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removal of fears and resentment, development of high values, good
interpersonal relationships, life plans, useful life skills, knowledge,
actual praise-worthy achievements, and on and on.
Although feeling negative about yourself is an unpleasant situation
(such people especially get down on themselves when they fail), it
isn't always entirely bad. Fears and feeling inferior may sometimes
compel us to work very hard to succeed. Most of the time, however,
failure makes us (especially if we are extrinsically motivated or
conclude we are stupid) feel incompetent and uninterested in the task
(Kohn, 1994). Certainly, as we will see, there are better ways to
motivate ourselves, but nevertheless self-doubts, fears, and guilt can
help us strive to be better. At the other extreme, there are highly
arrogant people who are mean, dishonest, immoral, lazy, and all sorts
of bad stuff. Dalrymple (1995) reminds us that the Nazi leaders had
such inflated self-esteem that they felt invincible and were unfazed by
their atrocities. So, high self-esteem can be part of a serious problem
as well as parts of solutions.
For most of our purposes here, however, we don't have to impose
a definition: the self is whatever you define it to be. Your sense of
self is whatever you believe you are. It can be all of you or just your
conscious self-evaluations; it can be good or bad or both. Individuals
obviously see their selves very differently, e.g. as free, choosing, and
effective (Bandura's self-efficacy) or as helpless and controlled by
external forces or internal unconscious urges. This method is to help
you feel better about yourself, no matter how you acquired the
negative feelings.
Certainly we humans have an enormous capacity to judge
ourselves as bad or inadequate--dumb, mean, selfish, ugly, unlovable,
hopeless and on and on (probably equaling our capacity to exonerate
ourselves and deny our evilness.) It has been estimated that almost
90% of college students feel inferior in some way (Hamachek, 1987).
Some of us know very well that demanding, judging part of us, called
our "internal critic." It is a common source of low self-esteem. But
we also have a "rational part." The rational part can confront the
unreasonably critical part.
Your internal critic may be obviously cruel and merciless with you,
like Sooty Sarah's critic in chapter 6. Or, your critic may also be weak
so that you are insensitive to your own cruelty and indifferent to
others (see chapter 3). Or, you may not have much of an idea about
how strong your critical parent is (see chapter 9). In which case, it
may help you get in touch with your critic if you imagine how you
would respond to the unpleasant assignment of eating a worm. Two
psychologists (Comer & Laird, 1975) tried this experiment and found
that subjects responded by talking to themselves in one of three basic
ways as they contemplated the wiggly worms:
1.
"Worms aren't so bad."
