It’s a journey to understand what a healthy sense of self looks like. Let’s call that journey, “human development.” I like that word as it is my life study. Even under the perfect conditions, development requires some crisis or lack of comfort to move to the next level of development. That’s normal or healthy development. Competing ideas for the development of the healthy sense of self are enough to make your head spin in this information age. Am I selfish to think of developing a healthy sense of self? Or am I so special that my rights exceed others? I’d like to explore a few of these ideas of what a healthy sense of self looks like and weigh in on the topic.
For starters, the idea of self-esteem has created some confusion. I want my children to feel good about their accomplishments; however, I don’t want them to believe their accomplishments are the only ones that matter. Or for that matter, to believe that they are what they accomplish. Or that they need to put others’ accomplishments down to build up their own. Research has shown us narcissists have high self-esteem, and they have the capacity to use, abuse, and crush the selves around them without feeling bad about it. So the concept of self-esteem is tricky to unpack. A better developmental concept is self-efficacy or competency, which is the ability to work at something and feel like our efforts pay off. Self-efficacy creates healthy motivation when the bar is set at the optimal level (not too low, not too high) and being effective at what we value is one part of developing a healthy view of self.
Another complicating factor in understanding the healthy self is confusing versions of personality theory. Is personality set at birth and therefore cannot change through development? If so, do I allow those who seem dominant or “choleric” to have their way? Is that what being a “born leader” means? It is confusing how we can make descriptive words for our own thought patterns, feelings and behaviors into excuses for what separates us in relationship with others and even God. Personality, derived from the Greek word for, “persona” or “mask” is another way of describing masks or a set of skills that we put on over our true selves to survive our lives or to organize our lives. The recent buzz over the Enneagram has helped shed light on personality as really neither good nor bad but the masks we learn to wear early in life to make sense out of what is happening. More on the Enneagram as a tool or a map for understanding our true selves in a later blog.
In a recent conversation with my precious mother, she was describing the painful journey of working through discovering a healthy view of herself. The struggle came early in life. She is the middle child of a domineering mother and a passive father. Her parents survived poverty through the Great Depression in their childhoods and great personal loss in WWII,and then had children in a time of new hope in America. Simply put, my mother described her mother’s parenting method as comparing her to others’ accomplishments as a way of motivating her to do better. Of course, the comparisons throughout childhood and adolescence along with the controlling nature of her mother created a wobbly and anxious sense of self in my mother. Ironically, my mother did not parent her own four children this way, somehow knowing this parenting method was flawed even though she absorbed the impact to her own self. If you see my mother as having a low self-esteem or an anxious personality, you might miss the nuances of her true self, a peacemaker, with the mask or survival skill of people-pleasing during distress in her younger life. What a great tragedy it is to believe personality is the true self and set for life. We could miss the enormous possibility we all have to evaluate these masks and change over the course of our journey or development through our lifespan.
Lastly, and this is not an exhaustive list, for those of us who grew up in the conservative Christian church, the ideas of a sense of self presented in sermons, books, lessons and even songs have not always been healthy. In fact, some have hijacked our ability to have healthy boundaries and even worse, some have excused egregious abuse. Is thinking about myself selfish? It certainly can be and yet, Jesus taught us to love others the way we love ourselves. I can hear the standard sermon illustration right now…. that no child needs help thinking about or loving himself/herself first. I disagree. I think that every child needs help understanding what a healthy sense of self looks like in order to learn to love well, himself or herself and others. The Beatitudes of Matthew 5 begin with a confirmation of blessing for those who recognize their need for God. What does it take to journey to a place where I could understand this great need? The lavish response from God to those who take this journey is the gift of the Kingdom of Heaven. That is everything! This seems to imply that one would need to take some time in development to come to this conclusion. The methods of some churches of teaching the souls of children their depravity just seems to produce either a sense of resistance, defiance, or passive acquiescence to “authority.” I remember a song of childhood describing the self as a “worm,” and my little child self wished deeply that I would be a beautiful green inchworm to God. Thankfully, the idea that I was a grose worm just didn’t stick. Instead, it produced a lifetime of reading and listening to find that truly the starting place in faith is to understand our massive worth, or design, or root system in the soil of God’s love to be able to grow up into loving self appropriately and loving others. Is not the massive depravity of life in the form of abuse the product of the extremes of those who believe their own superiority over others, whether that is male superiority, white supremacist, abuse to children, and the opposite, those who believe their own inferiority to others. It is said that hurt people hurt people. Broken souls can break souls. But that is not entirely true. My mother did the opposite of her own mother. Broken people who know they are broken have immense capacity to heal and help others heal. Again, knowing thyself, and working towards having a healthy sense of self seems to make the difference. In part 2 I am going to give you a few of my thoughts on developing a healthy sense of self.