Honoring the Self

by Nathaniel Branden

  One of the characteristics of people with healthy self-esteem is that they tend to recognize the difference between authentic love and these other conditions—in contrast to individuals with low self-esteem, who often do not make such distinctions. Not that a person on any level of self-esteem cannot be honestly confused about his or her feelings; but people with high self-esteem are relatively less prone to self-alienation and consequently enjoy a more intimate acquaintance with their inner life.

  We know, from clinical observation and from a number of studies, that people of high self-esteem tend to fall in love with people of high self-esteem; people of average self-esteem tend to fall in love with people of average self-esteem; people of low self-esteem tend to fall in love with people of low self-esteem. In the area of self-esteem and love, there is a powerful tendency for like to be attracted to like. This is hardly surprising. Love may require the excitement of complementary differences, but it also requires a foundation of basic affinities.

  Many people can “fall” in love, but to sustain love across time requires self-confidence and self-respect. If I enjoy a fundamental sense of efficacy and worth, and if, as a consequence, I feel lovable as a human being, I have an emotional wealth within me that I can channel into loving. Without respect for and enjoyment in who I am, however, I have very little to give. I see other people essentially as sources of approval or disapproval, not as people in their own right.

  Further, if I do not feel that I am lovable, it is very difficult to believe that anyone else loves me. Your profession of love conflicts with my self-concept. Even if I consciously disown my feelings of being unlovable, my poor self-concept remains, operating beneath the surface of awareness to undermine my attempts at relationships. In my insecurity, I may subvert love in any number of ways: by demanding excessive reassurances, by venting irrational possessiveness, by making catastrophes of small frictions, by seeking to control through subservience or domination, by finding ways to reject my partner before my partner can reject me.

  A former client, a man with poor self-esteem, married a woman who cared for him deeply. But nothing she could ever do was enough to make him feel loved. Whatever she offered, he wanted more. Whatever she said, he wondered if she meant it. But she loved him, and she persevered. Finally, the day came when he no longer could escape knowing how much he meant to her. His response was to begin wondering whether he had set his own standards too low. More and more he questioned whether she was good enough for him. “How can I love this woman who is inferior even to me, who has been so easily duped into loving me?”

  The marriage did not survive his problem. But the pain of losing his wife was not an unqualified negative; it became the catalyst activating him to search for a solution. Later, as his self-esteem was rising, he fell in love again. I encouraged him to maintain a daily diary of his interactions with his lover, to keep note of the behaviors that nurtured the relationship and the behaviors that frustrated it, and to share his fears with his lover when they arose. Over time he learned to relinquish self-sabotaging thoughts and behaviors, and in so doing, he saw the quality of his self-esteem and of the relationship continue to rise together.

  I recall another client, a woman with low self-esteem, who felt she had to tell the man who cared for her all the ways in which other women were superior; they were more attractive, more intelligent, more feminine, and so forth. When he did not concur in her judgment and said he preferred her, she became frustrated and sometimes very angry. Her irritability became chronic, as did her tendency to ridicule him for his poor judgment. Eventually she exhausted him; worn out, bewildered, and disenchanted, he left her. She was deeply hurt, shocked, and dismayed. She wondered how she could have been so misguided in her assessment of him. She spoke of feeling like an abandoned child. “I always knew no one could love me.”

  In therapy she became sensitive to the countless ways in which her love life was operating by negative self-fulfilling prophecies. By making that which she most feared happen, she had retained a sense of being in control. In order to solve her problems, she had to relinquish that control by finding out what would happen in a relationship if she gave her best rather than her worst. It was not an easy struggle. Afterward she wrote to me, “What a strange kind of triumph. What an odd notion of bravery. And yet God knows it was hard, just to learn to have a man say, ‘I love you’ and for me to answer, very simply, ‘I love you, too.’ ”

  If self-esteem is confidence in one’s appropriateness to life, then we can readily understand why men and women of high self-esteem tend to expect success and happiness and why, as a consequence, they are likely to create these conditions for themselves. Men and women of low self-esteem tend to expect defeat and suffering, and their lives are shaped accordingly.

  No one can understand the course of his or her life who does not understand the power of self-fulfilling prophecies. They are the central dynamic of our existence.

  In understanding the relationship of self-esteem to love, there is another aspect of the process we need to consider: whether or not, or to what extent, we feel worthy of happiness.

  If I do not feel deserving of happiness, consciously or subconsciously, or if I have accepted the belief that happiness is somehow wrong or cannot last, that attitude will inevitably subvert my attempts at love. If I do not feel it is appropriate for me to be happy, then the presence of happiness triggers anxiety. Joy does violence to my self-concept because pain (my pain) is my lot in life. I must not allow myself to be “set up” by transitory flickers of joy for the devastating pain that inevitably must follow.

  In other words, happiness makes me feel anxious. When we feel anxious, we do something very natural: we attempt to reduce our anxiety by ridding ourselves of its cause.

  Not that poor self-esteem forbids me to dream of happiness, aspire to happiness, yearn for happiness. Not necessarily. As long as joy remains out of reach, as long as it remains a distant longing, I can allow myself to believe I am reaching for it.

  People can “work on” their relationships for years. They can read books on psychology. They can consult marriage counselors. They can participate in an endless stream of workshops and seminars. And yet their underlying problem is one they are very unlikely to confront. I call it happiness anxiety. Here again we encounter the principle of motivation by fear.

  I have had the opportunity to work with many thousands of people in a variety of professional contexts and settings, at the seminars and workshops I conduct in addition to my psychotherapy practice. And I am absolutely persuaded that happiness anxiety is one of our most widespread and least understood problems. Many people feel they do not deserve happiness, are not entitled to happiness, have no right to the fulfillment of their emotional needs and wants. Often they feel that if they are happy, either their happiness will be taken away from them, or something terrible will happen to counterbalance it, some unspeakable punishment or tragedy. That is why happiness for such people is a potential source of anxiety. While they may long for it on one level of consciousness, they dread it on another.

  A person may be quite unaware of the problem consciously. He or she may insist, “Of course I am entitled to happiness!” But when the person is in a relationship that is working, for example, often the response to happiness is a feeling of anxiety or disorientation.

  Many an individual, particularly if raised in a religious home, has been taught that suffering represents a passport to salvation, whereas enjoyment is almost certainly proof that one has strayed from the proper path. Psychotherapy clients have spoken to me of times when, as children, they were ill, and a parent told them, “Don’t regret that you are in pain. Every day you suffer, you are piling up credits in heaven.” Then what are they piling up on the days when they are happy?

  We all know how often children are told, in effect, “Don’t be so excited. Happiness doesn’t last. When you grow up, you’ll realize how grim life is.”

  If a man and woman who are infected by this attitu
de fall in love, and the attitude itself will not prevent them from falling in love, they will find a way to bring their experience back into alignment with their self-concept, with their view of “the way things really are”: for example, facing one another across a dinner table, feeling joyful and contented, one of them suddenly can’t stand it and starts a quarrel over nothing or withdraws and becomes mysteriously depressed. At this moment of their existence, happiness is not a dream but a reality. Joy is not a fantasy or an aspiration but a fact. That is unbearable. First of all, they don’t deserve it. Second, it can’t last. Third, if it does last, something else terrible will happen. They feel: “Let me out of here, I can’t stand this!”

  After an ecstatic experience of lovemaking, one partner may crack an inappropriate joke, or leap out of bed without any emotional transition, or say something gratuitously critical and estranging, or withdraw and become depressed, or escape into sleep when he or she is not tired—as if the strain of joy and intimacy has become too much to endure.

  Here we can note an analogy to work. I once went to observe a meeting of Alcoholics Anonymous. What made this particular group interesting to me was that almost all of them were high achievers. One after the other they stood up and described the circumstances under which they resumed drinking after months or years of abstinence. The most common story I heard that day concerned the progression of striving toward success in a career, then reaching (or being on the verge of reaching) an important goal, then feeling excited and happy, then experiencing an overwhelming desire to drink—which, more often than not, led to behaviors that sabotaged the success. Happiness anxiety and success anxiety are very intimately related; both have their roots in deficient self-esteem.

  I will have more to say about the origins of this problem when we discuss separation and individuation, the process by which an infant evolves into an independent human being—and some of the ways in which that evolution often fails to take place.49,50 Separation pertains to discovering one’s own boundaries, understanding where self ends and the world begins. Individuation has to do with the discovery of one’s own center, one’s own resources, the process of evolving toward a more and more comprehensive recognition, understanding, and integration of the self.

  For the moment, I will simply observe that poor self-esteem and inadequate separation and individuation are intrinsically linked; and happiness anxiety is often a consequence of the failure to achieve adequate separation and individuation. Without successful separation and individuation, I do not sufficiently discover my own internal resources; I can very easily persist in the belief that my survival depends on protecting my relationship with my mother and father, at the expense of enjoying the rest of my life.

  Suppose that a woman has witnessed the unhappy marriage of her parents. It is not uncommon for a child to internalize subtle messages from mother or father to the effect that “you are not to be any happier in your marriage than I was in mine.” A woman with poor self-esteem who wants to be a “good girl,” who feels the need to retain mother’s or father’s love at all costs, often proceeds very obediently either to select a husband with whom happiness is clearly impossible or to manufacture unhappiness in a marriage where happiness might have been possible. “I couldn’t bear to let mother see that I was happy in my relationship with a man. She would feel betrayed, she would feel humiliated. I might cause her to feel overwhelmed by her own sense of inadequacy and failure. And I couldn’t do that to her.” Translation: “Mother might become angry at me, mother might repudiate me, I might lose mother’s love—and without mother’s love, how can I survive?”

  This pattern is not uniquely feminine. “If father saw me making a success of my marriage/my career, he would feel hurt. It would be my way of saying to him, ‘You’re a failure.’ I would be saying, ‘I succeeded where you didn’t.’ I would lose father’s love. I want to remain my father’s son.” Translation: “Without father’s love, I cannot conceive of having acceptable self-esteem.”

  It is often futile to treat romantic problems by teaching communication skills, improved sexual techniques, or methods of “fair fighting.” This is what is wrong with so much marriage counseling. While all such teachings are valuable, and there is good reason to learn them, they rest on the assumption that the persons involved are willing to be happy, want to be happy, feel entitled to be happy. What if they don’t? The success of love relationships requires an appreciation of the fact that happiness is our human birthright.

  How, then, are men and women to proceed? What are they to do if happiness triggers anxiety? Their desire to reduce anxiety is clearly normal. And if happiness ignites anxiety, then the impulse to reduce or sabotage happiness is understandable. Self-sabotage has its own logic; understood in context, it is a survival strategy.

  When we begin to understand the model of reality with which we are operating, we become open to the possibility of finding better solutions, strategies that support our life rather than impoverish it.

  The first step is to cultivate in ourselves an awareness of when we are feeling anxious, rather than simply allowing ourselves to be manipulated by an anxiety of which we are unconscious. We need to pay attention to the moments and situations in which apprehension in relation to happiness or success or any other value arises. Then we need to study (and perhaps make lists) of our particular style of self-sabotage—specific behaviors we have learned to undermine our joy and thereby reduce our anxiety. If possible, this is information to communicate to our partner. One of the very best things we can do when we are feeling happiness anxiety or success anxiety is to talk about it. To describe the experience is to begin to drain it of its power. And the honesty and responsibility of responding in this way itself contributes to the strengthening of self-esteem.

  Sometimes when we feel happy and the happiness triggers anxiety and disorientation, we must learn to do nothing—beyond, perhaps, feeling, describing, and sharing the experience, without being manipulated into behaving self-destructively. We can slowly build a tolerance for happiness, we can increase our ability to handle joy without panicking. We can eventually discover that being happy is far less complicated than we had believed and that joy is our natural state.

  And in keeping the presence of mind not to surrender to fear, in generating the consciousness needed to function at this level, in practicing the emotional honesty that may be required between us and our partner, we are at the same time causing self-esteem to increase—and thereby deepening our sense of our right to happiness.

  I wish to permit myself a small digression concerning the relationship of two earlier books of mine to this discussion. The Psychology of Romantic Love was written to develop a new vision of man-woman relationships (a departure, in some respects, from the historical notion of romantic love and the development of a new paradigm); to define the psychological needs that romantic love, rationally understood, can fulfill; and to indicate in a general way the conditions for the growth or death of romantic love. In its sequel, The Romantic Love Question & Answer Book, my coauthor, E. Devers Branden, and I had a purpose that bears more directly on this immediate discussion: to outline many of the basic, day-by-day steps and strategies by which people in love can nurture their relationship. We did not assume, in the latter book, that everyone who read it already had a well-developed self-esteem. We wrote from the conviction that if there was a genuine desire to understand the nature of love, and the conditions of successful love, then a willingness to practice the ideas presented would have two results: an increase in the quality of one’s relationships and an increase in the level of one’s self-esteem.

  If we learn to behave appropriately in relationships, even when it is difficult to do so, even when we are not initially supported by a high level of self-esteem, the courage and willingness to persevere tend to raise self-esteem—as well as raise effectiveness at love.

  So, in its own way, The Romantic Love Question & Answer Book is not only a book about making relationships work but als
o a book about raising self-esteem. Of course, it deals only with certain aspects of the process—there is far more to be said than was covered in that volume—but every one of the policies and strategies it recommends represents an application of the principles discussed in the present book.

  High self-esteem is not all that is needed for success in love, just as it is not all that is needed for success at work. Many other factors are relevant, some of which will be discussed in the chapters that follow. But no single factor is more important than self-esteem; and I do not think that any other single factor is as important as self-esteem.

  *  *   *

  In discussions of self-esteem and romantic love, I sometimes hear the question asked: If an individual loses the person he or she loves to someone else, will not self-esteem suffer a severe blow?

  While the individual will almost certainly experience pain, it is not really reasonable to give another person total power over our self-appraisal. Pain and damaged self-esteem are not synonymous. Not all pain is the pain of diminished self-regard; that is a very particular kind of pain.

  The more insecure or self-doubting we are, the more likely we are to turn any disappointment, any defeat, any failure to get what we want into evidence of our incompetence, inadequacy, and unworthiness. But that is a correctable problem, not a built-in one.

  A person of healthy self-esteem who loses a loved one to someone else may respond in any number of ways: by questioning objectively the appropriateness of the initial choice, by examining what errors might have precipitated rejection and loss, by determining what can be learned from the experience, and by resolving not to allow pain to turn into bitterness and into an inability to be open to love in the future.