect our internal signals, to be fully present to our own experience, that is what self-esteem asks of us as far as self-acceptance is concerned.

  However, we sometimes find that the process of self-acceptance is blocked and we do not know why. Mysterious voices inside our head generate relentless self-criticism. Self-acceptance feels like an ideal we can never fully realize. When this happens, working with subpersonalities can become an avenue to breakthrough.

  In psychotherapy subpersonality work can be invaluable, since one of the barriers to growing in self-esteem can be parental voices bombarding the individual with critical and even hostile messages. As therapists we need to know how to turn those negative voices off—and turn an adversarial mother- or father-self into a positive resource.

  Skills a Self-Esteem-Oriented Therapist Needs

  There are basic skills that every psychotherapist needs to do his or her work effectively: human relationship skills such as building rapport, creating an atmosphere of safety and acceptance, and conveying a perspective of hope and optimism. Then there are the skills a therapist needs to address specific problems, such as sexual difficulties, obsessive-compulsive disorders, or career problems.

  If a therapist sees the building of self-esteem as central to his or her work, there are specific issues that need to be addressed. They can be summarized in the form of questions:

  By what means do I propose to assist my client in living more consciously?

  How will I teach self-acceptance?

  How will I facilitate a higher level of self-responsibility?

  How will I encourage a higher level of self-assertiveness?

  How will I contribute to the client operating at a higher level of purposefulness?

  How will I inspire greater integrity in everyday living?

  What can I do to nurture autonomy?

  How can I contribute to the client’s enthusiasm for life?

  How can I awaken blocked positive potentials?

  How can I assist the client to deal with conflicts and challenges in ways that will extend his or her field of comfort, competence, and mastery?

  How do I assist the client in freeing him- or herself from irrational fears?

  How do I assist the client in freeing him- or herself from the lingering pain of old wounds and traumas, perhaps originating in childhood?

  How can I assist the client to recognize, accept, and integrate denied and disowned aspects of the self?

  By the same token, a client wishing to assess his or her own therapy could utilize the standards implicit in these questions to examine a therapeutic approach or the personal progress being made with this approach. Thus: Am I learning to live more consciously? Am I learning greater self-acceptance? Does my therapist’s manner of dealing with me contribute to my experience of autonomy and empowerment? And so on.

  Fear, Pain, and the Amelioration of Negatives

  Irrational fears almost inevita
bly have a negative effect on our sense of ourselves. Conversely, the elimination of irrational fears causes self-esteem to rise. This is one of the basic tasks of therapy.

  * * *

  Unhealing pain from the past represents yet another barrier in the quest for stronger self-esteem.

  * * *

  Unhealing pain from the past, because of the sense of debilitation it often provokes and the defenses people typically set against it, represents yet another barrier in the quest for stronger self-esteem. When we are able to reduce or eliminate the pain of psychological wounds, self-esteem tends to rise.

  * * *

  When we eliminate negatives, we clear the way for the emergence of positives, and when we cultivate positives, negatives often weaken or disappear.

  * * *

  In working with the issues itemized in the above questions, we constantly move back and forth between what I call the “positive” issues (for example, learning to live more consciously) and the “negative” ones (for example, eliminating irrational fears). They are interwoven at every point. It is worth isolating them conceptually for purposes of discussion and analysis, but in reality they do not operate in isolation. When we eliminate negatives, we clear the way for the emergence of positives, and when we cultivate positives, negatives often weaken or disappear.

  In recent years significant breakthroughs in psychopharmacology have been achieved, with implications for the amelioration of some “negatives,” particularly among the severely disturbed, the origins of whose problems is surmised to be biochemical imbalances. Many men and women have been enabled to function in the world who could not do so before. But this field is not without controversy. Opponents of the claims made by enthusiasts assert that they are often grossly exaggerated, are not supported by reviews of the research, and that the dangerous side effects of some of these psychopharmacplogical agents are denied or minimized.* I have treated clients before and after their anxiety, depression, or obsessive-compulsive reactions were reduced or eliminated (or masked?) by chemical agents, but what has always struck me is that their fundamental self-esteem problems (and personality structure) remained, quite apart from whether they “felt” better or not. However, one of the therapeutic benefits of their medication, in addition to the alleviation of suffering, is that it sometimes made them more capable of participating in psychotherapy. The bad news is that sometimes it facilitated their flights from real problems, the solutions for which demanded more of them than the ingestion of a pill.

  Methodology evolves and we will continue to discover new ways to achieve our goals in therapy. My primary focus in this chapter is with the question of what our goals need to be. I have wanted to convey basic guiding principles for a self-esteem-based approach.

  The Therapy of the Future

  As consciousness of the importance of self-esteem spreads through our culture, it is a foregone conclusion that more psychotherapists will be asked by their clients, “How can I grow in self-esteem?” There will be increasing demand for a technology specifically addressed to this issue. But first, there must be an understanding of what, precisely, self-esteem is, and what its healthy emergence depends on.

  For example, there is an approach to self-esteem that thinks primarily in terms of assisting the client to grow in practical efficacy—that is, to acquire new skills. This is an important aspect of self-esteem therapy, to be sure, but it is only an aspect. If the client is living hypocritically and dishonestly, new skills will not fill the void in his or her sense of worth. Or, if the client has internalized the hypercritical voice of Mother or Father (represented by a mother-self or a father-self), a feeling of basic inadequacy or worthlessness can coexist with high achievement. Or, if the client thinks of competence and worth only in terms of specific knowledge and skills, but not the underlying mental processes that make them possible, a deep feeling of inefficacy can coexist with any number of acquired abilities. Regarding this last point: When we say that self-efficacy is trust in one’s competence to cope with the basic challenges of life, we are anchoring this component of self-esteem not in specific knowledge or skills but in one’s ability to think, make decisions, learn, and persevere in the face of difficulties, which are matters of process, not content. An effective self-esteem therapy has to be process focused, but it has to be more than that. It has to be comprehensive enough to address not only issues of competence but also of worth—self-respect: confidence that one deserves love, success, and happiness.

  Another tradition has it that self-esteem is the “reflected appraisals” of significant others. Then a therapist might logically tell the client, “You must learn how to make yourself likable to other people.” In reality, however, few therapists would make this statement; nor would they say, “Through therapy you will learn how to manipulate people so expertly that the overwhelming majority will have no choice but to like you—and then you will have self-esteem!” And yet, if one really believes that self-esteem is a gift from others, why wouldn’t one say it? The answer, I suspect, is that no matter how “other directed” one may be theoretically, somewhere there is the implicit knowledge that the approval each of us needs is from within. When we are children, we are dependent on others for the satisfaction of most of our needs. Some children, are more independent than others, but no child can have the level of independence possible to an adult. As we mature, we become “self-supporting” in more areas, including self-esteem. If we develop properly, we transfer the source of approval from the world to ourselves; we shift from the external to the internal. But if one does not understand the nature and roots of adult self-esteem, but thinks in terms of “reflected appraisals,” one is at a severe disadvantage when it comes to putting theory into effective practice.

  * * *

  If we develop properly, we transfer the source of approval from the world to ourselves; we shift from the external to the internal.

  * * *

  Some psychotherapists identify self-esteem exclusively with self-acceptance and treat it in effect as a birthright, with no further effort required of the individual. This approach conveys a very limited view of what self-esteem is and requires. Important as self-acceptance is, the client will be left to wonder why it does not satisfy the hunger for something more—some height the client may yearn for but have no inkling of how to reach, and no guidance.

  For these reasons, I recommend that a person seeking professional assistance in raising self-esteem, which is an eminently worthy and admirable undertaking, would do well to interview a prospective therapist and ask these questions:

  What do you understand “self-esteem” to mean?

  What do you think healthy self-esteem depends on?

  What will we do together that will have a positive effect on my self-esteem?

  What are your reasons for thinking so?

  Any conscientious professional will respect these questions.

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  Self-Esteem and Culture

  One way to deepen our understanding of the themes with which this book has been concerned is to look at self-esteem as it relates to and is affected by culture.

  Let us begin by considering the idea of self-esteem itself. It is not an idea—let alone an ideal—one finds in all cultures. It emerged in the West only recently and is still far from well understood.

  In medieval times, “self” as we understand the idea still lay sleeping in the human psyche. The basic mind-set was tribal, not individualistic. Each person was born into a distinct and unchangeable place in the social order. With very rare exceptions, one did not choose an occupation but rather was cast by circumstances of birth into the role of peasant, artisan, or knight—or the wife of one. One’s sense of security derived, not from one’s achievements, but from seeing oneself as an integral part of “the natural order,” which was presumed to be ordained by God. Subject to the vicissitudes of war, famines, and plagues, one was more or less guaranteed a livelihood, determined by tradition. There was very little competition, just
as there was very little economic freedom—or any other kind of freedom. In such an environment, with so little outlet for an independent, self-assertive mind, self-esteem—when and to the extent it existed—could not manifest itself through superior economic adaptiveness. There were occasions when it was life endangering: it could lead its possessor to the torture rack and the stake. The Dark and Middle Ages did not value self-assertion; did not understand individuality; could not conceive self-responsibility; had no grasp of the “Rights of Man” or the modern idea of political freedom; could not imagine innovativeness as a way of life; did not grasp the relation of mind, intelligence, and creativity to survival; had no place for self-esteem (which does not mean it did not exist).

  Our idea of “the individual,” as an autonomous, self-determining unit, able to think independently and bearing responsibility for his or her existence, emerged from several historical developments: the Renaissance in the fifteenth century, the Reformation in the sixteenth, and the Enlightenment in the eighteenth—and their two offspring, the Industrial Revolution and capitalism. Self-esteem, as we think about the concept today, has its roots in the post-Renaissance emerging culture of individualism. This is true of any number of ideals that we (and increasingly people in other countries) have come to admire, such as the freedom to marry for love, a belief in the right to the pursuit of happiness, a hope that work can be not only a source of sustenance but also of self-expression and self-fulfillment. Not long ago these values were regarded as very “Western,” very “American”—and now more and more of the world is embracing them. These values reflect human needs.