Honoring the Self

by Nathaniel Branden

  Was it your parents’ practice to punish you or discipline you by striking or beating you?

  Did your parents project that they believed in your basic goodness? Or that they saw you as bad or worthless or evil?

  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?

  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?

  Did your parents’ behavior and manner of dealing with you tend to produce guilt in you?

  Did your parents’ behavior and manner of dealing with you tend to produce fear in you?

  Did your parents respect your intellectual and physical privacy?

  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”?

  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 are possible for you? Did your parents give you the impression that life could be exciting, challenging, a rewarding adventure?)

  Did your parents instill in you a fear of the world, a fear of other people? Or were you encouraged to face the world with an attitude of relaxed, confident benevolence?

  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 your mistakes accepted as a normal part of the learning process? Or as something you were taught to associate with contempt, ridicule, punishment?

  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 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?

  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?)

  The relevance of these questions to self-esteem is so apparent that additional comment scarcely seems needed. Almost everything psychology has learned about the environmental conditions that support healthy self-esteem is reflected in the above selection of issues. All significantly affect a child’s sense of self.

  An important question in the above list that I want to pause on is question 7, the issue of whether or not a child feels visible to his or her parents.

  A child has a natural desire to be seen, heard, understood, and responded to appropriately. This is the need for psychological visibility.

  When we discuss psychological visibility we are, of course, always operating within the context of degree. From childhood on, we receive from human beings some measure of appropriate feedback; without it, we could not survive. Statistically, however, in their early years few children experience a high degree of appropriate visibility from adults.

  A child who experiences his or her excitement as good, as a value, but is punished or rebuked for it by adults undergoes a bewildering experience of invisibility and disorientation. Similarly, a child who is praised for “always being an angel” but knows this is not true also experiences invisibility and disorientation.

  Working with clients in psychotherapy and with students at my Intensive Workshops on “Self-Esteem and the Art of Being,” I am often struck by the frequency with which the pain of invisibility in their home life as children is clearly central to their developmental problems and to their insecurities and inadequacies in their adult relationships.

  I do not wish to imply that we first acquire an independent sense of identity and then seek visibility through interaction with others. Obviously, our relationships and the responses and feedback we receive contribute to the sense of self we acquire. All of us, to a profoundly important extent, experience who we are in the context of our relationships. When we encounter a new human being, our personality contains, among other things, the consequences of many past encounters, many experiences, the internalization of many responses and instances of feedback from others. And we keep growing through our encounters.

  We need the experience of visibility. We normally have, of course, a sense of our own identity, but it is experienced more as a diffuse feeling than as an isolated thought. Our self-concept is not a single concept but a cluster of images and abstract perspectives on our various (real or imagined) traits and characteristics.

  In the course of our life, our values, goals, and missions are first conceived in our mind. To the extent that our life is successful, we then translate them into action and objective reality. They become part of the “out there” of the world that we perceive.

  But our most important value—our character, soul, psychological self, spiritual being, whatever name one wishes to give it—can never be perceived as part of the “out there.” We can never objectify it apart from our own consciousness. Yet we desire and need the fullest possible experience of the reality and objectivity of that compound of consciousness, our self, because our concept of who we are, of the person we have evolved into, is central to all our motivation.

  In interaction with other human beings—first as a child, when our sense of identity is in the early stages of emerging, and then in more complex ways appropriate to adulthood—we seek this experience of visibility.

  One of the reasons I so much admire the work of the late child psychologist Haim Ginott is that Ginott was a genius at teaching parents and teachers how to interact with children in ways that provide an experience of enriched visibility and self-esteem.24,28,29,30

  A favorite anecdote of mine, taken from Ginott’s Between Parent and Teenager, illustrates some of the principles I have been discussing above and has special relevance for the issue of visibility:

  David, age seventeen, was interviewed for a summer job, but was rejected. He returned home disappointed and depressed.

  Father felt sympathy for his son and conveyed it effectively.

  Father: You really wanted this job, didn’t you?

  David: I sure did.

  Father: And you were so well-equipped for it, too.

  David: Yeah! a lot of good that did me.

  Father: What a disappointment.

  David: It sure is, Dad.

  Father: Looking forward to a job and having it slip away just when you need it is tough.

  David: Yeah, I know.

  There was silence for a moment. Then David said: “It’s not the end of the world. I’ll find another job.”

  Let us pause on this interaction a moment.

  It is very likely that at the same time the boy is feeling disappointed and depressed, he is resisting the feeling of disappointment and depression; he is tensing his body against it to shut off and deny his emotions. By recognizing what the boy would necessarily feel, by naming it in words, and by communicating benevolent acceptance and respect, the father is in effect permitting the boy to experience his emotions fully, to accept and integrate them into conscious awareness.

  We do not fully explain the healing effect of the father’s response if we say merely that the boy feels better because he received sympathy. He feels better because his feelings do not remain trapped within him. He is able to assimilate the painful experience and therefore move beyond it; his natural, healthy sense of rea
lity is now able to assert itself.

  Most parents do not respond to such situations like the father in Ginott’s example; they respond instead in a manner likely to prolong and aggravate the depression. Ginott gives seven examples of common types of destructive response perpetrated by parents, which I would like to quote:29

  “What did you expect? To get the first job you wanted? Life is not like that. You may have to go to five or even ten interviews before you are hired.”

  “Rome was not built in one day, you know. You are still very young, and your whole life is in front of you. So, chin up. Smile and the world will smile with you. Cry and you will cry alone. I hope it will teach you not to count your chickens before they are hatched.”

  “When I was your age I went looking for my first job. I shined my shoes, got a haircut, put on clean clothes, and carried the Wall Street Journal with me. I knew how to make a good impression.”

  “I don’t see why you should feel so depressed. There is really no good reason for you to be so discouraged. Big deal! One job did not work out. It’s not worth even talking about.”

  “The trouble with you is that you don’t know how to talk with people. You always put your foot in your mouth. You lack poise, and you are fidgety. You are too eager, and not patient enough. Besides, you are thin-skinned and easily hurt.”

  “I am so sorry, dear, I don’t know what to tell you. My heart breaks. Life is so much a matter of luck. Other people have all the luck. They know the right people in the right places. We don’t know anyone, and no one knows us.”

  “Everything happens for the best. If you miss one bus, there will soon be another, perhaps a less crowded one. If you don’t get one job, you’ll get another—perhaps even a better one.”

  All such responses have this in common: they encourage the child to deny and repress feelings; they convey lack of confidence in the child’s ability to arrive at a healthy, balanced perspective; they alienate the child from his or her experience; and they leave the child feeling invisible. These are the kind of responses that most of us received over and over again in the course of growing up. None of them serves the needs of healthy development or positive self-esteem.

  A child who experiences invisibility in the early years of life and who feels badly frustrated with regard to other basic needs—physical contact, for example, or affection, or respect, or recognition, or love, or confidence in his or her strengths—is caught in a universe that is not only painful but bewildering. The child has almost no way to understand his or her suffering, which makes the suffering harder to bear. In addition to feeling pain, the child feels helpless.

  A child of four or five can hardly be expected to think, “I understand why daddy won’t play with me or allow me to sit on his knee. No need for me to take it personally. It’s just that daddy’s father was a terribly repressed man, cut off from his own feelings and emotions. He was so cold and unfeeling in the way he brought up daddy that when daddy was a little boy, he shut down emotionally, he numbed himself in order not to feel the pain. He’s kept himself numb through his whole life, and now he doesn’t know what to do. It’s not that he intends to hurt me. But if he were to open himself to me and to my needs, he would have to reconnect with a small, lonely, abandoned little boy in himself—and that would be too painful for daddy.”

  A little girl can hardly be expected to say, “I understand why mommy shouts and screams so much. It’s not really me she’s angry at. It’s just that daddy almost never makes love with her, and his coldness and lack of affection is tormenting her unbearably—and she doesn’t know what to do. Her nerves are torn to shreds. So she explodes over anything and everything. And it’s easier to get mad at me than at daddy.”

  No, this is not the typical thinking of children. From their point of view, what is happening is incomprehensible. All they know for certain is that they hurt.

  And to believe that their hurt bears no important relation to their own actions but is merely the end product of unsolved problems residing within their parents would only generate an intensfied feeling of powerlessness. They cannot solve their parents’ problems. So what are they to do?

  At this point, the need for intelligibility and the need for an experience of efficacy in effect conspire against the child. They often lead the child to a solution that yields short-term benefits while laying the foundation for a long-term disaster in which self-esteem turns against itself. The need for the experience of efficacy turns into a tool of self-destruction.

  The solution consists of some variant of the idea “There’s something wrong with me. It’s my fault. I’m bad in some way. I’m wrong somehow. I’m not enough. I’m unlovable. I’m undeserving.” For the child, this self-condemnation is a survival strategy—the self is attacked at one level in order to protect some sense of efficacy at another.

  An analogy may prove helpful. When human beings developed the notion of a God who is omniscient and omnipotent, they quickly added the attribute all-good. It would be too terrifying to imagine a capricious or sadistic God. Therefore, if disaster befalls, the fault must be ours. Someone or something must be sacrificed to appease this God.

  A child’s relationship to his parents is in some way like our relationship to this God.

  So if I suffer, let me believe I have committed some offense, even though I don’t understand what it is. It is too terrifying to imagine that my parents do not know what they are doing. I will disown what I see, repress what I feel—and take the guilt upon myself. And if only I can discover the actions that will please my parents, then will I receive the kindness and nurturing I crave.

  The problem is compounded by the fact that when we begin to think that we are bad, we usually proceed to prove ourselves right. We strike a younger sibling, we smash a friend’s toy, we tell lies, we get pregnant at the age of fourteen, we get arrested for reckless driving at the age of sixteen, and so on.

  In the early years of practicing psychotherapy, I recall being puzzled by the intense attachment that clients seemed to have for their own guilt. They would come to therapy, talk about feeling bad or unworthy or unlovable or undeserving, and when I would ask, in effect, “What’s so bad about you?” they were rarely able to cite instances of wrongdoing that were remotely commensurate with the degree of their self-condemnation. When I suggested that perhaps they were being too hard on themselves, they looked at me as if I were annoying, irrelevant, and insensitive to the reality of the situation—which I was. I had not yet discovered the functional utility of their self-condemnation, within the context of their private model of self-in-the-world.

  Slowly I began to realize the survival value of their self-blame. Unless they came to see not only that their strategy was obsolete but that superior alternatives for living were possible for them, they would not abandon the only life belt they had ever known.

  When I began working with the sentence-completion technique, I found the way to demonstrate easily, to myself and my clients, the functional utility of much of their self-condemnation. The essence of the sentence-completion technique is that the client is given a sentence stem by the therapist and asked to keep repeating the stem, adding a different ending each time, generally going as rapidly as possible, without worrying whether each ending is literally true and without worrying whether one ending might conflict with another.*

  Whenever I suspected the presence of the problem I have been discussing, I asked the individual to work with the stem “If it turns out I’m not a bad person and never was—.” Here are the kind of endings I hear over and over again.

  If it turns out I’m not a bad person and never was—

  Then I don’t understand mother.

  What has my whole life been about?

  My father was crazy!

  I don’t understand anything or anybody!

  No, no, this is too frightening even to think about!

  Then what was the matter with my parents?

  I want to kill mother!

  I feel
rage!

  I feel fear!

  I feel my whole life has been a sham!

  I’m so hurt and angry!

  Then it’s all been so unfair!

  Then I’m an orphan, and I’ve always been an orphan!

  Then why did they do the things they did?

  How am I ever going to understand anything?

  I’m alone, I’m alone, I’m alone.

  The child within us, who long ago turned to self-condemnation to make sense out of the world and to survive, can have great difficulty, even now, relinquishing the notion of “badness.” We cling to the strategy of self-blame, perpetuating it by behaviors we ourselves condemn, not ever noticing that the need for the strategy has long passed, that the strategy that may have helped us at age five is killing us at age thirty-five, forty-five, fifty-five, or sixty-five.

  When clients in therapy come to understand this, they begin to realize that the most courageous task life may ever ask of them is to relinquish their attachment to the vision of themselves as inadequate, unworthy, not enough. Because on the day they give up that strategy, they will stand face to face with the fact of their own aloneness and with a need to accept responsibility for their own existence as adults.