The Six Pillars of Self-Esteem Read online

  ALSO BY NATHANIEL BRANDEN

  HONORING THE SELF HOW TO RAISE YOUR SELF-ESTEEM

  Available from Bantam Books

  THE SIX PILLARS OF SELF-ESTEEM

  THE SIX PILLARS OF SELF-ESTEEM

  Nathaniel Branden

  © 2011 Nathaniel Branden. All rights reserved.

  Contents

  Copyright

  Introduction

  PART I SELF-ESTEEM: BASIC PRINCIPLES

  1 Self-Esteem: The Immune System of Consciousness

  2 The Meaning of Self-Esteem

  3 The Face of Self-Esteem

  4 The Illusion of Self-Esteem

  PART II INTERNAL SOURCES OF SELF-ESTEEM

  5 The Focus on Action

  6 The Practice of Living Consciously

  7 The Practice of Self-Acceptance

  8 The Practice of Self-Responsibility

  9 The Practice of Self-Assertiveness

  10 The Practice of Living Purposefully

  11 The Practice of Personal Integrity

  12 The Philosophy of Self-Esteem

  PART III EXTERNAL INFLUENCES: SELF AND OTHERS

  13 Nurturing a Child’s Self-Esteem

  14 Self-Esteem in the Schools

  15 Self-Esteem and Work

  16 Self-Esteem and Psychotherapy

  17 Self-Esteem and Culture

  18 Conclusion: The Seventh Pillar of Self-Esteem

  APPENDIX A: Critique of Other Definitions of Self-Esteem

  APPENDIX B: A Sentence-Completion Exercise for Building Self-Esteem

  APPENDIX C: Recommendations for Further Study

  References

  Acknowledgments

  To Devers Branden

  Introduction

  My purpose in this book is to identify, in greater depth and comprehensiveness than in my previous writings, the most important factors on which self-esteem depends. If self-esteem is the health of the mind, then few subjects are of comparable urgency.

  The turbulence of our times demands strong selves with a clear sense of identity, competence, and worth. With a breakdown of cultural consensus, an absence of worthy role models, little in the public arena to inspire our allegiance, and disorientingly rapid change a permanent feature of our lives, it is a dangerous moment in history not to know who we are or not to trust ourselves. The stability we cannot find in the world we must create within our own persons. To face life with low self-esteem is to be at a severe disadvantage. These considerations are part of my motivation in writing this book.

  In essence, the book consists of my answers to four questions: What is self-esteem? Why is self-esteem important? What can we do to raise the level of our self-esteem? What role do others play in influencing our self-esteem?

  Self-esteem is shaped by both internal and external factors. By “internal” I mean factors residing within, or generated by, the individual—ideas or beliefs, practices or behaviors. By “external” I mean factors in the environment: messages verbally or nonverbally transmitted, or experiences evoked, by parents, teachers, “significant others,” organizations, and culture. I examine self-esteem from the inside and the outside: What is the contribution of the individual to his or her self-esteem and what is the contribution of other people? To the best of my knowledge, no investigation of this scope has been attempted before.

  When I published The Psychology of Self-Esteem in 1969, I told myself I had said everything I could say on this subject. In 1970, realizing that there were “a few more issues” I needed to address, I wrote Breaking Free. Then, in 1972, “to fill in a few more gaps,” I wrote The Disowned Self. After that, I told myself I was absolutely and totally finished with self-esteem and went on to write on other subjects. A decade or so passed, and I began to think about how much more I had personally experienced and learned about self-esteem since my first work, so I decided to write “one last book” about it; Honoring the Self was published in 1983. A couple of years later I thought it would be useful to write an action-oriented guide for individuals who wanted to work on their own self-esteem—How to Raise Your Self-Esteem, published in 1986. Surely I had finally finished with this subject, I told myself. But during this same period, “the self-esteem movement” exploded across the country; everyone was talking about self-esteem; books were written, lectures and conferences were given—and I was not enthusiastic about the quality of what was being presented to people. I found myself in some rather heated discussions with colleagues. While some of what was offered on self-esteem was excellent, I thought that a good deal was not. I realized how many issues I had not yet addressed, how many questions I needed to consider that I had not considered before, and how much I had carried in my head but never actually said or written. Above all, I saw the necessity of going far beyond my earlier work in spelling out the factors that create and sustain high or healthy self-esteem. (I use “high” and “healthy” interchangeably.) Once again, I found myself drawn back to examine new aspects of this inexhaustibly rich field of study, and to think my way down to deeper levels of understanding of what is, for me, the single most important psychological subject in the world.

  I understood that what had begun so many years before as an interest, or even a fascination, had become a mission.

  Speculating on the roots of this passion, I go back to my teenage years, to the time when emerging autonomy collided with pressure to conform. It is not easy to write objectively about that period, and I do not wish to suggest an arrogance I did not and do not feel. The truth is, as an adolescent I had an inarticulate but sacred sense of mission about my life. I had the conviction that nothing mattered more than retaining the ability to see the world through my own eyes. I thought that that was how everyone should feel. This perspective has never changed. I was acutely conscious of the pressures to “adapt” and to absorb the values of the “tribe”—family, community, and culture. It seemed to me that what was asked was the surrender of my judgment and also my conviction that my life and what I made of it was of the highest possible value. I saw my contemporaries surrendering and losing their fire—and, sometimes in painful, lonely bewilderment, I wanted to understand why. Why was growing up equated with giving up? If my overriding drive since childhood was for understanding, another desire, hardly less intense, was forming but not yet fully conscious: the desire to communicate my understanding to the world; above all, to communicate my vision of life. It was years before I realized that, at the deepest level, I experienced myself as a teacher—a teacher of values. Underneath all my work, the core idea I wanted to teach was: Your life is important. Honor it. Fight for your highest possibilities.

  I had my own struggles with self-esteem, and I give examples of them in this book. The full context is given in my memoir, Judgment Day. I shall not pretend that everything I know about self-esteem I learned from psychotherapy clients. Some of the most important things I learned came from thinking about my own mistakes and from noticing what I did that lowered or raised my own self-esteem. I write, in part, as a teacher to myself.

  It would be foolish for me to declare that I have now written my final report on “the psychology of self-esteem.” But this book does feel like the climax of all the work that preceded it.

  I first lectured on self-esteem and its impact on love, work, and the struggle for happiness in the late 1950s and published my first articles on the subject in the 1960s. The challenge then was to gain public understanding of its importance. “Self-esteem” was not yet an expression in widespread use. Today, the danger may be that the idea has become fashionable. It is on everyone’s tongue, which is not to say that it is better understood. Yet if we are unclear about its precise meaning and about the specific factors its
successful attainment depends on—if we are careless in our thinking, or succumb to the oversimplifications and sugar-coatings of pop psychology—then the subject will suffer a fate worse than being ignored. It will become trivialized. That is why, in Part I, we begin our inquiry into the sources of self-esteem with an examination of what self-esteem is and is not.

  When I first began struggling with questions concerning self-esteem forty years ago, I saw the subject as providing invaluable clues to understanding motivation. It was 1954. I was twenty-four years of age, studying psychology at New York University, and with a small psychotherapy practice. Reflecting on the stories I heard from clients, I looked for a common denominator, and I was struck by the fact that whatever the person’s particular complaint, there was always a deeper issue: a sense of inadequacy, of not being “enough,” a feeling of guilt or shame or inferiority, a clear lack of self-acceptance, self-trust, and self-love. In other words, a problem of self-esteem.

  In his early writings Sigmund Freud suggested that neurotic symptoms could be understood either as direct expressions of anxiety or else as defenses against anxiety, which seemed to me to be a hypothesis of great profundity. Now I began to wonder if the complaints or symptoms I encountered could be understood either as direct expressions of inadequate self-esteem (for example, feelings of worthlessness, or extreme passivity, or a sense of futility) or else as defenses against inadequate self-esteem (for example, grandiose bragging and boasting, compulsive sexual “acting-out,” or overcontrolling social behavior). I continue to find this idea compelling. Where Freud thought in terms of ego defense mechanisms, strategies to avoid the threat to the ego’s equilibrium represented by anxiety, today I think in terms of self-esteem defense mechanisms, strategies to defend against any kind of threat, from any quarter, internal or external, to self-esteem (or one’s pretense at it). In other words, all the famous “defenses” that Freud identified can be understood as efforts to protect self-esteem.

  When I went to the library in search of information about self-esteem, almost none was to be found. The indexes of books on psychology did not contain the term. Eventually I found a few brief mentions, such as in William James, but nothing that seemed sufficiently fundamental or that brought the clarity I was seeking. Freud suggested that low “self-regard” was caused by a child’s discovery that he or she could not have sexual intercourse with Mother or Father, which resulted in the helpless feeling, “I can do nothing.” I did not find this persuasive or illuminating as an explanation. Alfred Adler suggested that everyone starts out with feelings of inferiority caused, first, by bringing some physical liability or “organ inferiority” into the world, and second, by the fact that everyone else (that is, grown-ups or older siblings) is bigger and stronger. In other words, our misfortune is that we are not born as perfectly formed mature adults. I did not find this helpful, either. A few psychoanalysts wrote about self-esteem, but in terms I found remote from my understanding of the idea, so that it was almost as if they were studying another subject. (Only much later could I see some connection between aspects of that work and my own.) I struggled to clarify and expand my understanding chiefly by reflecting on what I observed while working with people.

  As the issue of self-esteem came more clearly into focus for me, I saw that it is a profound and powerful human need, essential to healthy adaptiveness, that is, to optimal functioning and self-fulfillment. To the extent that the need is frustrated, we suffer and are thwarted in our development.

  Apart from disturbances whose roots are biological, I cannot think of a single psychological problem—from anxiety and depression, to under-achievement at school or at work, to fear of intimacy, happiness, or success, to alcohol or drug abuse, to spouse battering or child molestation, to co-dependency and sexual disorders, to passivity and chronic aimlessness, to suicide and crimes of violence—that is not traceable, at least in part, to the problem of deficient self-esteem. Of all the judgments we pass in life, none is as important as the one we pass on ourselves.

  I recall discussing the issue with colleagues during the 1960s. No one debated the subject’s importance. No one denied that if ways could be found to raise the level of a person’s self-esteem, any number of positive consequences would follow. “But how do you raise an adult’s self-esteem?” was a question I heard more than once, with a note of skepticism that it could be done. As was evident from their writings, the issue—and the challenge—were largely ignored.

  Pioneering family therapist Virginia Satir talked of the importance of self-esteem, but she was not a theoretician of the subject and said little about its dynamics except in a limited family context. Carl Rogers, another great pioneer in psychotherapy, focused essentially on only one aspect of self-esteem—self-acceptance—and we shall see that while the two are intimately related, they are not identical in meaning.

  Still, awareness of the importance of the topic was growing, and during the seventies and eighties, an increasing number of articles appeared in professional journals, aimed chiefly at establishing correlations between self-esteem and some aspect of behavior. However, there was no general theory of self-esteem nor even an agreed-on definition of the term. Different writers meant different things by “self-esteem.” Consequently they often measured different phenomena. Sometimes one set of findings seemed to invalidate another. The field was a Tower of Babel. Today there is still no widely shared definition of self-esteem.

  In the 1980s, the idea of self-esteem caught fire. After a quiet buildup over decades, more and more people began talking about its importance to human well-being. Educators in particular began thinking about the relevance of self-esteem to success or failure at school. We have a National Council for Self-Esteem, with chapters opening in more and more cities. Almost every week somewhere in the country we have conferences in which discussions of self-esteem figure prominently.

  The interest in self-esteem is not confined to the United States. It is becoming worldwide. In the summer of 1990 I had the privilege of delivering, near Oslo, Norway, the opening keynote address at the First International Conference on Self-Esteem. Educators, psychologists, and psychotherapists from the United States, Great Britain, and various countries in Europe, including the Soviet Union, streamed into Norway to attend lectures, seminars, and workshops devoted to discussions of the applications of self-esteem psychology to personal development, school systems, social problems, and business organizations. Notwithstanding the differences among participants in background, culture, primary focus of interest, and understanding of what precisely “self-esteem” meant, the atmosphere was charged with excitement and the conviction that self-esteem was an idea whose historical moment had arrived. Growing out of the Oslo conference, we now have an International Council on Self-Esteem, with more and more countries being represented.

  In the former Soviet Union a small but growing group of thinkers is keenly aware of the importance of self-esteem to the transitions their country is attempting to achieve. Commenting on the urgent need for education in self-esteem, a visiting Russian scholar remarked to me, “Not only are our people without any tradition of entrepreneurship, but our managers have absolutely no grasp of the idea of personal responsibility and accountability that the average American manager takes for granted. And you know what a gigantic problem passivity and envy is here. The psychological changes we need may be even more formidable than the political or economic changes.”

  Throughout the world there is an awakening to the fact that, just as a human being cannot hope to realize his or her potential without healthy self-esteem, neither can a society whose members do not respect themselves, do not value their persons, do not trust their minds.

  But with all of these developments, what precisely self-esteem is—and what specifically its attainment depends on—remain the great questions.

  At one conference, when I stated that the practice of living consciously was essential to healthy self-esteem, one woman demanded angrily, “Why are you trying t
o impose your white, middle-class values on the rest of the world?” (This left me wondering who the class of humanity was for whom living consciously was not important to psychological well-being.) When I spoke of personal integrity as vital to the protection of a positive self-concept, and the betrayal of integrity as psychologically harmful, no one volunteered agreement or wanted that idea recorded in our report. They preferred to focus only on how others might wound one’s feelings of worth, not how one might inflict the wound oneself. This attitude is typical of those who believe one’s self-esteem is primarily determined by other people. I will not deny that experiences such as these, and the feelings they ignite, have intensified my desire to write this book.

  In working with self-esteem, we need to be aware of two dangers. One is that of oversimplifying what healthy self-esteem requires, and thereby of catering to people’s hunger for quick fixes and effortless solutions. The other is that of surrendering to a kind of fatalism or determinism that assumes, in effect, that individuals “either have good self-esteem or they haven’t,” that everyone’s destiny is set (forever?) by the first few years of life, and there’s not much to be done about it (except perhaps years or decades of psychotherapy). Both views encourage passivity; both obstruct our vision of what is possible.

  My experience is that most people underestimate their power to change and grow. They believe implicitly that yesterday’s pattern must be tomorrow’s. They do not see choices that—objectively—do exist. They rarely appreciate how much they can do on their own behalf if genuine growth and higher self-esteem are their goals and if they are willing to take responsibility for their own lives. The belief that they are powerless becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

  This book, ultimately, is a call to action. It is, I now realize, an amplification in psychological terms of the battle cry of my youth: A self is to be actualized and celebrated—not aborted and renounced. This book is addressed to all men and women who wish to participate actively in the process of their evolution—as well as to psychologists, parents, teachers, and those responsible for the culture of organizations. It is a book about what is possible.