samples
Samples from The Self-Esteem Trap
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Jason, a young man in his early twenties, came to see me in therapy because he had a distinct feeling that he was superior to others. He didn't like the feeling. He didn't know how he had gotten it, but it made him uncomfortable socially. When Jason met new people, at first he was interested and enthusiastic about getting to know them. But then within a month or so, he would notice himself judging them. He would quickly and gleefully identify their flaws and weaknesses. Eventually he would find himself to be superior, better, or more capable than others who had initially intrigued him. He felt a pressure to succeed, to be better than others, almost all the time. He was uncomfortable around, and uninterested in, those whom he secretly found lacking, yet he felt ashamed of his incessant judgments. This whole range of thoughts and feelings was terribly upsetting to him on many different levels.
Jason is stuck in the self-esteem trap. The special self demands that its owner constantly measure up to extraordinary standards, try to win every competition, and fulfill a specific or vague grand fantasy about what the self and its life should be. As this young man sensed, this identity becomes a prison, an eternal trap from which the person feels there is no escape and no chance of rescue. After all, who else is capable of rescuing you if you're better than everyone else? The special self is a lonely and scary place to live.
The most threatening aspect of cultivating this kind of self is its hair trigger for feelings of humiliation and shame. When the person fails, even for a moment, to meet the demands of this self - to be the best, the thinnest, the smartest, the most witty and most successful - there is a plunge into a kind of black hole, the darkness that Adrienne referred to. It feels internally like dropping or falling through the floor into a dark space where one is all alone and cannot be helped. The higher the pedestal, or accomplishment, or fantasy, the harder the fall.
Most frightening is the feeling of being all alone, which comes from an inability to believe in any reliable context or group or community that will sustain the self. This all-aloneness makes it difficult to feel empathy for others (except for close friends who seem to have the same problems and views) and further encourages a negative preoccupation with the self. Ironically, although by definition the special self feels like a personal problem to each individual who suffers from it, it is ubiquitous among today's youth.
When I listen to people like Adrienne and Jason in psychotherapy, it strikes me immediately how unrealistic their expectations are. Believing from an early age that they are exceptional, even extraordinary, they often don't accept older people as role models. They also reject the milestones or road markers that signal that they are just beginners on the career or parental path, that all accomplishments are a process, and that they have a long way to go before they are expert.2 Being a beginner feels humiliating. Being ordinary won't do. And this unwillingness to feel ordinary, flawed, less than perfect, can be traced back to how they were parented.
