His anxiety is triggered by the collision of two absolutes: a value imperative—“I must know what to do to handle the responsibilities of my new position”—and the feeling that he is inadequate to obey that imperative—“I don’t and can’t.” The conflict is not conscious; it is repressed. But the effect of the conflict is to demolish his pretense of control over his life and thus to precipitate his anxiety.
Observe the nature of the conflict. It is a clash between a value imperative (“I should know what to do; I must know what to do”) engaging the man’s sense of personal worth and a failure or flaw or inadequacy that the man experiences as a breach of that imperative (“I don’t know what to do”).
Another example is the woman raised to believe that her personal worth is a function of her role as wife and mother. For years she has repressed any impulse toward self-assertiveness or self-expression that threatens to interfere with her officially designated function. Building within her is enormous rage that she does not allow herself to identify or confront. But more and more frequently, she finds herself having fantasies of her husband and children being killed in an automobile accident. She becomes oversolicitous of her family’s well-being, to the point of annoying and burdening everyone. She feels rejected. Rage keeps on building. The fantasies of her family’s death increasingly dominate her consciousness.
One day, standing at the kitchen sink and washing dishes, she suddenly finds that she has difficulty distinguishing the colors of objects, everything in her field of vision begins to swim, and terrible pains appear to be coming from her heart. She feels certain she is going to die of a heart attack. But what has hit her is the onset of an anxiety attack.
The collision is between the value imperative of “I must not” and the contradictory emotion of “I did, do, and will continue to wish for my family’s death.”
The clash is between a value imperative (should, should not; must, must not) engaging her sense of personal worth and an emotion, a desire, a fantasy, that contradicts that imperative.
In every instance of self-esteem anxiety, we will find a conflict in the form of “I must/should have” versus “I cannot/did not,” or “I must not” versus “I do/did/will.” There is always a conflict between, on the one hand, some value imperative that is tied, in a crucial and profound way, to the person’s self-appraisal and inner equilibrium, and, on the other, some failure, inadequacy, action, emotion, desire, or fantasy that the person regards as a breach of that imperative, a breach that the person believes expresses or reflects a basic and unalterable fact of his or her “nature.”
Psychologists have understood self-esteem anxiety—which they call pathological anxiety—in many different ways. But I am convinced that if one studies the case histories they themselves report, or any of the case histories pertaining to anxiety in the many textbooks available today, one can discern very clearly the basic pattern described above, however the particular cases may differ in details.
One of the most common errors made by theorists in their interpretations of the anxiety process is to mistake a particular instance of pathological anxiety for the abstract prototype of all pathological anxiety.
Freud, for instance, in the final version of his theory of anxiety, maintained that anxiety is triggered by forbidden sexual desires that break through the barrier of repression and cause the ego to feel threatened and overwhelmed.23 Karen Horney countered with the declaration that this may have been true in the Victorian age, but in our day the source of anxiety is the emergence of hostile impulses.36
Both of their explanations will fit into the formula I have outlined, but neither explanation is a universal. The basic principle involved is demonstrably wider than either Freud’s or Horney’s theory. Pathological anxiety is a crisis of self-esteem, and the possible sources of anxiety are as numerous as the rational or irrational values on which a person’s self-appraisal may be based.
The value imperative involved in these anxiety-producing conflicts may be consonant with the facts of reality and appropriate to human nature, or it may be contrary to both, yet the person somehow believes that satisfying the demand of this imperative should be within his or her volitional power. The conflict is typically subconscious; either half of it, however, may be conscious or partially conscious.
There is no object of fear more terrifying to human beings than fear itself and no fear more terrifying than that for which they know no object. Few people consciously experience self-esteem anxiety in the terms in which I am discussing it here. In order to make it more bearable, it is commonly converted into specific, tangible fears, which might seem to have some semblance of plausibility in terms of the circumstances of ones life. Though a person may be beset by a dozen narrower fears, none really rational, all are a smoke screen and defense against an anxiety whose roots lie in the core experience of self.
Since positive self-esteem is a fundamental need, human beings who fail to achieve satisfactory self-esteem are driven by anxiety to counterfeit self-esteem. Pseudo-self-esteem, a pretense at self-confidence and self-respect, is a nonrational, self-protective device to diminish anxiety and to fulfill the need for positive self-regard.
In order to generate some semblance of psychological equilibrium, however, it is necessary to avoid or perhaps rationalize and otherwise deny ideas, feelings, memories, and behaviors that could adversely affect self-appraisal. And, further, it becomes necessary to seek a sense of efficacy and worth from something other than the appropriate use of consciousness, something other than rationality, honesty, responsibility, and integrity. This alternative value or virtue, such as “doing one’s duty” or being stoical or altruistic or financially successful or sexually attractive or “tough,” is perceived as more easily attainable.
This complex process of self-deception, this misguided attempt at self-healing on which an individual may build his or her life, holds the key to the individual’s motivation, values, and goals—to the impulses that drive the individual along a particular path.
Let us establish a point of contrast here. In the psychology of a man or woman of authentic self-value, there is no clash between the recognition of the facts of reality and the preservation of positive self-esteem. Positive self-esteem is based on the determination to know and to act in accordance with the facts of reality as perceived and understood. But to the man or woman of pseudo-self-esteem, reality is often the enemy: reality precludes positive self-esteem, since the pretense at self-confidence and self-respect is purchased at the price of avoidance.
A person may be perfectly rational and lucid in an area that does not touch on or threaten pseudo-self-esteem and be flagrantly irrational, evasive, defensive, and downright stupid in an area that is threatening to self-appraisal. A woman, for example, may operate her business smoothly; she is open to recognizing her mistakes in judgment, when she makes them, and quick to correct them. In this sphere, she has a strong reality orientation. At home, when dealing with her husband or children, she becomes hysterical at the smallest challenge to her authority; her equilibrium is disturbed by any failure of her family to acquiesce to her judgment. Her pseudo-self-esteem is invested in being “the perfect wife,” “the perfect mother,” and any suggestion of failure activates her anxiety, which activates her defenses, which makes her unable to hear or respond appropriately to what her family is telling her. Her family is left to wonder, How can she be so brilliant in one area of her life and so blind in another?
The process of avoidance and repression is not sufficient to provide a person with the illusion of good self-esteem; that process is only part of the self-deception. The other part consists of the values chosen as the means of achieving the sense of personal worth.
Again, we will develop a point of contrast. An individual who develops healthily derives intense pleasure and pride from the work of his or her mind and from the achievement that that work makes possible. Feeling confident of the ability to deal with the challenges of life, the individual will desire an
effortful, stimulating, creative existence. Feeling confident of his or her own value, the individual will be drawn to good self-esteem in others; what he or she will desire most in human relationships is the opportunity to feel admiration. In the spheres of both work and human relationships, the individual acts from a firm base of security, of efficacy—and, as a consequence, a love for the fact of being alive. What he or she seeks are means to express and objectify good self-esteem.
The person with poor self-esteem acts out of fear rather than confidence. Not to live, but to escape the anxiety of living, becomes the fundamental goal. Not creativeness, but safety, becomes the ruling desire. And in human relationships, such a person seeks, not admiration, but, more commonly, an escape from moral values, an escape from standards, a promise to be forgiven, or to be accepted without being respected, or to be admired without being understood—to be comforted and protected or else held in blind awe.
The principle that distinguishes the basic motivations of high self-esteem from that of low self-esteem is the principle of motivation by love versus motivation by fear: the love of self and of existence versus the fear that one is unfit for existence. Motivation by confidence, which places its primary emphasis on the possibility of enjoyment, versus motivation by terror, which places its primary emphasis on the avoidance of pain.
To the extent that a person suffers from poor self-esteem, he or she lives negatively and defensively—that is, out of motivation by fear. When that person chooses particular values and goals, the primary motive is not to realize a positive enjoyment of existence but rather to defend against anxiety, against distressing feelings of inadequacy, self-doubt, guilt, and the possibility of being hurt.
An analogy may prove helpful. If a person’s life is in physical danger as a result of having contracted a major disease, the primary concern in such an emergency situation is not the pursuit of enjoyment but the removal of the danger, the regaining of health, the reestablishing of a context in which the pursuit of enjoyment will again be possible and appropriate. But to the person significantly lacking in self-confidence and self-respect, life is, in effect, a chronic emergency; that person is always in danger—psychologically. He or she never feels free to pursue the enjoyment of life, because the method of combating the danger consists, not of dealing with it rationally, not of working to remove it, but of seeking to become persuaded that it does not exist.
I call any value chosen to support pseudo-self-esteem a defense value. A defense value is one motivated by fear and aimed at supporting an illusion of psychological equilibrium. It is an antianxiety device.
Such a value may be intrinsically admirable; what is irrational and unhealthy about it is the reason for its selection. Productive work is certainly a value worthy of esteem; but escaping into work as a means of avoiding one’s conflicts, shortcomings, anxieties—and the resultant unhappiness caused to self and others—is not admirable. Sometimes, however, defense values are irrational in both respects—as in the case of a person who seeks to escape anxiety and fake a sense of efficacy by acquiring power over other human beings.
The number of different defense values that people can adopt is virtually limitless. Most of these values, however, have one thing in common: they are values held in high regard by the culture or subculture in which a person lives. A number of common defense values of this type appear in the following examples:
The man who is obsessed with being popular, who feels driven to win the approval of every person he meets, who clings to the image of himself as “likable,” who, in effect, regards his appealing personality as his sole means of survival and the proof of his personal worth.
The woman who has no sense of personal identity and who seeks to lose her inner emptiness in the role of a martyr for her children, demanding in exchange only that her children adore her so that their adoration fills the vacuum of the ego she can hardly be said to possess.
The man who never forms independent judgments about anything but who seeks to compensate by making himself authoritatively knowledgeable concerning other people’s opinions about everything.
The man who works at being aggressively “masculine,” whose other concerns are largely subordinated to his role of woman chaser, and who derives less pleasure from the act of sex than from the act of reporting his adventures to the men in the locker room.
The woman whose chief standard of self-appraisal is the prestige of her husband and whose pseudo-self-esteem rises or falls according to the number of people who court her husband’s favor.
The man who feels guilt over having inherited a fortune, who has no idea of what to do with it and proceeds frantically to give it away, clinging to the “ideal” of altruism and to the vision of himself as a humanitarian, keeping his pseudo-self-esteem afloat by means of the belief that charity is a moral substitute for competence and courage.
The man who has always been afraid of life and who tells himself that the reason is his superior “sensitivity,” who chooses his clothes, his furniture, his books, and his bodily posture by the standard of what will make him appear “idealistic.”
Sometimes defense values are of a religious nature. Obedience to some religious injunction(s) may be made the basis of pseudo-self-esteem. Faith in God, asceticism, systematic self-abnegation, and adherence to religious rituals are devices commonly employed to allay anxiety and purchase a sense of worthiness.
Still another type of noteworthy defense value may be observed in the person who rationalizes behavior of which he or she feels guilty by insisting that such behavior “does not represent the real me,” that “the real me is my aspirations, and I am prevented from acting in accordance with my professed ideals only by reasons beyond personal control: the evil of the system, the malevolence of the universe, the tragedy of circumstances, human infirmity, I never got a break, I’m too honest and decent for this world.” The concept of a “real me” who bears little relation to anything one says or does in reality is an especially prevalent antianxiety device and often coexists with other defense values.
If an individual took responsibility for every one of his or her actions in the moment of performing the action, not only would defense values of this kind be impossible, but a radical elevation of self-esteem would be inevitable. To appreciate the kinds of changes that would be inevitable if we were to take responsibility for our actions in the moment of performing them, consider the following.
“Right now I am choosing not to do the work I promised my boss I would do, and I plan to alibi later—and I take responsibility for that.”
“Right now I am choosing not to answer, honestly and directly, my wife’s question—and I take responsibility for that.”
“Right now I am choosing not to deal with the look of pain in my child’s eyes—and I take responsibility for that.”
“Right now I am choosing to steal this money from my guest’s handbag—and I take responsibility for that.”
“Right now I am choosing to stay home and feel sorry for myself rather than go out and look for a job—and I take responsibility for that.”
“Right now I am choosing not to correct the job that I know I have done sloppily—and I take responsibility for that.”
“Right now I am choosing to procrastinate rather than confront an issue with my friend/spouse/employee/employer/colleague that I know needs to be confronted—and I take responsibility for that.”
“Right now I am choosing to pretend a love I do not feel—and I take responsibility for that.”
“Right now I am choosing to pretend that I am indifferent when the truth is I am hurting—and I take responsibility for that.”
“Right now I am choosing to act tough when the truth is I want to reach out for help—and I take responsibility for that.” *
Obviously, it would be nearly impossible to talk to ourselves in this manner and go on performing actions we know to be inappropriate. Therefore, to the extent we learn to talk to ourselves in this manner, we irresistibly genera
te changes in behavior—and thus we have the power to take a major step toward the rebuilding of damaged self-esteem.
More broadly, to the extent that we are able to step back from any of our defense values and ask ourselves, “Does this really make me good? Why do I think so?” we have the power to move toward placing our self-esteem on a saner and less precarious foundation. Even when we are afraid, this possibility is open to us. We can accept fear and then rise above it by taking unfamiliar but desirable risks in the service of our mind and life; we need not remain trapped at the level of poor self-esteem.
While some defense values are more serviceable than others (or less harmful than others), under the best of circumstances they rob the individual of possibilities for evolution and aliveness. Perhaps the ultimate defense value, at a concrete and specific level, the level of an actual object, is the tranquilizer. The fire alarm is turned off, but (in the subconscious) the fire continues to rage.
I am not denying that tranquilizers have their uses, at times, as short-term emergency measures. But as a way of life they become a denial of life. I pause here on the phenomenon of tranquilizers and other instances of drug abuse, to which I shall turn in a moment, because they are a metaphor for the entire issue of defense values and the problem of motivation by fear.
If tranquilizers are a boom industry, it is absurd to blame pharmaceutical companies, as if they are the cause of the problem. The “cause,” if one wishes to be simplistic, is the human inclination to follow the path of least resistance, the inclination to accept, not the right solution, but the one that appears easiest and least demanding. In tranquilizer abuse (and alcohol abuse and recreational drug abuse) people often find “solutions” that seem appealing when other defense values break down, when the tide of anxiety fails to be stemmed.
Honoring the Self Page 10