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If my aim is to prove I am “enough,” the project goes on to infinity—because the battle was already lost on the day I conceded the issue was debatable.
A disservice is done to people if they are offered “feel good” notions of self-esteem that divorce it from questions of consciousness, responsibility, and moral choice.
Commenting on the admonition to love thy neighbor as thyself, longshoreman-philosopher Eric Hoffer remarks somewhere that the problem is that this is precisely what people do: Persons who hate themselves hate others. The killers of the world, literally and figuratively, are not known to be in intimate or loving relationship to their inner selves.
The ultimate source of self-esteem is and can only be internal—in what we do, not what others do. When we seek it in externals, in the actions and responses of others, we invite tragedy.
Self-esteem is the reputation we acquire with ourselves.
self-acceptance is my refusal to be in an adversarial relationship to myself.
It is the refusal to regard any part of ourselves—our bodies, our emotions, our thoughts, our actions, our dreams—as alien, as “not me.”
Self-acceptance is the willingness to say of any emotion or behavior, “This is an expression of me, not necessarily an expression I like or admire, but an expression of me nonetheless, at least at the time it occurred.”
I can acknowledge some fact and move on with such speed that I only imagine I am practicing self-acceptance; I am really practicing denial and self-deception.
As a psychotherapist I see that nothing does as much for an individual’s self-esteem as becoming aware of and accepting disowned parts of the self. The, first steps of healing and growth are awareness and acceptance—consciousness and integration. They are the fountainhead of personal development.
In every organization we encounter both types: those who wait for someone else to provide a solution and those who take responsibility for finding it. It is only by grace of the second type that organizations are able to operate effectively.
To practice self-assertiveness logically and consistently is to be committed to my right to exist, which proceeds from the knowledge that my life does not belong to others and that I am not here on earth to live up to someone else’s expectations. To many people, this is a terrifying responsibility. It means their life is in their own hands. It means that Mother and Father and other authority figures cannot be counted on as protectors. It means they are responsible for their own existence—and for generating their own sense of security. Not fear of this responsibility but surrender to the fear
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I have a right to make mistakes; that is one of the ways I learn. Mistakes are not grounds for self-damnation.
In the ultimate sense, I accept my aloneness. That is, I accept that no one is coming to make my life right, or save me, or redeem my childhood, or rescue me from the consequences of my choices and actions. In specific issues, people may help me, but no one can take over primary responsibility for my existence. Just as no one else can breathe for me, no one else can take over any of my other basic life functions, such as earning the experience of self-efficacy and self-respect.
My self-esteem is more valuable than any short-term rewards for its betrayal.
If one of our top priorities is to avoid discomfort, if we make this a higher value than our self-regard, then under pressure we will abandon the six practices precisely when we need them most. The desire to avoid discomfort is not, per se, a vice. But when surrendering to it blinds us to important realities and leads us away from necessary actions, it results in tragedy.
Here is the basic pattern: First, we avoid what we need to look at because we do not want to feel pain. Then our avoidance produces further problems for us, which we also do not want to look at because they evoke pain. Then the new avoidance produces additional problems we do not care to examine—and so on. Layer of avoidance is piled on layer of avoidance, disowned pain on disowned pain. This is the condition of most adults.
