Oh, that’s right: No one.
Unfortunately we get this message from New Age gurus who advise us to go within (or Higher Up) to bypass the pain; from well-meaning friends who advise us to just think positive thoughts instead; and from popular culture which resolves discomfort in the length of a song or a TV sitcom. Sometimes we joke about millennials getting trophies just for showing up, because “Everyone’s a winner on our team!” As though losing or experiencing unpleasant feelings is to be avoided at all cost, or, if unavoidable, immediately corrected.
Many with Low Self-Esteem (LoSE) are unfamiliar with degrees of emotional discomfort, are hypersensitive to it, or dissociate from it entirely. They are sensitive to criticism, quick to anger, even eager to point out fault in someone else, and blame others for making them feel bad or guilty. They recognize a “bad” feeling when it comes and quickly work to extinguish it by denying, avoiding, or minimizing it. LoSErs often felt a lot of pain as youngsters and so have become particularly adept at spotting it a mile away and artfully deflecting it before it has a chance to stir up any further trouble. Like a former LoSEr sweetheart of mine who, getting a credit card bill in the mail which he knew he couldn’t pay, would just toss it away unopened.
But there are nuances in discomfort that help us live with authentic self-acceptance if we will only admit them to our inner audience. And nothing helps us Recover Inherent Self-Esteem (RISE) faster than embracing that authentic self — the good, the bad, and the ugly. Solid self-appreciation is only possible when we unabashedly examine (and find acceptable) all the parts of our selves.
A client I’ve been working with irregularly for almost a year suffers from LoSE. It’s been an interesting journey with Sharon, who admits low self-esteem is “one of” her problems but is reluctant to address it directly. Why? Because it’s uncomfortable. As a result, I see Sharon for a few weeks, we begin to make some progress, she edges closer to the uncomfortable truth of her self-perception, and cancels all further appointments. (Sharon is not clinically depressed). Fast forward a few months, to when she’s cobbled together a bit of self-confidence, and she returns for more sessions.
Sharon’s battle cry is, “Why should I?” which she applies to any challenge that threatens to rock her fragile homeostasis. “Why should I work through this resentment? My husband is the one who cheated, not me! It’s hard enough to be facing life as a single mother, and if I dwell on all these negative feelings I’ll never be able to move forward.” Sharon had recently called for hypnosis to help her lose the twenty pounds she’d gained in the previous five months, almost one year after discovering her husband’s infidelity.
When I suggested we address self-esteem as part of her hypnosis, Sharon reluctantly agreed to try again. One of the problems I’ve seen with LoSErs like Sharon is that they believe they shouldn’t feel discomfort; that it’s a sign of imbalance that should be eradicated immediately. And who can blame them? LoSErs are already battling the emotional discomfort of low self-esteem, so heaping additional irritation on can threaten an already vulnerable state of mind. As a result, they can’t sit still with the emotional feelings of anger, loneliness, grief, or resentment. Instead they distract, dissociate, self-medicate, or sooth their pain with other ultimately destructive techniques. Sometimes, hanging on to a negative feeling is the only evidence a LoSEr has of an old injustice, and letting it go would mean it never happened (this is especially apparent after so-called “gas-lighting”). In Sharon’s case, she avoided her feelings of resentment by eating. “Why shouldn’t I eat what I want? I have to share custody with my ex and his [expletive].”
Indeed: why should we feel uncomfortable?
Why not reward kids with a trophy for showing up? After all, watching friends get rewarded while you don’t can’t be good for self-esteem, right?
Why not have a drink (or several) after a long, unfulfilling week at work. If there’s no reward in the paycheck or hierarchy, being stuck in a dead-end job can’t be good for self-esteem either, right?
Why not have a smoke, a second helping of cake, another hour in front of the TV; why not go shopping or take one of your spouse’s pharmaceuticals? In these thankless times, we have to take care of ourselves, right?
Right, and wrong, too. Because rewarding oneself, isn’t always necessarily the same as taking care of oneself. Avoiding (or medicating) emotional discomfort is for LoSErs; the real reward comes in understanding what discomfort has to offer.*
Consider the interpersonal relationship. Many LoSErs weren’t given permission to be angry as children so they minimize their own feelings of anger and try to manage another person’s upset feelings, too. Women in particular are encouraged to avoid calling attention to their own discomfort and are strongly discouraged from causing another person unease. A few weeks ago I had to attend a business event where I came face to face with a man who, for reasons I’ll never understand, decided to make our local Library a target for his own political agenda. He didn’t stop at smearing the Library’s good name; he made it a point to accuse me personally of shady business dealings, as I’m currently president of the all-volunteer Library Board of Trustees. He used social media and letters to local papers to suggest that I was pocketing donations, hiding vast sums of money from the public, and lying to the taxpayers. All totally fabricated to cast himself in the role of local hero, the next great candidate for the Town Board.
At this particular event, local politicians and business leaders were giving interviews to the press, and the man in question came up to me through the crowd with his arms open and a big grin on his face. As he leaned in to give me a peck on the cheek, I put my hand on his shoulder to stop him and firmly pushed him back. I looked him in the eye and said, “No.” I didn’t make a scene and only a handful of professionals around us noticed. But as a person with a very healthy self-esteem now (and a well-known business owner and former elected official myself), I’ll be damned if I’m going to “make nice” with someone who had gone out of his way to create hardship.
There were other people there who were similarly bullied by this jerk as he tries to make a name for himself. I saw one poor woman who he’d also previously targeted grimacing as he pulled her close so he could pose for a picture. Like many women, I’m sure she put up with rude behavior so as not to make someone else uncomfortable. LoSErs would rather suffer discomfort themselves in order not to inflict it on others. If I’d encountered this man ten years ago and he made a show of our friendship for the cameras, I too would likely have gone along.
Nowadays I believe emotional discomfort is an extremely efficient teacher, helping the LoSEr to RISE, paradoxical as that may appear. If we can do the hard thing, the thing most uncomfortable for LoSErs, we can skip ahead on the otherwise long, bumpy road to recovery. If we can learn to sit patiently with discomfort without seeking to erase it ASAP, we’ll find the actual shortcut to feeling better, rather than the false, manufactured one we attempt with avoidance.
Consider grief. Buried, it can lead to resentment and even physical illness if suppressed long enough. Yet the prospect of diving into it is so exquisitely painful, it seems almost better to put it off. In grief I’ve found a personal example of the powerful magic of denial: four months ago my 36-year-old cousin died from ovarian cancer. While my own shock and sadness was debilitating, seeing my beloved aunt and uncle grieving was even worse. We’d all been celebrating at her wedding less than nine months ago. Even as a RISEr myself, Kassia’s funeral was extremely difficult. The sadness was palpable, unavoidable. Instead of resisting (and believe me when I tell you my former LoSEr inclinations were calling like a siren song), I joined the mourners and allowed myself to forget everything but the shared pain we were feeling. And it hurt like hell.
There’s no heroism or security in the avoidance of emotional pain. Sitting with grief or other bad feelings is lonely work. We know that even Jesus suffered grief and doubt. When he learns his dear friend Lazarus has died:
Now when Mary came to where Jesus was and saw him, she fell at his feet, saying to him, “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died.” When Jesus saw her weeping, and the Jews who had come with her also weeping, he was deeply moved in his spirit and greatly troubled. And he said, “Where have you laid him?” They said to him, “Lord, come and see.” Jesus wept. So the Jews said, “See how he loved him!”
John 11:32-37
And as he prays in the Garden of Gesthemene before Judas hands him over to the Roman soldiers:
“He prayed more fervently, and he was in such agony of spirit that his sweat fell to the ground like great drops of blood.”
Luke 22:44
Psychiatrist and rabbi Dr. Abraham Twerski offers a commentary on emotional distress using lobsters as a perfect metaphor. As the soft body of the lobster grows, the shell around it becomes increasingly confining and the lobster feels uncomfortable. So it hides from predators, casts off its old shell and grows a new one. When THAT shell gets too small the lobster repeats the process. Dr. Twerski says, “The stimulus for the lobster to be able to grow is that it feels uncomfortable. If lobsters had doctors, they would never grow because as soon as a lobster felt uncomfortable it would go to the doctor, get a valium or a Percoset and feel fine! It would never cast off its shell. We have to realize that times of stress are signals for growth. If we use adversity properly, we can grow through adversity.” I love this illustration because it perfectly captures how discomfort disguises growth. In addressing or admitting our discomfort, we actually move more quickly through it than by dulling it with other self-soothing avoidance techniques.
Back to Sharon. When she came to me most recently for hypnosis for weight loss, I was able to convince her to give her self-esteem recovery another try. If she were to avoid addressing her emotional pain and deal only with her weight gain, she might be successful in achieving her goals in the short term. But the pain of her marriage ending would still be within, and eventually another self-destructive behavior would take the place of over-eating.
Because she was consciously so resistant to getting inside her anger and resentment, I began by asking Sharon to imagine (in hypnosis) those negative feelings as an object or shape outside of her mind; one that she could observe from a comfortable distance. She gave it a shape (a knot of tangled, stiff, twisted wire) and a name (“Too Big”).
Over the course of three sessions, Sharon was able to bring “Too Big” into her own mind and start the process, by intention first, of untangling the ugly ball of her anger. As she owned the unpleasant feelings, she gave herself permission to have anger and still find herself acceptable. To have the feelings of (as she described it) humiliation, social embarrassment, and being scorned, and embrace the anger she’d always been taught to downplay. Despite her fears that owning her terrible feelings would cause her to erupt in fury “like a psychotic harpy,” Sharon found that accepting her anger and betrayal as absolutely valid and worthy of acknowledgement, she felt emotionally healthier and better equipped to move forward. She wasn’t an angry woman; she was a woman who had anger. Once a person acknowledges that she has feelings but isn’t defined by them, she begins to identify the power inherent in being, rather than having or doing.
That’s a big difference, and a fundamental one between the LoSEr and the RISEr.
Maybe you, too, have been skirting around an elephant in the room. Maybe you have a giant, thus-far-ignored issue that might feel threatening to address head-on. Have courage! Simply looking at that issue squarely has the immediate effect of diminishing it. Remember my former sweetheart who wouldn’t open the credit card bill he couldn’t pay? By not addressing what he was so anxious about, he carried around the weight of not-knowing. Once he sat down, took a deep breath, and started opening those bills he felt immediately empowered. Sure, it was still a huge debt, but by courageously addressing the previously-denied fear, he was able to make a plan to correct his situation. He learned he wasn’t a LoSEr who would always be in debt, but a RISEr who had debt and, if he could handle this, he could handle anything that came his way.
You may not be surprised to learn that Sharon’s weight came off effortlessly once she allowed herself to cry, to feel betrayed, and to share with her close friends how humiliated she felt. Had Sharon not taken these brave steps, I can almost guarantee she’d keep losing and gaining back that extra weight for a long, long time. After all, it’s so much easier to deal with the problem of that last 20 lbs. Being on a diet is an acceptable and emotionally safe topic in which to express frustration and to get sympathy. Once the weight comes off, the mind can tackle the real issues, but if the mind is unprepared or unwilling to tackle them… well, here comes that extra weight again.
You might consider low self-esteem at work if you, too, are repeatedly trying to lose that last 20 lbs, or if you’re repeatedly dating the same unavailable type, or repeatedly drinking, smoking, or shopping too much, even after you promise yourself you’re going to stop. If the thought of keeping off that weight or finding lasting love or being alcohol-, nicotine-, or debt-free causes you any small spark of anxiety, you may have found the clue to LoSE.
Try this:
First, allow yourself to consider that there is a deeper emotional pain within. Perhaps one you’ve been compensating for for uite a while.
Next, determine to face it. Just that. Say to yourself (in the mirror or out loud), “I’m going to look at what feels so bad within me.” This can be a scary, destabilizing thing to admit. It might take more than one admission. Part of your mind may start contributing derisive comments about self-reflection. Many LoSErs learned to ridicule bad feelings by being scorned for having them as children; an authority figure’s voice becomes internalized as our own. Try to talk right over those old voices, and insist, “I’m going to look right at you.”
Then, find a quiet place and time. Do as Sharon did, and give the bad feeling a shape and/or a name. Have it floating outside of yourself at the beginning. Don’t worry too much if you can’t identify labels for what makes up that bad feeling, such as loneliness or unfairness. Simply observe it as something separate from you. Look at it from all sides. Take your time with this exercise; you may even want to do this several times before moving on to the next step.
Now, when you feel like you can have an audience with “bad” feeling without denial or evasiveness, envision it moving gently back in to your body or mind. Sit very quietly and notice what that newly-reassociated feeling is telling you. Is it loneliness? Say so, aloud, in terms of having, not being. “I have a great sea of loneliness inside me,” for example; or, “I have a terrible sensation of not having received my fair share of good fortune.”
Finally, find a place to express the bad feeling you have. To a sympathetic friend, to a late-night call-in show, even to a journal. Be sure not to memorialize it overmuch. Be sure not to accept the kind of minimizing or dismissing well-meaning friends naturally might rush to offer. Remember, discomfort makes other people uncomfortable, too, and those who care for you may immediately try to fix it. Sharon created a book of “confessions” as a safe place to express the nuances of her discomfort.
That’s it! Get into the practice of knowing the unpleasant feelings you have, and you will know yourself and your motivations better. You’ll feel more empowered to change those feelings that cause you pain, rather than burying them. Should something happen to cause you distress in the future, you’ll know yourself well enough to understand your negative feelings and grow through the experience. And you’ll do it all while trusting your deepest self to keep you safe.
You’ll see surprising results in other areas of your life too, including physical health, communication, relationships, and goal-setting, to name a few. You’ll actively and progressively RISE!
___________________
*I’m in no way suggesting those on taking prescription medication for emotional or mental health reasons should stop. In these stories I’m referring to the garden-variety emotional discomfort that has no clinical diagnosis.
