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Why You Shouldn't Love Yourself Too Much
- Apr 17, 2009 at 9:59 AM
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In the late 1960s, self-esteem became a fashionable and influential idea. Nathaniel Branden was a psychotherapist and devotee of the philosopher Ayn Rand. He has written countless books on self-esteem and is considered the intellectual father of the self-esteem movement. Branden’s work is sophisticated and his definition of self-esteem, and notions of how it can be boosted, is a far cry from the exhortations to feel special that have come to characterise self-esteem building exercises in American schools.
Self-esteem
may simply have remained a psychological and philosophical concept,
debated by academics, if it hadn’t been taken up by politicians in
California in the late 1980s. John Vasconcellos was a state assemblyman
who believed that low self-esteem was the cause of crime, teenage
pregnancy, drug abuse and school underachievement. He believed that
boosting young people’s self-esteem could be seen as a ‘social
vaccine’. Money spent on this, he argued, would dramatically reduce the
problems plaguing modern society. John Vasconcellos even believed that
improving self-esteem would help the state balance the budget since
those with high self-esteem earned more money and so paid more in tax. Vasconcellos
persuaded the California State Governor George Deukmejian to set up a
task-force on self-esteem and personal and social responsibility.
Following a three-year study of the literature it produced a report
which did not completely corroborate Vasconcellos’ views. Indeed in the
introduction to the report one of its authors writes: ' one of the
disappointing aspects of every chapter in this volume ... is how low
the associations beween self-esteem and its [presumed] consequences are
in research to date.' The response of those involved in the movement
was not to question the importance they were attaching to self-esteem
but to try and find more evidence.
Roy Baumeister was a psychology professor in the US and a supporter of the self-esteem movement and he was concerned about the the paucity of hard evidence to support the claims being made for self-esteem. He was also concerned about some of the approaches and underlying assumptions of the research which had been undertaken. Many of the studies which were repeatedly quoted only used subjective assessments of self-esteem and, since self-esteem is a socially desirable characteristic in western societies, such self-reports had to be viewed sceptically. Moreover, although there appeared to be some link between self-esteem and academic performance, for example, it was difficult to discern if the academic performance caused the self-esteem or vice versa.
As a result of his research carried out in the 1990s, Baumeister concluded that the premise that low self-esteem was a problem, and that curing it could cure many social ills, was ‘completely false’. The link between self-esteem and academic achievement, he concluded, was weak or non-existent. It just wasn’t true that bullies always lacked self-esteem or that high self-esteem was important for good relationships. On the plus side he did find that people with high self-esteem tend to be happier, show more initiative and are less prone to eating disorders. But he no longer believed that it was simply possible to artificially boost self-esteem. Later Baumeister said that coming to these conclusions was ‘one of the biggest disappointments of his career’.
Another
challenging critique of self-esteem came from Professor Martin
Seligman. Seligman put forward a number of powerful arguments against
the idea that self-esteem was something that could be externally
boosted. In fact, he thought the type of self-esteem building activities
parents and teachers were using with children were, if anything,
fuelling the epidemic of depression.
The biggest challenger now to the notion of self-esteem as a ‘social vaccine’ is coming from Professor Jean Twenge. She is a psychology professor in San Diego and she has spent a good number of years undertaking research into how the attitudes and personalities of young Americans are changing. In 2006 she published the conclusions of her research in a book called Generation Me. On the cover it reads: Why Today’s Young Americans are More Confident, Assertive, Entitled – and More Miserable than Ever Before. Like Seligman she believes that obsession with self-esteem has fuelled the rise of depression in the US, is encouraging narcissism, and undermining the skills of young people.
We’ve come to
believe that we should try to banish dysphoria, anxiety, anger and
sadness. But feeling bad has three crucial uses. The first has to do
with the messages contained in feeling bad. Anxiety, depression and
anger have long evolutionary histories in which they’re trying to tell
us something. Depression, feeling sad, tells us we’ve lost something.
Anger alerts us to trespass, anxiety alerts us to danger. All of these
messages, by their very nature, carry pain, and it’s this pain that
makes them impossible to ignore and goads us to get rid of them.
They’re an alarm system, they’re not a flawless alarm system, they’re
very often wrong, but insofar as we jump in and try to dampen the
system, we can lose the message. So the first good use of bad feeling
is that it contains messages about how our commerce with the world is
going.
The second goodness of bad feeling has to do with the
notion of flow. Ask yourselves, when for you does time stop? When are you truly
at home, wanting to be no place else? This is the state that each of
you probably can recognise, it’s called flow, and the conditions for it
are now quite well known. Flow occurs in your life when your highest
skills are matched to challenges, that quite exactly meet them. If the
challenge is too high and the skill is too low, you get helplessness,
depression, frustration. If the skill is too high and the challenge too
low, you get boredom. But you can see that a life in which high self
esteem, confidence, ebullience, getting rid of challenge, frustration
occurs, one is deprived of flow. These negative emotions are necessary
for flow.
The final good use of bad feeling has to do with
overcoming helplessness. If you think of the thing in your life that
you’re most proud of, your greatest success, it was almost certainly
something that involved a large number of sub-failures, each one of
which you had to do something to overcome. Each failure involves the
negative emotions, to the extent we step in and attempt to alleviate,
prematurely, negative emotions. We deprive our children and ourselves,
of persistence. We need to fail,
children need to fail, we need to feel sad, anxious and anguished. If
we impulsively protect ourselves and our children as the feel good
movement suggests, we deprive them of learning persistence skills. So
it’s no accident that the feel good ethic in general and
the self esteem movement in particular had the untoward consequence of
producing low self esteem, and depression on an epidemic scale. By
cushioning bad feeling, made it harder for us, for our children, to
feel good and to experience flow. By circumventing feelings of failure,
it made it more difficult for our children to feel mastery. By blunting
warranted sadness, warranted anxiety, it created children at high risk
for unwarranted depression. By encouraging cheap success, it produced a
generation of very expensive failures.
Comments:
Good post! I've always been a wee bit confused about promoting self-esteem. How are we to strive if we continually repress normal human emotions?
Lots of wisdom, here.
my mom tries to blame a lot on her 'low self esteem'- but you can tell she thinks quite highly of herself and often that sheis better than most people. I think her problems are from to high a self esteem.
TOO much is blamed on self esteem.
Once again you're a rockstar...great info Liz!
Well written and insightful, Elizabeth.
You know how they say common sense is not common? Well, I think conventional wisdom is very often not wise.
You know how they say common sense is not common? Well, I think conventional wisdom is very often not wise.
She beat me to what I was gonna say! :P
Great post Liz!
Very good post and I agree.
This is a great post! I agree. Emotions are a good thing, even the bad ones. =)
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I agree! Good post.
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