That we are sometimes influenced by others in ways we do not recognize hardly alters the fact that there is a distinction between the psychology of those who try to understand things for themselves, think for themselves, judge for themselves, and those to whom such a possibility rarely occurs. What is crucial here is the matter of intention, the matter of an individual’s goal.
I recall a client in therapy once saying to me, “I can’t understand why I’m always relying on the opinions of other people.” I asked her, “As you were growing up, did you ever want to be independent, did you ever think of learning to be independent—did you ever make independence your goal?” She pondered for a moment, then replied, “No.” I said, “No need to be surprised, then, that you didn’t arrive there.”
To speak of “thinking independently” is useful because the redundancy has value in terms of emphasis. Often what people call “thinking” is merely recycling the opinions of others. So we can say that thinking independently—about our work, our relationships, the values that will guide our life, the goals we will set for ourselves—enhances self-esteem. And healthy self-esteem results in a natural inclination to think independently.
Seeing only the tail end of the process I am describing, a person might say, “It’s easy for him to think independently. Look at how much self-esteem he has.” But self-esteem is not a given; it is acquired. And one of the ways it is acquired is by thinking independently when it may not be easy to do so, when it may even be frightening, when the person doing the thinking is struggling with feelings of uncertainty and insecurity and is choosing to persevere nonetheless. It is not always easy to stand by our own judgment, and if it has become easy, that itself is a psychological victory—because in the past there were certainly times when it was not easy, when the pressures against independent thought were considerable, and when we had to confront and endure anxiety.
When a child finds that his or her perceptions, feelings, or judgments conflict with those of parents or other family members, and the question arises of whether to heed the voice of self or to disown it in favor of the voice of others; when a woman believes that her husband is wrong on some fundamental issue, and the question arises of whether to express her thoughts or to suppress them and thus protect the “closeness” of the relationship; when an artist or scientist suddenly sees a path that would carry him or her far from the consensual beliefs and values of colleagues, far from the mainstream of contemporary orientation and opinion, and the question arises of whether to follow that lonely path wherever it leads or to draw back—the issue and the challenge in all such situations remain the same. Should one honor one’s inner signals or disown them? Independence versus conformity, self-expression versus self-repudiation, self-assertion versus self-surrender.
Innovators and creators are persons who can to a higher degree than average accept the condition of aloneness. They are more willing to follow their own vision, even when it takes them far from the mainland of the human community. Their anxiety, to whatever extent it exists, does not deter them. This is one of the secrets of their power. That which we call “genius” has a great deal to do with courage and daring, a great deal to do with sheer nerve.
We are social animals. While it may sometimes be necessary, we do not normally enjoy long periods of being alienated from the thinking and beliefs of those around us, especially those we respect and love. One of the most important forms of heroism is the heroism of consciousness, the heroism of thought: the willingness to tolerate aloneness.
Like every other psychological trait, independence is a matter of degree. Although no one is perfectly independent and no one is hopelessly dependent all of the time, the higher the level of our independence and the more willing we are to think for ourselves, the higher the level of our self-esteem.
Part of thinking independently is learning to differentiate between facts on the one hand and wishes and fears on the other. The task is sometimes difficult because thoughts themselves are invariably touched or even saturated with feeling.
Still, on many occasions we can recognize that the desire to perform some action is not proof that we should perform it: running out of the room in the midst of an argument when we become upset, for example. And the fact that we may be afraid to perform some action is not proof that we should avoid performing it: going to a physician for a checkup when there are signs of illness, for another example.
If we make a purchase we know we cannot afford and avoid thinking about impending bills we will not be able to pay, we have surrendered our consciousness to our wishes. If we ignore signs of danger in a marriage and then profess to be bewildered and dismayed when the marriage finally explodes, we have paid the penalty for sacrificing consciousness to fear.
As far as our self-esteem is concerned, the issue is not whether we are flawless in executing the task of distinguishing among facts, wishes, and fears and choosing consciousness over some form of avoidance. Rather, the issue is one of our underlying intention. When we describe a person as “basically honest,” in the sense meant here, we do not mean that he or she is impervious to the influence of wishes and fears, but rather that there is a pronounced and evident desire and intention to see things as they are. We cannot always know for certain whether or not we are being rational or honest; but we can certainly be concerned about it, we can certainly care. We are not always free to succeed in our thinking, but we are always free to try.
The accumulated sum of our choices in this matter yields an inner sense of basic honesty or dishonesty—a fundamental responsibility or irresponsibility toward existence. From childhood on, some individuals are far more interested in and respectful of such questions of truth than others. Others operate as if facts need not be facts if we do not choose to acknowledge them, as if truth is irrelevant and lies are lies only if someone finds them out.
As I write these lines, I recall a news article I read recently about a medical researcher of high repute who was discovered to have been faking his data for years while piling up grant after grant and honor after honor. There is no way for self-esteem not to have been a casualty of such behavior, even before his fakery was revealed. He knowingly chose to live in a world of essential unreality, where his achievements and prestige were equally unreal.
Contrast this with the psychology of scientists who patiently and assiduously seek out evidence that will disprove their hypotheses. They understand that the unreal has no value.
The task of consciousness is to perceive that which exists, to the best of our ability. To honor reality—the perception of that which exists—is to honor consciousness; to honor consciousness is to honor the self.
All of the foregoing leads us very naturally to still another pillar of healthy self-esteem: integrity.
As we grow older and develop our own values and standards, the maintenance of personal integrity assumes increasing importance for our self-evaluation. Integrity means the integration of convictions, standards, beliefs—and behavior. When our behavior resonates with our professed values, and philosophy and action are integrated, we have integrity.
When we behave in ways that conflict with our judgments of what is appropriate, we lose face in our own eyes. We respect ourselves less. If the policy becomes habitual, we trust ourselves less—or cease to trust ourselves at all.
In their eagerness to disassociate themselves from philosophy in general and ethics in particular, psychologists are often uncomfortable about anything that sounds like a reference to morality in the context of psychotherapy or psychological well-being. In consequence, they can miss the obvious fact that integrity is, in effect, one of the guardians of mental health and that it is cruel and misleading to encourage people to believe that practicing “unconditional positive regard” toward themselves will bring them to undiluted self-love, irrespective of the question of their personal integrity.
Sometimes an individual seeks to escape from the burden of integrity by disavowing, or professing to disavow, all values and sta
ndards. The truth is, human beings cannot successfully regress to a lower level of evolution; we cannot draw back to a time before thinking in principles and long-range planning were possible. We are conceptual beings, and we cannot function successfully as anything less. We need values to guide our actions. We need principles to guide our lives. Our standards may be appropriate or inappropriate to the requirements of our life and well-being, but to live without standards of any kind is impossible. So profound a rebellion against our nature as the attempt to discard all values, principles, and standards is itself an expression of impoverished self-esteem and a guarantee the impoverishment will be ongoing.
While it is easy enough to recognize, at a commonsense level, the relationship between self-esteem and integrity, the issue of living up to our standards is not always as simple as it may first appear. What if our standards are mistaken or irrational?
We may accept a code of values that does violence to our needs as living organisms. For example, certain religious teachings implicitly or explicitly damn sex, damn pleasure, damn the body, damn ambition, damn material success, damn (for all practical purposes) the enjoyment of life on earth. This acceptance of life-denying standards is an enormous problem and one to which we shall have to return.
Once we see that living up to our standards appears to be leading us toward self-destruction, the time has obviously come to question our standards, rather than simply resigning ourselves to living without integrity. We must summon up the courage to challenge some of our deepest assumptions concerning what we have been taught to regard as the good.
To cite a number of random examples of the kind commonly encountered in the practice of psychotherapy: women who struggle with the moral dilemmas created by the Catholic church’s prohibition of birth control devices and abortion; employees in government agencies who, appalled by the magnitude of bureaucratic corruption, feel themselves caught in conflict between their notion of patriotism and good citizenship on the one hand and the demands of individual conscience on the other; hard-working, ambitious businessmen who had been encouraged at the start of their careers to be productive and industrious but who, when they finally committed the sin of succeeding, were confronted with the disorienting biblical pronouncement that it shall be easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven; wives who suddenly sense that the traditional view of woman-as-servant-to-man is a morality of self-annihilation; young men struggling with the dilemma of complying with or fleeing from military conscription; former nuns and priests disenchanted with the religious institutions to which they had given their allegiance and striving to define their values outside the context of a tradition they could no longer accept; rabbis or former rabbis with precisely the same problem; young persons rebelling against the values of their parents and not knowing what vision of the good to live by instead.
Such conflicts and the manner in which they are resolved or left unresolved necessarily affect the quality of the individual’s self-esteem because they affect the experience of integrity. And integrity is a prerequisite of high self-esteem.
No discussion of the central pillars of healthy self-esteem would be complete that did not acknowledge the profoundly important role of self-responsibility as a basic life orientation. Self-responsibility is essential to self-esteem, and it is also a reflection or manifestation of positive self-esteem. The relation between self-esteem and its pillars is always reciprocal.
Working with clients in psychotherapy, I often see that the most radical transformation occurs after the client’s realization that no one is coming to the rescue. “When I finally allowed myself to face fully my own responsibility for my life,” more than one client has said to me, “I began to grow. I began to change. And my self-esteem began to rise.”
I am responsible for my choices and my actions. Not responsible as the recipient of moral blame or guilt, but responsible as the chief causal agent in my life and behavior. Further, self-responsibility means acceptance of my basic aloneness and acceptance of responsibility for the attainment of my own goals.
The appreciation of self-responsibility can be an exhilarating and empowering experience. It places our life back in our own hands. For example, a client in therapy learns to question, “Why and how do I make myself so passive? What do I tell myself to keep myself so passive?” rather than bemoaning, “Why am I so passive?” Instead of asserting that he can’t care about anything, the client learns to. explore why and how he prevents himself from experiencing strong feelings about anything. “Why,” in this context, means, “For what purpose?” Instead of saying, “Why does the back of my neck become painfully tense?” the client learns to say, “What feelings am I trying to avoid experiencing by tensing my neck muscles?” Instead of complaining that people are so often taking advantage of her, the client learns to say, “Why and how do I invite or encourage people to take advantage of me?” Instead of complaining, “No one understands me,” the client asks, “Why and how do I make it difficult for people to understand me?” Instead of saying, “Why do women always turn away from me?” the client confronts the question, “Why and how do I cause women to turn away from me?” Instead of moaning, “I always fail at whatever I attempt,” the client begins to consider, “Why and how do I always cause myself to fail at whatever I attempt?”
I do not mean to imply that a person never suffers through accident or through the fault of others, nor that a person is responsible for everything in life that may happen to him or her. We are not omnipotent.
But self-responsibility is clearly indispensable to good self-esteem. Avoiding self-responsibility victimizes us with regard to our own life; it leaves us helpless. It is just this view from which many people need to emancipate themselves if they are ever to evolve to a nontragic sense of life.
Much more remains to be said about the conditions of successful self-esteem—more than can be contained in this chapter. But everything I have discussed thus far is traceable back to mental operations, and this will continue to be true in the material that follows. This is the essential point at the base of the entire presentation. Self-esteem is rooted internally, rather than in external successes or failures.
The failure to understand this principle causes an incalculable amount of unnecessary anguish and self-doubt. If we judge ourselves by criteria that entail factors outside our volitional control, the result, unavoidably, is a precarious self-esteem that is in chronic jeopardy. But our self-esteem need not be affected or impaired if, in spite of our best efforts, we fail in a particular undertaking, even though we will not experience the same emotion of pride that we would have felt if we had succeeded.
Further, we need to remember that the self is not a static, finished entity, but a continually evolving creation, an unfolding of our potentialities, expressed in our choices, decisions, thoughts, judgments, responses, and actions. To view our self as basically and unalterably good or bad—independent of our present and future manner of functioning—is to negate the facts of freedom, self-determination, and self-responsibility. We always contain within ourselves the possibility of change; we need never be the prisoner of yesterday’s choices.
The final issue I wish to introduce here—self-acceptance—is especially pertinent to those of us who are unhappy with the way we experience ourselves and are seeking a change in self-concept.
If we are to grow and change, we must begin by learning self-acceptance. In my experience, self-acceptance is not an easy concept for most people to understand. The tendency is to equate self-acceptance with approval of every aspect of our personality (or physical appearance) and with the denial that any change or improvement might be desirable.
To be self-accepting does not mean to be without a wish to change, improve, evolve. It means not to be at war with ourselves—not to deny the reality of what is true of us right now, at this moment of our existence. We deal once more with the issue of respect for and acceptance of facts—in this case, the
facts of our own being.*
To accept ourselves is to accept the fact that what we think, feel, and do are all expressions of the self at the time they occur.
So long as we cannot accept the fact of what we are at any given moment of our existence, so long as we cannot permit ourselves fully to be aware of the nature of our choices and actions, cannot admit the truth into our consciousness, we cannot change.5
Accepting what I am requires that I approach the contemplation of my own experience with an attitude that makes the concepts of approval or disapproval irrelevant: the desire to be aware.
There is still a deeper level on which we need to understand self-acceptance. Self-acceptance, in the ultimate sense, refers to an attitude of self-value and self-commitment that derives fundamentally from the fact that I am alive and conscious. It is deeper than self-esteem. It is a prerational, premoral act of self-affirmation—a kind of primitive egoism that is the birthright of every conscious organism, and yet that human beings have the power to act against or nullify.
An attitude of self-acceptance is precisely what an effective psychotherapist appeals to or strives to awaken in a person of even the lowest self-esteem.72 This attitude can inspire a person to face whatever he or she most dreads to encounter within, without collapsing into self-hatred, repudiating the value of his or her person, or surrendering the will to live. Thus, a person might be unhappy about experiencing poor self-esteem yet accept it along with the self-doubts and feelings of guilt—“I accept them as part of how I experience myself right now.”
Self-acceptance, at this level, is unconditional. Self-esteem is not, and cannot be.
When I endeavor to communicate the concept of self-acceptance to clients in therapy, I am sometimes met with protests. “But I don’t like the way I am. I want to be different.”
Or: “I don’t like to be afraid of what people think of me. I hate that part of myself. I wish I could get rid of it.”
Honoring the Self Page 7