Honoring the Self

by Nathaniel Branden

  I wouldn’t be afraid to commit to a goal.

  I’d trust myself more.

  I’d be more ambitious.

  I’d take more risks.

  I’d care more about what I thought and less about what others think.

  I’d make fewer mistakes.

  I’d have more confidence in my mind.

  One of the most important ways in which teachers and parents can lay a valuable foundation for the growth of healthy self-esteem in children is by accepting as natural and normal the process of making mistakes. With or without adult support, when an individual of any age acquires a rational perspective on mistakes—allows him- or herself to err without punitive self-reproach—then self-esteem is nourished and fostered. And fewer mistakes are perpetrated, because the individual’s consciousness is not controlled by fear.

  No one who is terrified of making mistakes can attain moral autonomy.

  The process of successful growth to psychological maturity—to intellectual and moral autonomy—depends on a person’s accepting intellectual responsibility for his or her own existence. As a human being grows to adulthood, reality presents increasingly more complex challenges in thought, knowledge, judgment, and decision making. At each stage, the responsibility involves both cognition and evaluation; the individual has to acquire knowledge of facts and has to pass value judgments and choose goals. The consequence of accepting responsibility is the self-confident state of a sovereign consciousness. The consequence of responding negatively is a state of intellectual, or cognitive, dependency.

  Apart from the environmental factors we have already discussed, there are at least four factors that can motivate—not necessitate—a person’s default on the responsibility of independence and cognitive self-reliance:

  Thinking requires mental work.

  A policy of responsibility toward truth and facts, practiced consistently as a way of life, forbids one the possibility of indulging antithetical desires or emotions.

  If a person makes an error at any step of the thinking process and acts on that error, he or she may suffer pain, defeat, or destruction.

  Independent thinking often brings a person into conflict with the opinions and judgments of others, thus provoking disapproval or animosity.

  While intellectual and moral autonomy are obviously related, the fact is that there are persons who have the courage to challenge the cognitive judgments of world figures, but lack the courage to challenge the value judgments of the folks next door. Why is this so?

  As I discuss in The Psychology of Self-Esteem, normative abstractions, such as “justice,” for instance, stand on a higher, more advanced level of the hierarchy of our concepts than do many of our cognitive abstractions, such as “green” or “industry.” For many, the distance of moral abstractions from direct perceptual experience is fearsome and discomfiting; it demands a stronger commitment to the efficacy of their own mind than they possess.

  Furthermore, the fear of relying on the judgment of our own mind is felt most acutely in the realm of values because of the direct consequences of our judgments for our life and well-being. The evaluative errors that we make affect us personally far more often—and often far more devastatingly—than do most of our cognitive errors. To assume responsibility for choosing our values, principles, and goals, relying solely upon our own reason and understanding—to honor our internal signals to that extent—is to practice the ultimate form of intellectual independence, the one most difficult for the overwhelming majority of human beings and for which their upbringing has least prepared them.

  Still another reason that the fear of independence is most intense in the sphere of value judgments is the fact that independence in this area is most likely to bring a person into conflict with other people. Cognitive differences do not necessarily generate personal animosity among people; value differences commonly do, particularly when basic issues are involved. Therefore, independence in the sphere of value judgments is more demanding psychologically.

  Since a social form of existence is natural and appropriate to us, and since we derive many survival benefits from living among and dealing with others, the desire to have harmonious and benevolent relationships with others is not a breach of proper independence. It becomes such a breach only if a person places that desire above his or her own perception of reality. When the price of harmony with others becomes the surrender of our mind, an autonomous individual chooses not to pay it.

  In understanding the barriers to autonomy, still another motive needs consideration. We can learn from one another, but we cannot share the act of being conscious or of thinking. We can share the results—namely, our thoughts and perceptions—but consciousness, awareness, thinking, reasoning is, ultimately, an individual, solitary process, not a social one. And many people dread independent thought and judgment precisely because of this factor of inescapable aloneness; it makes them aware of their own separateness as living entities; it makes them aware of the responsibility they must bear for their own existence.

  Finally, to think for oneself is to face the fact of one’s own being and thus to confront the possibility—perhaps the terror—of nonbeing.

  To think, to judge, to choose our values is to be individuated, to create a distinct, personal identity. But thus to affirm that I exist is to open myself to the realization that I am finite, that my life is limited, that I am mortal, that one day I will die.

  The rebellion against the inevitability of death results in a rebellion against the challenges and opportunities of life. If I refuse to live fully, I cannot die.

  So: fear of autonomy entails fear of self-responsibility entails fear of identity entails fear of aloneness entails fear of death.

  That which does not exist cannot perish.

  This issue is of such profound importance that I shall need to return to it after we have explored further and from other perspectives the nature and challenges of the individuation process.

  *An excellent discussion of this process may be found in Joseph Chilton Pearce’s Magical Child, although there is much of a speculative nature in this book that needs to be read with more than a little skepticism.

  *For more on the uses of the sentence completion technique in therapy, see my If You Could Hear What I Cannot Say.

  9

  The Problem of Self-Alienation

  Today, there appears to be growing recognition that philosophically, culturally, and educationally, we require a psychology of balance, of integration. Awareness of the world and awareness of the self are understood increasingly as equal necessities for optimal human existence.

  An excessively external focus commonly results in self-estrangement, spiritual impoverishment, and the compulsive pursuit of activity for its own sake. An excessively internal focus leads to passivity, helplessness to cope with many of the basic problems of existence, and resignation to avoidable human suffering—which results, once again, in self-alienation.

  In this chapter I am chiefly concerned with showing that the repression of emotion and the disowning of experience, the precursors of self-alienation, inevitably sabotage clarity of thinking and the integrity of consciousness—with disastrous consequences for autonomy, most particularly with regard to value judgments.

  Let me begin with the general observation that in order to function successfully a person needs to be in contact with the universe in which he or she acts—and with his or her own needs, feelings, desires, frustration, capabilities, and goals. To the extent that awareness is blocked in either direction, life and well-being are impaired.

  It is particularly important to understand that a blindness concerning important aspects of self leads to a blindness concerning important aspects of the environment. A person who denies a need for companionship and nurturing, for instance, may be oblivious to opportunities to satisfy that need, such as signs of interest and friendship from people who care. A person who denies the reality of his or her pain will be blind to the source of the pain, such as the
wrong kind of friends, and be hurt again and again by these friends. A person who disowns feelings of anger may falsely attribute them to others—the process of projection—and see anger where it does not exist. We deal here with a profoundly important law of psychological functioning: Awareness moves freely in both directions—or it moves freely in neither.

  But how do self-blindness, self-fragmentation, and self-alienation come into being? That is the issue we shall proceed to consider.

  The phenomenon of self-alienation, or self-fragmentation, may refer to one or more of a number of interrelated problems: dissociation from the body as part of self; being out of touch with our needs; emotional blockage; the severance from explicit awareness of thoughts, attitudes, inclinations, yearnings; the denial of important capacities that lie dormant or unrecognized. Taken as a whole, with all of these overlapping meanings included, this is the condition I described in an earlier book as the problem of the disowned self.

  To disown means to cease to recognize as our own—to cease to recognize our body, our emotions, our thoughts, our attitudes, our aspirations, our abilities as ours. We thus radically restrict and impoverish our sense of self. We have less access to our inner signals, and consequently we become more dependent on signals from others. We need others to tell us what to think, how to live, when to express which emotion, what is appropriate and what is inappropriate, and so forth. By ourselves, we barely exist; our sense of self is often reduced to little more than a sense of anxiety. In such a state of self-alienation, we are prone to becoming approval addicts, love addicts, group-membership addicts, system and structure addicts, belief-system addicts, guru and leader addicts, escape from pain/inner emptiness/anxiety addicts.

  Self-alienation precludes autonomy. Although, granted, we are dealing with matters of degree, and most people exist on a continuum, this principle is an underlying theme of the discussion that follows.

  Let us begin with alienation from the body.

  The infant child’s first sense of self is almost entirely as a body self: self as physical organism. This was what Freud meant when he said that our first ego is a body ego.22 Later, as the mind develops, the child learns to relocate the sense of self “upward”: ego and self find their primary location in mind.

  When growth proceeds appropriately, the body is recognized as part of self but not the totality. Consciousness differentiates from body—or, as some would say, transcends body—and a more complex and comprehensive sense of self evolves.

  But inherent in this process is the potential for dissociation from body. Where there is dissociation, body is neither all of self or even an aspect of self but, rather, nonself. In our culture the overwhelming majority of people exist in varying degrees of estrangement from their own bodies—and often the voice of parents joins the voice of nuns joins the voice of athletic coaches in encouraging that split.*

  The child can see the body as a source of parental irritation and even revulsion if, for example, the mother conveys disgust in the way that she bathes or touches it. Perhaps the child becomes ill and then begins to hate the body as a source of suffering and betrayal. Or the child sees a loved one sicken and die, and again the body is perceived as the traitor. It is the body that allows not only pain but death to enter. In childhood or adolescence the body may be perceived as the sinful source or repository of sexual longings and therefore of guilt. In school, a child’s mind/body split may be exacerbated through physical education teachers who see the body as an object to be beaten into performing, to be controlled and manipulated. The child may be taught to override bodily signals of pain or to become unconscious of them. There is growing evidence that any number of unnecessary accidents and injuries among professional and amateur athletes and dancers are the consequences of inappropriate practice and training methods that reflect a perspective of body-as-adversary.

  The end of the road of bodily dissociation is the privilege of dying of a heart attack at the age of fifty. It is worth contemplating the fact that any number of major illnesses are preceded by long periods of ignored exhaustion.

  By way of illustrating the relationship between autonomy and the body, I want to mention an incident that took place some years ago in a weekly personal growth group I was conducting. One of the participants was a twenty-five-year-old, rather attractive Catholic woman who complained of social insecurity, fear of self-assertiveness, and the inability to recognize her own desires. During the first few sessions, she sat for three and a half hours with a perfectly upright posture, her hands at her sides, her legs pressed tightly together from thighs to ankles, while others in the group, in a perfectly natural manner, adjusted their body movements from time to time.

  One evening, when she began to speak of her problems, I pointed out how she was sitting and asked her how she felt about it. She smiled pleasantly and responded, “I’ve always been taught to sit this way. Ever since I was a little girl. Mother taught me that’s how a lady sits.”

  “But how does it feel to you?” I asked.

  She looked thoughtful for a moment, as if this was a question she had never considered. Then she replied. “Actually, it’s very uncomfortable. Quite painful, really.”

  “Can you sense what your body might like to do right now?”

  Again she remained thoughtful for a moment, then wriggled in her chair, then grinned shyly and crossed her legs.

  “How does that feel?” I asked.

  “Much better,” she said, sighing.

  “So your body gives you one kind of signal, and your mother gives you another.”

  “Yes.”

  “Now you’re confronted with a choice. To which signal will you listen?”

  “Listening to my body feels better than listening to my mother,” she said, as if she had just made an extraordinary discovery—which she had.

  Autonomy begins with the body. The first voice of the authentic self is the voice of the body. The body is not all there is to autonomy, by any means, but it is the root, the foundation. Without the data the body provides, thinking cannot proceed effectively.

  Indeed, human beings are often ignorant of their own bodies, dangerously out of touch with them, and this attitude is encouraged in all spheres. In the medical realm, for example, numerous reports have shown that a chief cause of damage to patients, including death, is the physician’s failure to listen to the patient—out of a conviction that the body is a foreign object about which a patient is presumed not to have knowledge, even when the body in question is the patient’s own. The solution lies, not in unthinking obedience to the dictates of authorities, but in a philosophical and cultural reorientation, beginning with the ability to hold two thoughts in our heads simultaneously: “On the one hand, I am more than my body; on the other, my body is me, a part of me, a manifestation and expression of me. Therefore, getting to know myself includes getting to know my body. If I allow my body to remain a stranger, ‘the other,’ then in an important way I remain a stranger to myself.”

  One of the areas in which alienation from the body is most glaringly evident is the sexual. Studies demonstrate that a woman can have an orgasm while denying that she is sexually experiencing anything in particular, so blocked is she from her own pelvic sensations. If this particular problem is found more commonly in women than in men it is because women, in our culture, receive more messages aimed at inhibiting sexuality. The consequence is that many women do not know what gives them pleasure. They have been taught not to know—or not to find out.

  Sometimes, working with a woman who is dissociated from her own body, and, more specifically, blocked in the pelvic area, I will ask her to perform bump-and-grind movements while saying aloud, over and over again, “I am a good girl.” This exercise is a multilevel assault on the problem. Physically, the movements induce some relaxation of the pelvic musculature, increase blood circulation, and thereby raise the level of feeling. Psychologically, the physical movements are a complete repudiation of her childhood training, while the ironic
humor of “I’m a good girl” interrupts her routine thought patterns and releases in her a fresh perspective. Sometimes, as the client begins to feel an increase of sensation in the pelvic area, anxiety arises, and she makes direct experiential contact with the fear of disapproval that inspired the blocking in the first place. As she is encouraged to accept the anxiety, it tends to disappear, and what she progressively experiences is a sense of liberation and excitement—the sense of waking up. Further work needs to be done on the voices within telling her that she is not to be a sexual being, but the first step is almost always to give the body a voice, to allow the life-force within her an opportunity to be felt and heard. Unblocking the body—unblocking feelings—is unblocking consciousness.47

  Alienated and estranged from our bodies and our bodies’ feelings, we sometimes experience our own impulses as something foreign. This is often the case with sexual desires. As a child, a man may have been starved for intimate physical closeness with his parents. To survive the pain of his unmet needs, he has learned to shut down, ceasing to feel his body’s longings, armoring himself against it. Now, as an adult, he is compulsively sexual. He cannot understand why he feels driven to seduce almost every woman he encounters. At times he feels humiliated by his own sexual urges. Where do they come from? Why is he thus afflicted?

  Once, working with such a man in therapy, I guided him into a hypnotic trance in order to explore his thoughts and feelings during the first moments of making love to a new woman. In the voice of a young boy, he said, “Why do I have to do this? Why can’t I just ask you to hold me? Why do we have to have sex? Why can’t we just cuddle?” He began to weep a child’s tears.

  Subsequent therapy consisted of allowing him to feel the pain of his unmet childhood needs—touch and body contact needs, in particular—with the consequent waking up of his emotional life in general. The more integrated he became with his body, the more connected with his feelings, the freer he became of the impulse toward undiscriminating sexual encounters. He began to experience sex as an expression of self, not as an embarrassment to self.