Psychologists know that the way we see ourselves develops in early childhood through the way that we are seen by Important Adults. If a parent regularly expresses annoyance when a kid cries for attention or affection, that combined with other factors can create annoyance with our own need for affection as adults.
For example, my client Rick came to me for a psychic reading a few years after his marriage ended because he couldn’t find love again, and not for lack of trying. He was feeling demoralized and as though something was wrong with him as a man, even though he felt he was a good partner. He wanted to know if I could see a significant love for him in his future.
It was clear at the beginning of our appointment that Rick had a terrible headache, but when I suggested we reschedule he growled “No, I’ll be fine.” Rick made it clear has no patience with himself when he’s sick and revealed he has little patience with others who aren’t feeling their healthiest. He said his wife divorced him because of his inability to express sympathy and nurturing. He told me about the ongoing disagreement between them, and the final argument that lead to divorce:
“When we were first dating I broke my arm when I fell off a ladder doing some weekend chores. I didn’t want to go to the hospital but I finally did because the pain was so bad. I went to work on Monday morning and just kind of powered through. What else was I going to do? Sit home? Carolyn (then his girlfriend) tried to get me to take a day off but I wouldn’t. Afterwards she told me she was amazed that I powered through it and kept working; she thought I was just really ambitious and she was happy I wasn’t a slacker. She told me this after we got married.”
“What about when Carolyn was sick?” I asked Rick.
“That’s where our problems really blew up. I know she thinks I’m insensitive — maybe I am — but when someone just has a cold, come on, get over it. The world isn’t going to stop. Take some cold medicine or sleep for ten hours. Do what you need to do.”
“I can see why she might have thought that was insensitive,” I prompted.
“I guess so, but I don’t think I’m insensitive as a person. All of that fuss is just crazy. What is a person supposed to do? I can’t fix it, you just have to wait to get over it.”
The final straw came when his wife had to have dental surgery and Rick didn’t “coddle” her. “She wasn’t even awake! She was so drugged up on painkillers. I asked her what she needed a couple of times, and then I left her alone. We got into a huge argument a couple of days later and that’s when she filed for divorce. I know I have to resolve this somehow. Maybe my karma is broken and I won’t find a partner again.”
When I finished my reading for Rick I suggested he think about low self-esteem (LoSE) as an underlying issue in his self-perception. After all, he saw himself as a pretty good catch, “better than average” yet once things got intimate with his partner it was only a matter of weeks or months before the relationship ended. He brushed off my suggestion and I didn’t hear from him for about six months.
When he came back he wanted to talk about LoSE. “I think I need to get this ‘sympathy thing’ fixed,” he said. “I didn’t think I had low self-esteem, but I couldn’t quite shake the notion that you were onto something with that suggestion.”
With hypnosis and intuitive counseling Rick began to recover his inherent self-esteem (RISE). We did some regression work around events in his very early childhood where he could see his teenaged parents — both so overwhelmed with financial struggles and a new baby — and their inability to give him the attention and nurturing he desired. They did the best they could, but whenever young Rick was fussy, scared, or ill, his exhausted young parents expressed disappointment, frustration, and anger, often dismissing his whines and telling him, “You’re fine, I can’t do anything, get over it.” We all learn to treat ourselves how our early caregivers treat us, so it’s no surprise that Rick internalized impatience and frustration with his own and others’ “whining.”
I have another client named Ben with a similar early childhood story. Ben also internalized his parents’ impatience when he was needy, but he compensated by creating an overly-nurturing response. I met him after I’d been seeing his former girlfriend Cindy, with whom he was still friends. They came together for a life-in-perspective session with me, and both laughed about an example that highlighted Ben’s tendency to smother:
“We had just started dating and I had to move to New York City for a short-term acting job. Ben stayed in Ithaca where he worked and where we both lived. In one of our first phone calls while I was staying with my girlfriend Ben could hear I was getting stuffy. The next day I came back from rehearsal and outside the apartment door was a huge floral arrangement. It looked like a centerpiece at a fancy wedding reception. I mean, it was enormous! I could barely get it through the door.”
The following day more gifts arrived: teddy bears, chicken soup he’d had delivered from a restaurant he looked up in the neighborhood, more flowers. “And the phone calls!” Cindy laughed, “he’d leave me these messages about how worried he was about me. It was a cold! It was over in two days!”
Ben talked about his early childhood, his alcoholic father and emotionally checked-out mother, how little sympathy he received from either when he felt sick or anxious. Unlike Rick however, his brand of LoSE manifested in a desperate need to be present and available, to provide in advance for any small need a sick person might have. Not having been encouraged to talk about what he might need when he felt poorly, Ben assumed others were the same and as Cindy put it, was almost intrusive in his desire to meet her needs.
We see yourselves as we were taught to in childhood by Important Adults or Authority Figures. If other factors are in place, low self-esteem can turn that internalized perception into self-loathing or self-aggrandizement; expressions of underachievement or overachievement, a view of ourselves as unworthy or entitled.
British philosopher Derek Anthony Parfit (1943-2017), widely considered one of the most important and influential moral philosophers of the late 20th and early 21st centuries, wrote “The early Buddhist view is that much or most of the misery of human life resulted from the false view of self.” I’m not a philosopher (of any note ;o) but I think he’s referring to how LoSE creates personal misery.
We experience misery because we’re seeing what someone (usually a LoSEr) taught us to see in ourselves; whatever LoSE they struggled through they projected onto us. That’s how toxic fog spreads… it has no distinguishable edges, it seeps insidiously in and before we know it we’re contending with blurry, indistinct reasons that appear as evidence that we’re unworthy. “How did this idea get here?” we might ask if we were self-aware young children, without the utter reliance on Important Adults.
Adult LoSErs experience the “misery of human life” and the toxic fog of their low self-esteem makes that misery appear normal or deserved. RISErs also experience misery, but it’s less a condition and more a temporary state from which they apply their self-love, their self-awareness, and their rational minds to extricate themselves.
You came into this world a pure and perfect being, a life-affirming eternal energy force with the urge to thrive, express, create, connect, and grow. You came in as God’s thought of himself, individuated into the vehicle made by your biological parents’ DNA. The mind and body that grows from the DNA is a clean slate and ideally a servant of the spirit, following your natural and inherently perfect, deserving, and uniquely valuable urges simply to be. Our parents (or other Important Adults) who all have their own degree of toxic fog to deal with, often impress falsehoods on that clean slate of body and mind. They might teach us poor eating or sleeping habits, or that bodies should be fat, thin, athletic, or soft. We passively receive their teachings even through covert suggestions like “Everyone in our family struggles with weight,” or “Watch out for cholesterol because all the men on your mother’s side had heart disease.”
LoSEr Important Adults might teach us that our deepest desires — originating in our spirit — are the servant of the almighty Rational Mind, so we’d better just stop this silly pipe dream of being an artist and get a real job. We learn to see ourselves in comparison to measures of worldly success through school, career, and income.
The quickest way to escape the “misery of human life” is to shuffle off the false view of the self. If the view you have of yourself makes you feel ugly, small, unworthy, deficient, stupid, or never-able-to-keep-up-with-the-Joneses, you’re seeing yourself through the toxic fog of LoSE.
Why not make a special effort to find that lovely spirit within you. You’ll be able to identify it in those moments of connection you feel with a beloved child, friend, or pet. You’ll find it in those joyful, spontaneous moments when time seems to disappear. That’s your spirit reminding you that you deserve joy and abundance. You’re God’s thought of Himself, so of course you feel like creating, or singing, or walking in nature, or playing. Begin to bring this view of yourself more into your daily life whenever possible.
Focus for a little bit every so often on how you would like to feel. Stay with that feeling for several minutes or as long as you can. You’re re-establishing the connections between your mind and your spirit, and before long your mind will desire to serve that happy spirit. Your powerful mind will begin to show you ways to see yourself that feel TRUE, and will begin to suggest strategies to you that will make those feelings more consistent. You can trust your spirit to give you the authentic view of yourself.
If, like Rick or Ben you seem to be missing the mark with others and you’re consistently getting the same message that you’re not nurturing enough or too nurturing, look at how you see yourself around that issue.
For example, if you hear that you’re not nurturing enough, think about how you feel about being cared for when you’re sick. Think about how you see yourself around sickness, and think about what your early Important Adult caregivers felt about it. Is it an inconvenience? Is it cause for great alarm? Were you made fun of for being weak? Did a parent work through illness because to take a day off would have a negative impact on finances? You were taught to see yourself a certain way around the issue of nurturing. There’s nothing wrong with you; you can’t help what you were taught. But consider whether it conflicts with what your spirit feels about nurturing.
After thinking about these questions, begin feeling what your spirit wants to express around nurturing. When you’re ill do you feel scared or alone? When others are sick do you feel helpless or frightened? There are no wrong answers to this self-exploration, just discovery.
Come to know how you see yourself, and you’ll begin to truly see yourself. You’ll distinguish between the mind’s directives (what we’re taught) and the spirit’s urgings (what we long for). Whenever possible, defer to the spirit. It knows how to fix everything. That’s why you hear statements like “there’s a spiritual solution to every problem.”
I encourage you to seek the perfect spirit within in whatever way makes your heart glad. We have enough misperception out there in the world; it’s practically self-perpetuating. When you see yourself as you truly are — an individual spark of a flawless Creator — everything in life improves.
