SELF-ESTEEM, SELF-DECEIT, SELF-ACCEPTANCE, AND FREEDOM

Interestingly, when people are asked if they are a good person, 95-98% answer affirmatively. But by what standard have they come to this assessment? We have objective standards and measures to determine our height, but what do we have to measure our goodness? It seems that we have merely deceived ourselves into believing in our surpassing moral superiority, as many parallel studies indicate:

·       In one study of nearly a million high school seniors, 70 percent said they had “above average leadership skills, but only 2 percent felt their leadership skills were below average.” Another study found that 94 percent of college professors think they do above average work. And in another study, “when doctors diagnosed their patients as having pneumonia, predictions made with 88 percent confidence turned out to be right only 20 percent of the time.”

·       25% of college students placed themselves in the top 1%, relative to their ability to get along with others.

·       84% of Medical Residents thought that Doctors influenced by gifts from pharmaceutical companies, but only 15% of the respondents thought that they would be so influenced.

·       Psychologist Shelley Taylor writes, “Normal people exaggerate how competent and well liked they are. Depressed people do not. Normal people remember their past behavior with a rosy glow. Depressed people are more even-handed…On virtually every point on which normal people show enhanced self-regard, illusions of control, and unrealistic visions of the future, depressed people fail to show the same biases.” (Positive Illusions, p.214)

However, if and when depressed people recover, they become just as self-deluded as the “normal,” according to Taylor. We don’t suffer from a low self-esteem but an inflated self-esteem.  While we universally struggle with feelings of guilt, shame, inferiority, or just gnawing self-doubts, we tend to compensate for these painful feelings with self-aggrandizement, but why?

However, the more we inflate ourselves, the more we need to justify our inflated esteem against the assault of our feelings, and the more scaffolding we need to maintain our façade that we are significant and worthy of love and respect.

But wouldn’t it be easier to just accept and present ourselves as we really are and to admit our crying and insatiable need for success, validation, and love? Instead, it is a burden to carry around our weighty façade wherever we go and to incessantly have to prove ourselves! We crave freedom, but we have imprisoned ourselves with our own unseen shackles – a ball and chain heavier than any made of iron.

Why do we do this to ourselves? Why do we place weights upon our back that we cannot bear? It is not just a matter of proving ourselves to the world; before all else, we need to prove ourselves to ourselves so that we can accept and feel good ourselves. However, this self is not really who we are. It is a falsely constructed self as demanding as a corpse that always needs to be refreshed.

We are told to love ourselves, but we longer even know the self that we want to love. Besides, there are constant emissions from our conscience, like gases from a septic tank, which contradict the image we have created. This means the we are in a continual and tiring struggle with ourselves to suppress the truth.

What then is the answer? Many have become workaholics, addicted to the hope that enough accomplishments will neutralize the stench. President Lyndon B. Johnson obsessively built monuments to his “success”:

• According to one commentator, “It is a curious footnote to history that long before he ran into trouble, Johnson had turned central Texas into a living monument to his heritage and his journey to the summit (the L.B.J birthplace, the L.B.J. boyhood home, the L.B.J. state park, the L.B.J. ranch and more).” (George Weaver, “The Significant Life,”  22)

The Doors’ Jim Morrison faced this struggle for freedom in a different way. His conscience wouldn’t be silenced by self-denial, money or success. Instead, he believed that his conscience had to be saturated and cleansed by self-indulgence until it was wiped clean. He was convinced that this would result in freedom and spiritual purification:

·       “Sensuousness and evil is an attractive image to us now…It’s like a purification ritual in the alchemical sense. First you have to have the period of disorder, chaos, returning to a primeval disaster religion. Out of that you purify the elements and find the new seed of life.” (Quoted from “Hungry for Heaven,” Steve Turner, 96)

Instead of freedom, death claimed him.

If servitude is the incessant need to maintain our front or image, freedom is not having to. It is the freedom to simply accept ourselves as we are, warts and all, and not have to worry about what people might think! But how? Don’t the dreadful feelings and psychological demands that percolate up from the unseen deep need to be addressed?

They must, but they can’t be covered over! The remedy has to penetrate to the very source of the infection. I would now like to suggest a remedy that will directly address the infection. However, we first have to understand our ailment before we can address it appropriately. It is called “sin.” It is both an affront to our nature and conscience and also to the One who has given us our conscience.

Our conscience is a fire alarm. It tells us of a moral problem that has to be addressed. It serves us like our pain receptors that alert us that we must remove our hand from a hot stove. However, in the case of the conscience, we do not appropriately react to its alarm. Instead, we usually tell ourselves that we have done the right thing and, therefore, do not need to apologize. It is like refusing to remove our hand from the burner, insisting that we have placed it just where we want it to be.

We stubbornly refuse to acknowledge our guilt, and it becomes a life controlling infection that putrefies everything else:

·       All the ways of a man are pure in his own eyes, but the LORD weighs the spirit. (Proverbs 16:2)

The Lord “weighs” us by allowing us to reap what we’ve sown. Consequently, we have to make peace with our Creator by acknowledging our sin and asking for His remedy. However, coming to the Lord is like a mouse coming to the cat. Jesus explained it like this:

·       And this is the judgment: the light has come into the world, and people loved the darkness rather than the light because their works were evil. For everyone who does wicked things hates the light and does not come to the light, lest his works should be exposed. (John 3:19-20)

The judgment is this – we condemn ourselves to the darkness of the cave. I had been a cave dweller, feeding upon endless self-delusions of grandeur. It was only the love of God that had coaxed me out of the cave and into the once painful light of the truth about myself.

I now bask in the light of the forgiveness of Christ and the eternal assurances of his love. It is this love that has enabled me to be transparent and to even laugh at myself:

·       If God is for us, who can be against us? He who did not spare his own Son but gave him up for us all, how will he not also with him graciously give us all things? (Romans 8:31-32)

This is freedom.