2024 Author: Harry Day | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 15:43
The self-concept myth is perhaps the most popular, most enduring and one of the most harmful psychological myths.
The metaphor of low self-esteem does not at all reflect the real complex psychological processes that give rise to concern about this problem. There are always more complex things behind "self-esteem problems": tons of misconceptions about their inferiority, lack of experience of safe and respectful close relationships, lack of ability to integrate feedback, etc.
For example, the most ordinary baby in a family with a dysfunctional psychological environment is growing up. His basic psychological needs are not met: his parents often ignore him, are not interested in his feelings, pour aggression on him, shame him, deprive him of love and respect for "educational" purposes.
Since childhood, a toxic lie has been drilled into his head, either explicitly or implicitly: "As you are, you are defective, nobody needs you, if you want to be safe - learn to imitate the behavior of a worthy person." And the baby has nowhere to go - he, as he can, portrays what the parent needs, putting his whole soul into it - just not to completely lose parental support and love (which for a child is comparable to the fear of death). He learns to crush in himself any manifestations for which he is deprived of love, and grows a special facade for the parent, for which he is somehow mistaken. And over time, he becomes so immersed in this game that he forgets what he really is.
And with this grown facade, the kid comes into society - first to a kindergarten, then to a school, to an institute, to a work collective. And everywhere, of course, he tries to join the team and earn acceptance in the only way that he worked with the parent. But only the facade, grown for the specific neurosis of one unbalanced adult, no longer works with other people - the people there are different and their neuroses are different. Instead of love and acceptance, a person receives misunderstanding and rejection: "You are kind of strange, you joke out of place, you take offense at the wrong place, you don’t take a trick," etc.
And with each such case, a person is more and more affirmed in the initial delusion about his inferiority. And then pop psychology whispers: "and you go to the gym, make more money, take a pickup - work on self-esteem." A person is carried away by the idea that he just somehow evaluates himself in a wrong way, that he needs to do something in order to earn a good mark, prove something to himself and to others, somehow wind himself up … And, of course, all these efforts after short triumph, they return him exactly to the same impasse, because in fact there is no real problem and never was - there was only a delusion introduced from the outside about his own inferiority.
Calm does not come from high self-esteem or realistic self-esteem. A healthy state is a lack of self-esteem concern. And this pleasant inner peace appears exactly when a person has developed a sufficient number of ways to receive internal and external support in the required volume, to successfully adapt to the environment and satisfy their needs in it. And these issues are resolved only with obtaining a fundamentally new experience of close, safe and respectful relationships with living people (an option is in psychotherapy), but not in the process of reading books or going to the gym.
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