While a broad range of mental health professionals insist
that we have to believe in ourselves and have a high self regard to be mentally
healthy, the Biblical revelation takes us in an entirely different direction.
We are instructed to trust exclusively in God and reject self-trust (Phil 3:2;
Jer. 17:5-7). In contrast, the idea of believing in oneself is so deeply
entrenched in American society that people are genuinely surprised when this broadly
accepted “truth” is questioned.
However, there are a lot of sound reasons to question this iconic
assumption. For one thing, learning to trust in ourselves entails having an
unrealistically high estimation of ourselves. We can’t trust in ourselves if we
don’t esteem ourselves capable of delivering on that trust. We can’t trust that
we’ll get an “A” unless we esteem ourselves capable of getting the “A.”
However, building self-esteem is not the same thing as self-acceptance; it’s the opposite. If
self-acceptance represents the willingness to see ourselves as we truly are,
self-esteem represents its unwillingness. Although it feels much better, at
least in the short run, to regard ourselves more highly than we ought, this
represents a rejection of who we really are.
While the
building of self-esteem has been identified as the panacea for all sorts of
personal failures, according to Wikipedia, many psychologists have joined in
condemning the practice of building self-esteem:
·
“Perhaps
one of the strongest theoretical and operational critiques of the concept
of self-esteem has come from American psychologist Albert Ellis who on numerous occasions
criticized the philosophy as essentially self-defeating and ultimately destructive…unrealistic,
illogical and self- and socially destructive – often doing more harm than good…The
healthier alternative to self-esteem according to him is unconditional self-acceptance
and unconditional other-acceptance…”
Indeed,
self-acceptance is antithetical to building high self-esteem. While self-trust
and self-esteem attempt to unrealistically inflate our estimation of ourselves,
self-acceptance reflects a willingness to regard and to accept the truth about
ourselves, however uncomfortable this might be. Many advocates of self-esteem
recognize that promoting it is not the same as promoting truth and accuracy,
but instead argue that high self-esteem has many beneficial effects.
In contrast to
this, it is argued that adaptive decision-making depends upon accurate data, in
this case, a sober assessment of our true performance and abilities. This requires
the acceptance of reality the way it is. In support of this, it is obvious that
whatever we manage well, we must first see clearly and understand. When I drive
my car, the thousands of decisions I make every minute depend upon accurate
visual feedback. If the data is distorted, my decisions will be disastrous. The
same is true about managing our own lives. We have to be willing to accept and
confront the truth about ourselves if we are going to experience positive
adaptive adjustments.
Is Ellis correct
that building self-esteem is “self-defeating and ultimately destructive…unrealistic,
illogical and self- and socially destructive?” Does trusting in oneself produce
good results other than feeling good about oneself? Research gives a resounding
“no!”
·
“Recent
research indicates that inflating students' self-esteem in and of itself has no
positive effect on grades. One study has shown that inflating self-esteem by
itself can actually decrease grades.” (These five
quotes are taken from Wikipedia.)
·
“Some
of the most interesting results of recent studies center on the relationships
between bullying,
violence,
and self-esteem. People used to assume that bullies acted violently towards
others because they suffered from low self-esteem…”
·
“In
contrast to old beliefs, later research indicates that violence is often linked
to high self-esteem.”
·
“Violent
criminals often describe themselves as superior to others - as special, elite
persons who deserve preferential treatment. Many murders and assaults are
committed in response to blows to self-esteem such as insults
and humiliation.”
—Rajbir Singh, Psychology of Wellbeing, 2007
·
“Self-esteem
can also lead to superiority complexes, wherein arrogant individuals feel no
qualms about abusing someone they consider inferior. This, Baumeister argues,
is the case with psychopaths or has been the case with groups such as the
Nazis.”
The evidence
seems to be a consistent thumbs-down for self-esteem. High self-esteem seems to
enable us to justify abusing others. After all, we are the ones who are “good”
and “right.” Also, we are the ones who have been wronged. Abusers reconstruct
their biographies to justify their retaliations against society. Believing in
themselves, they are self-convinced that it is they who are the real victims!
Richard Lee
Colvin (LA Times, 1/25/99, “Losing Faith
in the Self-Esteem Movement”) writes:
·
“Having
high self-esteem certainly feels good, psychologists say. But contrary to
intuition, it doesn’t necessarily pay off in greater academic achievement, less
drug abuse, less crime or much of anything else. Or, if it does pay off, 10,000
or more research studies have yet to find proof.”
The findings are
uniform. Erica Goode (NYT, 10/1/02, “Deflating Self-Esteem’s Role in Society’s
Ills”) writes:
·
“’D’
students…think as highly of themselves as valedictorians, and serial rapists
are no more likely to ooze with insecurities than doctors or bank managers…In
an extensive review of the studies, Nicholas Emler…found no clear link between
low self-esteem and delinquency, violence against others, teenage smoking, drug
use or racism…High self-esteem, on the other hand, was positively correlated
with racist attitudes, drunken driving and other risky behaviors.”
·
[Psychologist
Jennifer Crocker concluded:] “The pursuit of self-esteem has short-term
benefits but long term costs…ultimately diverting people from fulfilling their
fundamental human needs for competence, relatedness and autonomy and leading to
poor self-regulation and mental and physical health.”
Reviewing two new
studies regarding positive self-talk, Wray Herbert reports on some perplexing
results. Those subjects who were primed to perform a certain task with
self-trust statements (“I will” do….) performed worse than those without this
priming. (“Will Power Paradox,” Scientific
America
Mind, July/August 2010, 66-67)
Why such negative
findings for something – self-esteem and self-trust – that feels so positive? For
one thing, the pursuit of self-trust inevitably produces self-delusion and
denial. This should be obvious. In order to trust in ourselves, we suppress
those things that would argue against self-trust and feed ourselves only upon
those thoughts that would serve to promote self-trust and esteem. Nurtured on
this diet, any anti-social act can be justified. Sadly, many mental health
practitioners are ready to affirm these delusions. They blindly assume that
their clients suffer from low self-esteem, and that healing means feeling good
about self.
Consistent with
this, I have never seen a psychotherapist advertise, “Come to me and learn the
truth about yourself.” Indeed, no one would come. Instead, they assert, “Come
to me to reduce your painful symptomology.”
Instead,
self-esteem training makes it harder for the client to work out his
interpersonal problems. After all, how can he if he has been trained to only
see the “positive!”
Truth has become
the casualty of our pursuit of the feel-good life, and research has reaffirmed this
fact repeatedly. In fact, self-delusion is all too “normal.” Shelley Taylor is
a psychologist who believes that a little self-delusion is necessary to get you
out of bed in the morning. Nevertheless, she unequivocally affirms,
·
“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, 214)
Self-delusions
characterize the “normal” life, as a wealth of studies have found. In one
study, 25% percent of the college students asserted that they were in the top
1% in terms of their ability to get along with others. In a 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. (ABC.go.com, 11/9/05, “Self-Images Often Erroneously Inflated”)
Costs abound. If
we have duped ourselves into believing that we are great leaders, we will make
some foolish decisions.
But perhaps
self-delusion and self-trust are healthy, especially when we compare them with
their opposite – depression? If denial and delusion enable us to pursue our
goals, perhaps a little dab of this poison is just what the doctor would
prescribe? Perhaps there is too much of a preoccupation on the idea of truth? Instead,
it seems that the poison – this flight from reality into a comforting fantasy
world – is lethal, although the psychological dying process might remain
imperceptible.
I know something
about this kind of psychological death. As a youth, I felt very bad about
myself and struggled with shame, but I found a “remedy.” I compensated for my
bad feelings with “good,” inflated thoughts. As a 15-year-old, I’d look in the
mirror and flex my muscles and tell myself how wonderful I was and how the
girls secretly loved me. After a while, I began to believe it. I got a “high,”
and confidently strutted towards the previously threatening classroom. However,
once there, reality assaulted me. I saw that the girls didn’t love me. They
seemed to prefer the athletes, class clowns, and even the bad boys. I went home
crushed and returned to my mirror. However, in order to restore my confidence,
I had to now tell myself more grandiose distortions and to also believe them.
Nevertheless, I could never achieve the original high – my drug failed to
confront the underlying problems – but instead I became addicted to the drug of
self-delusion.
There are many
costs to this addiction. For one thing, with every “fix,” I became more
alienated from reality and from myself. I couldn’t make sound decisions because
I was unable to see myself accurately. I didn’t want to! I had opted to feel
good about myself at the cost of thinking accurately.
For another
thing, I was building my life on the foundation of self. I had to believe in
myself, and I had to be able to shoulder all of life’s challenges. Some were
too big to bear, but I convinced myself that I could do it. However, I became
more and more self-conscious. If the foundation of my life is me, then I had
doomed myself to obsessively scrutinize that foundation of self to assure
myself whether it could bear the weight of my life.
It gets worse. My
positive affirmations inevitably failed to deal with the real problem – the
underlying guilt and shame that always seemed to bubble to the surface despite
my most strenuous efforts to keep them submerged. This necessitated more
positive affirmations, but I was becoming increasingly alienated from myself –
a self I couldn’t bear to face, which I tried unsuccessfully to keep at bay
with a web of self-deceptions.
When depression
would come – and it came as a regular visitor – it would thrust me into an
entirely different reality, a reality of shame and self-contempt. During such
visitations, my drug of positive affirmations failed to help, no matter how
many doses I took. Nothing worked, but as a dead body bobbing up and down in
the waves, I would eventually come up for a brief reprieve and some fresh air.
However, the “deep” would reclaim me for increasingly long periods.
The more I built
my self-esteem, the more I separated myself from the other rejected self – the “me”
I could no longer bear to observe.. Consequently, I saw two separate selves,
but I couldn’t tell which was the real one – the superior being that I had
created and nurtured, or the depressed, ugly, helpless version? Not only was I obsessed with myself and the
endless battle to try to prove myself, but I was also obsessed with negative
comparisons with others.
Self-trust always
comes at great price. How do we know that we’re decent and superior human
beings? By comparing ourselves to others! Jesus told a parable about someone
who trusted in his own goodness and looked down on others (Luke 18:9-14). The
two things – self-trust and the disdain of others – go together. Self-trust seems
to always require comparisons with others. It gives me little satisfaction to
score “A” on my papers if everyone else is scoring “A+!”
Here is the basis
of the human dilemma. We all need to believe that we are good and worthwhile
people, but we have a conscience that, if still operative, informs us that we
fall far short of our standards and then beats us up with feelings of guilt and
shame. “Normal” people can convince themselves that they’re OK despite these
unpleasant internal messages. Depressed people can’t and eventually succumb to
this reality. The struggle to suppress these unwanted messages just becomes too
much to bear, but both groups struggle at the expense of inner peace.
However, the
“normal” succumb to an equally bad set of demons – a greater confidence in
their delusions, arrogance, stagnation, shallowness, superficiality, contempt
for others, bigotry, and even criminality, as the research reveals. Chauvinism
is a variation of the theme – my group or ethnicity is better than yours – and
produces bloody results.
Everyone is
trapped in an endless cycle to prove themselves, either by their
accomplishments, power, popularity, or belonging to the right group or
ethnicity. We do whatever it takes to
feel good about ourselves! In order to establish our significance, we fight
wars, subjugate peoples, refuse to speak their inferior languages, and become
ethnocentric. Ironically, what had once been regarded as pathological –
self-esteem – is now regarded as essential to mental health. (In an interesting
variation of this theme, instead of degrading others, we promote them, all the
while thinking, “Look how good a person I am!”)
However, we never
arrive at any rest from this endless struggle to achieve significance and to
prove that we’re worthy of believing in ourselves. John D. Rockefeller, the
richest man in the world at that time, was asked, “How much more money will you
need to be happy.” He wisely answered, “Always a little bit more.”
Even he hadn’t
arrived! We convince ourselves, “If I only had that house, job, promotion, or
woman, I’d be happy.” The promotion might suffice for a week or two until we
hear of a co-worker who received a more significant promotion.
How can we account
for this very human phenomenon? Clearly, the answer isn’t to be found in all of
our strivings to establish the self. The more we attempt to reassure ourselves
of our worth, the more we become addicted to this drug. In contrast, the right drug deals directly with the
problem. When we scrape our arm, we apply antiseptic to kill the invading
germs. We might also take aspirin for the pain, but aspirin can’t address the
problem, only the symptoms. However, if we continue to rely on aspirins, we
will develop side affects, some of which will remain undetected.
Building
self-esteem, like taking aspirin, fails to address the real issue. This is
shown by the fact that we require increasingly higher doses and never attain
any healing. Instead, self-esteem merely helps us to live with our bad feelings
about self, but the side-effects are deadly.
The thrust to
build self-esteem and self-trust not only alienates us from ourselves and
reality, it alienates us also from others. Relationship builds upon the turf of
a mutually-shared reality. It’s hard to have a relationship with a delusional
person. Many terminally ill people are very delusional and in denial about
their impending death, according to the late psychiatrist, M. Scott Peck. He
laments the fact that, although this urgent reality could provide opportunities
for interpersonal reconciliation and healing, more often than not, it drives
people apart. How do you relate to the dying person who promises that once he’s
out of the hospital, he’s going to take you on many joyous vacations? You
can’t. Your two perspectives are so different that you want to run away.
This is the case
with all self-delusion. Relationship is only possible if two people share the
same delusion. Both have to believe that the terminally ill person will fully
recover. If one party believes he’s Napoleon, both must believe this in order
to experience interpersonal harmony. However, self-delusion rarely allows for
this.
An interesting
study conducted in 1986 and then repeated 20 years later in 2006, found that in
1986, 10% of the interviewees admitted that they lacked a confidant. However,
by 2006, this significant index rose to 25%! I wonder if the growing
self-esteem culture is responsible for this trend.
There are other
significant interpersonal issues. If building self-esteem makes us receptive to
good messages and causes us to reject the negative messages about ourselves,
then it shouldn’t surprise us that this tendency will serve to undermine
relational problem-solving. When I was still operating out of my own delusional
paradigm, I had convinced myself that I was always right. I had learned to see
the good about myself and to deny the bad. Whenever my wife and I would argue,
I was sure that I was right and she was equally sure that she was right.
Consequently, there was never any reconciliation. The argument would only cease
after we both became exhausted, but the problem remained and hope fled away.
Besides, if we’ve
succeeded in convincing ourselves that we are worthy people, then we will
eventually regard our partners as unworthy in comparison. In accord with the grandiose self-image we
have come to nurture, we might convince ourselves that we are seeing our
partners as they truly are—hopelessly inferior to us! Dissatisfaction with our partner will be our
inheritance. It is so much better to regard ourselves as “unworthy” of our
partners. How grateful we will then be.
My orientation
has changed dramatically from one of self-trust to God-trust, from a belief in
my worthiness to the knowledge of my unworthiness apart from Christ. For one
thing, I can now see and admit my wrongdoing. As I have become convinced of His
love and acceptance of me, I could begin to accept myself, warts and all. I
usually don’t like what I see in myself – reality can be brutal – but I am far
better off despite the discomfort. Before, I had to trust in myself to get me
through. Now I know that my God holds my
hand, working everything out for good. I know that I am perfectly cared for,
and I can begin to laugh at myself. Before, when the foundation for my life was
myself, I took myself all too seriously. I couldn’t dream of laughing when
everything depended on me. However, now I know that it all depends upon my
Savior, and I truly exult in this. I no longer have to inflate my self-esteem
to get out of bed in the morning. I need only think about how God esteems me.
Yes, I do need to feel good about myself, but I don’t have to achieve this by
denying the truth about myself. I just have to look to the One who loves me
more than mind can comprehend (Ephesians 3:16-19) and bask in His reassuring
estimation of me, in spite of my many failures.
My wife and I
recently returned from Cambodia
where we visited the Genocide Museum in Phnom
Penh. We had enjoyed the lovely, gentle Cambodian
people so much that we struggled to reconcile our experience with the reality
of the killing fields. What could
have transformed such wonderful people into Pol Pots?
For one thing,
the Khmer Rouge had succeeded in convincing themselves of their own ethnic superiority.
They also saw themselves as liberators from oppression, and regarded their
opponents as capitalist vermin and parasites, worthy of extermination for the
greater cause.
Many communists
would like to distance themselves from the Khmer Rouge (Reds) by claiming that
they followed a different form of communism. However, I couldn’t detect any
real differences in my readings. Indeed, the Khmer Rouge national anthem,
however chilling, reflected the basics of communist thinking:
·
“Glittering
red blood which blankets the towns and countryside of the Kampuchean
Motherland! Blood of our splendid workers and peasants. Blood of our
revolutionary youth! Blood that was transformed into fury, anger and victorious
struggle…Blood that liberated us from slavery…We united together to build up Kampuchea and a
glorious society, democratic, egalitarian, and just…”
The wonder of
communism is that its adherents believed that a little bloodshed mixed with
their communist philosophy could transform society into a utopian paradise.
Idealistic, indeed! But their self-trust and denial of the counter-evidence deceived
them, blinding them to reality.
The Khmer Rouge
seemed to have differed from other Communists in one way. They mixed a deadly
form of nationalism into their Leninist-Maoist doctrine. They had been raised
on the idea that the Khmers were a superior race. Indeed, from the 9th
to the 14th centuries, the Khmers did have a great empire! They had been taught to believe in
themselves, and this they continued to do despite all of the counter-evidence –
the murder of one-fourth of their own nation!
There is great
peace in trusting our Savior. The inner struggle to prove ourselves diminishes
as Christ grows within. I no longer have to wage war against all of the
unwanted and disparaging thoughts which bubble up from within. I know I have
been forgiven and cleansed (Hebrews 10:19-22).
In contrast,
those who remain in the world of self-trust have to learn to practice
self-forgiveness. This is because we are aware that something is wrong inside.
We experience guilt, shame, and the terrifying sense of unworthiness and
judgment (Rom. 1:32: Hebrews 10:27; 2:15) and must deal with these unsettling
feelings. Primitive people perceived more clearly that there was an underlying
relational problem – the gods had been offended – and consequently made
offerings to appease these angry deities. Modern man attempts to achieve the
same thing through his accomplishments, affiliations, and by consulting the
modern therapeutic shaman who counsels him to forgive himself.
Self-forgiveness
fits in so well with self-trust, but does it work? It is just more of the same
– positive affirmations, a bandage to cover up the real relational problem. Our
God has been offended, and as a result, we experience guilt, shame and anxiety.
If I cheat on my wife and merely forgive myself, I have not addressed the
problem or even my wife’s feelings.
This is the
essential nature of self-trust – self-justification. It is a refusal to deal
with reality. There is only one way that I can deal with reality. Our Savior
has convinced us that if we confess our sins, He is faithful to forgive and to
cleanse us (1 John 1:9). He has therefore won over my heart and also my mind. I
no longer need to trust in myself, since He has become my strength and
assurance. I no longer have to artificially esteem myself, because He esteems
me.
