PRIDE. PRIDE. FEELING OF OWN DIGNITY. WHAT IS THE DIFFERENCE?

2024 Author: Harry Day | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 15:43

During psychoanalytic sessions, clients often talk about self-esteem: “How to restore self-esteem? Aren't pride and pride the same thing? Pride is a sin. How can you feel your dignity and not be too proud?"

A teenage daughter brought the same theme the other day from the lyceum: "Teachers say that being proud is bad."

In literature, these words are often replaced by one another and identified, but still, they have different meanings. Let's analyze.

The word "pride" is derived from the Old Slavic "grd". But in Latin there is a similar word "gurdus" - "stupid."

PRIDE is self-respect, self-esteem. This is sincere joy for yourself and your successes, without a feeling of arrogance and exaltation of yourself above others. Pride motivates you to set big goals and achieve them.

PRIDE - has the same origin as pride, but this feeling with a negative connotation. Its meaning is different: arrogance, excessive pride that comes from selfishness. Pride is a positive attitude only towards oneself, one's personal values, comparing oneself with other people in order to surpass them in everything, it is disrespect for the values of other people. In almost all religions, pride is a sin, and even leading to other sins.

• PRIDE is a strong sense of pleasure in one's own successes or the accomplishments of an individual, group, or other entity with which a person identifies.
• Pride as an emotion arises not only as a result of one's own, but also of others' successes, PRIDE - only as a result of one's own successes.
• PRIDE has a positive connotation and PRIDE has a negative connotation.
• PRIDE is self-esteem, and PRIDE is arrogance.
• PRIDE needs a reason. PRIDE needs comparison.
• PRIDE allows you to set new goals, and PRIDE prevents you from going even towards those goals that are clear and understandable. This is prevented by the fear of being worse against the background of others and the desire to take away what the other has in order to become better than him.
• DIGNITY is the subject's awareness of the need to follow lofty principles and strive for the ideal.
• A person with a SENSE OF OWN DIGNITY feels himself worthy of love just like that, without conditions, from birth. A person with PRIDE tries to deserve / beg for love from other people, pushing himself aside, and cannot get enough of it.

DIGNITY is an inner feeling. Comparisons are not needed to confirm it. This is what is given from birth - people's idea of equality.

In the process of raising a child, dignity can be destroyed as a result of humiliation, excessive criticism, physical or mental violence, identification with parents whose dignity is violated.

In case of a positive outcome, a SENSE OF OWN DIGNITY is formed - an internal core built on spiritual and moral values and on a sense of one's own self-worth. Awareness of their rights, moral value, self-respect. This is a strong internal law that is observed without coercion, at will.

• A person with a sense of his own dignity perceives other people as equals, he will not betray, will not deceive, because this is contrary to his inner nature.
• This person looks confident outwardly, with adequate self-esteem and self-respect.
• He does not humiliate himself or others. He does not lower his head in front of anyone, but at the same time does not require to lower his head in front of him. Respects subordinates, rivals, and even enemies. He does not despise the less powerful, less intelligent. It is simply impossible to “omit” such a person, because no blackening statements find a response within him and do not come into resonance.
• A person with dignity communicates only with those who respect him.
• He knows how to build vertical and horizontal relationships. Vertical - observing the hierarchy in the family or communicating with management at work, while suppressing any attempts to insult, humiliate, ridicule. Horizontal - relationships on an equal footing with friends, with business partners, with a loved one. Follows your desires. Does not allow you to neglect your interests and devalue your investments in the relationship. Respects his own and others' boundaries. Knows how to say "no" and calmly with dignity perceives the refusal of another person.

PRIDE is always outside - it is important for a person to appear smarter, more beautiful, more successful, richer than anyone else. Pride needs comparison. And bragging. At the same time, she sometimes skillfully disguises herself as self-deprecation: "This could only happen to me, no one loves me, I am the worst of all …" or "Well, I'm fat in this dress …", in order to "run into" compliments and assurances as a result: “Oh, well, what are you. You are doing great. And you look so cool! " Pride needs constant attention and reinforcement of self-esteem from the outside.

PRIDE - in fact, this is self-dislike. Pride is a dignity perverted by egoism that is inherent in every person. Erich Fromm wrote in his book Escape from Freedom: “The fact is that it is the lack of self-love that gives rise to selfishness. He who does not love himself, who does not approve of himself, is in constant anxiety for himself. Some inner confidence will never arise in him, which can exist only on the basis of genuine love and self-approval. An egoist is simply forced to deal only with himself, spending his efforts and abilities to get something that others already have. Since in his soul he has neither inner satisfaction nor confidence, he must constantly prove to himself and those around him that he is no worse than the others."

As a result of the great confusion in society about the difference between PRIDE, PRIDE, and DIGNITY, some teachers and parents feel that it is dangerous to praise a child even for specific merit. Many people, unconsciously or unknowingly, try to deliberately maintain both themselves and their children a sense of their own inferiority in order to avoid falling into the trap of self-satisfaction and arrogance. But this can lead to the formation of a “victim” position, prone to patience and feeling unworthy, of little value. This position attracts tyrants, rapists and manipulators. A person falls into a trap and endures, not daring to admit that he deserves a better attitude towards himself. Women take for granted humiliation, violence from the husbands of alcoholics. In such destructive families, children grow up who do not respect their mother, father, or themselves and pass on trauma from generation to generation.

A person who feels that he is of little value, defective, unworthy suffers from an inferiority complex, has low internal self-esteem and may have two options for external self-esteem.

• Compensatory - "I must be the best" (conscious external self-esteem), so as not to be insignificant (unconscious inner self-esteem). He overestimates his qualities and "life goals", the ideals to which he strives.
• Avoidant Low - “I cannot be the best (conscious external self-esteem), as I am a nonentity (unconscious attitude).

As a rule, such an attitude in people who, for one reason or another, were deprived of unconditional love, acceptance, respect and emotional closeness in childhood, grew up in destructive families, acutely experienced a sense of their own uselessness and worthlessness, humiliation, insults, emotional, physical and mental violence, comparison with others, overestimated requirements, or even in a seemingly ideal family, the child could set too high requirements for compliance, achievement levels, tasks to meet the expectations and dreams of parents.

The sense of dignity, self-worth, self-esteem of an adult is associated with his childhood traumas of upbringing. The root of self-esteem problems is in childhood developmental trauma. Therefore, only “I am the most charming and attractive” affermations or behavioral tasks for achievement will be ineffective.

Accordingly, working with self-esteem and self-esteem is more psychotherapeutic work to reconstruct the personality and resolve these childhood traumas.