samples
Samples from The Self-Esteem Trap
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I meet with Marie, a woman in her forties, in weekly psychotherapy. Marie works as a school counselor and exudes a warm, motherly attitude that telegraphs her Italian American roots. She started therapy with me because of power struggles and communication problems in her marriage to Andy, her husband of twenty years. Although Marie primarily needs to lighten the load of the emotional baggage she's brought from her childhood into her marriage, she now spends at least half of every session worrying about one or the other of her two teenage children.
On one particular occasion she was crying, and then even sobbing, as she told me about an emergency she had experienced a few nights before. At home with her nineteen-year-old son, Michael, she had had a gallbladder attack and was in terrible pain. Sweating heavily and barely able to speak, she called out to her son to bring her the telephone. He seemed shocked when he saw his mother and asked curtly, "What's wrong with you?" She answered that she was very ill and might need to go to the hospital. He replied, "Could you hand me the phone when you're done? I'm in the middle of ordering a pizza."
As I sat and listened to Marie, I realized that I was reacting as a mother as well as a therapist, a fellow traveler on the seemingly impossible road to raising a responsible, alert, compassionate young adult. My heart went out to Marie, knowing how hard it is to be the parent of a teenage child.
As a mother and grandmother to some terrific and responsible young people, I have made it a personal mantra to say "There's no way to get it right" when it comes to being a parent, and "If you muddle through and everyone survives, then you've done a good job." On one hand, I am immensely proud of all my progeny. On the other hand, everything I say here about the struggles of being a parent applies to me as well. My children also have been troubled by the self-esteem trap, just as Adrienne and Michael have. Their lives have been shaped in part by a style of parenting and educating that has dominated child rearing for the past several decades - a style that continues. In fact it is being embraced by new parents, who are locked into a cycle of cultural demands and effects they might not even be aware of, in danger of enlarging upon the mistakes of their own parents. As a parent and as a therapist, I believe that never before has it been so confusing and destabilizing to be a parent. And never before have we had a generation of such confused and unhappy young adults whose lives seem desirable from the outside. Something has gone drastically wrong.
The Problem
America's children are suffering from a particularly threatening and perplexing problem. Obsessive self-focus, restless dissatisfaction, pressures to be exceptional, unreadiness to take on adult responsibilities, feelings of superiority (or inferiority), and excessive fears of being humiliated are the pervasive symptoms of the self-esteem trap, as I mentioned earlier. Even in very young children, we can witness the beginning of these symptoms - for instance, when a child seems unable to step back from her own needs when they are in conflict with another's more important needs, such as Marie reported with her teenage son Michael. The self-esteem trap, in its least troubling form, leads to unhappy adult children who feel defective because they are unable to have or be what they imagined for themselves. At its worst, unchecked over childhood and young adulthood, and reinforced by other social conditions, it can lead to chronic emotional disorders such as depression, narcissism, and addiction.1
