Liar, Liar

Ben:

Self esteem is a tricky and sometimes elusive thing for people to get their minds around. Under normal circumstances, people learn their value early on and that knowledge becomes a foundation upon which they build a healthy life. A positive self-esteem --one in which a person understands and embraces their own nature -- can insulate someone from the ups and downs of external forces acting on them. Compliments and criticisms, for example, have a significantly decreased emotional impact on someone with a strong sense of self as compared to someone who lives and dies based on others’ input.

There are two kinds of people I’d like to direct your attention towards; they are two sides of the same coin, and they’re both liars.

The first kind of liar is the avoider.

Avoiders say they like themselves when they actually possess deep contempt for themselves. They’re miserable because they know on some level that something needs to change, but they’re unable to face it. As a result, they isolate themselves emotionally. They cut everyone out, afraid others will bring attention to that broken part they can’t acknowledge. Avoiders might be caring and sensitive but outwardly appear callous, cold, or distant.

External feedback could dispel avoiders’ illusions so they’re terrified of it. These people typically have superficial relationships and only minimally commit to someone else. They also distract as much attention from their core as possible by being the life of the party or the curmudgeon. In both cases, whether the avoider chases people off or the excitement ends and the “friends” leave to go find someone real, people eventually leave the avoider, who then lapses into depression.

The second kind of liar is the pleaser.

Pleasers tell themselves they’re worthless. Everyone needs to feel valuable, and healthy people are taught their worth and taught how to correctly value themselves from an early age. Pleasers, however, have no internal resources to meet their need for self esteem so they look to others to meet it. They will move heaven and earth to see to it that others approve of them even if it means they themselves will be harmed in the process. In addition, they try to piggyback their life stories onto their pleasing antics so they can get the personal affirmation they desperately need. Their strategy goes something like this:

The pleaser gives someone a plate of cookies.

The pleaser then tells the person their life story while the person is eating said plate of cookies.

The pleaser then asks the person if they liked the cookies.

If the person says yes, the pleaser interprets it as, “Yes, I empathize with your life story and I approve of you,” when in truth, the person was just saying, “Yes, I liked your cookies.”

And while pleasers live for approval, they’re devastated by criticism. They’ve so invested their self worth into the people and elements around them that their emotions rise and fall in dramatic fashion along with their external input. Pleasers are like investors in an emotional stock market. This is what their major anxiety stems from: the fear their need won’t be met.

Using the above example, if the recipient of the cookies said, “No, I didn’t like your cookies,” a pleaser would be brought to tears, because they pair what they DO with who they ARE.

And, while the pleaser’s need for approval never goes away, eventually the pleaser runs out of resources to spend on approval. Their emotional stock market crashes and depression sets in.

So, for the pleasers and the avoiders, how do we deal with all this? How do we get ourselves out of these ruts? In both cases, self-honesty is the cure.

For the avoiders, it is making peace with the fact that there IS something inside that needs mending; that it CAN be mended; and that they will need to reach out to healthy people or perhaps professionals to help mend it.

For the pleasers, it begins with discovering their internal value and learning to like who they are. It means learning that self-worth is an inside job and can’t be accomplished through acts or gifts for others. It means no longer relying on others to assign value to them.

These aren’t things you can just will yourself to do. In many cases, especially where childhood dysfunction is involved, you’ll need professionals to help guide you towards a healthy understanding of yourself. It will likely be hard work and stir up uncomfortable emotions, but in the end, you’ll be more of a whole person, better equipped to deal with the world around you.

Esther:

I know your childhood can seem irrelevant, but you still carry everything you learned back there. How to ride a bicycle. How to tie your shoes. What to tell yourself when you make a mistake or someone criticizes you.

Sometimes I wonder if anyone has truly had a successful, well-adjusted childhood. Several people have told me they have, but their behavior and beliefs about themselves tell me a different story. Considering the vast number of us who didn’t make it to adulthood with the necessary internal values and life skills, you’d think by now we could all just talk about it openly and discuss the solutions at hand instead of protecting the sacred cow of parenthood.

This is not at all to vilify parents -- it’s actually to free them from an unrealistic responsibility. How can you give what you don’t have, or teach what you don’t know? Neither of my parents had healthy, well-adjusted parents, so how could they have been healthy and well-adjusted for me? How could I, in turn, have taught my children to do things I couldn’t do?

After quite a few years into adulthood, I saw I was making bad choices based on bad information. Very little of this bad information had been taught to me in plain words. Some of it I learned from watching how my parents interacted with the world, each other, and themselves; and a lot of it I learned from how they interacted with me.

The time for further parenting has passed, however. Now that I’m an adult, it’s my own responsibility to figure out what I learned right and what needs unlearned. I also need to identify the needs my parents were never able to meet for me, grieve those losses, and start meeting those needs for myself. Again, this is not to vilify anyone. My parents’ own needs were not met when they were children, and I imagine if we could keep looking back we’d find our family’s brand of dysfunction extends for centuries. Not all parents even try, and I’m comforted in knowing mine did.

So I’ve called it as I see it. What good does that do me?

Looking honestly at things is the first step in laying a new foundation. The idea of overhauling my old belief system is daunting, but if I don’t do this hard work, I could waste my entire life. Acting out of a misguided mindset, I could blindly hurt other people. The bad information I teach my children could set them up for future failure in their relationships, in their jobs, in every aspect of their lives.

The idea of wasting my life should be motivating enough, but I admit I didn’t initially value myself enough to care. What made the work worth it was realizing how many lies I’d already passed on to my children, and wondering if I still had time to become someone I’d be comfortable with them modeling themselves after.

My family has been doing the same thing over and over for generations and has gotten the same results. Logically, it follows that the only thing left to do is something different. It’s not a comfortable process to opt out of my family’s culture, but the lies won’t set anyone free.