Is low self-esteem a condition? Or is it, in some strange and paradoxical way, a hidden self-protective strategy? One sees oneself only through the eyes of another … lacking, however, tools and criteria to question the accuracy of that perception. The dynamic of low self-esteem feeds on itself. It is a chronic imbalance of engagement with the world that leaves one at the mercy of the ostensibly unmanageable whims of others.
It feels like a condition. How could it possibly be seen as a self-protective procedure?
If it is a condition, it is a condition of waiting and searching; waiting and searching to be seen through eyes that know, without a need to clarify for understanding. Even though such waiting creates a state of chronic and helpless vulnerability, waiting and searching is held with a fierce hope and determined desperation. That hope is clung to with an unacknowledged sense of entitlement. It is an attitude where ‘shoulds’ reign. Emotionally, the experience of low self-esteem is a search for the special and exclusive relationship: the relationship where there are only two of us. Beneath this hidden entitlement to repair a wounded experience of childhood lurks a terror of re-experiencing a parental let down that has, in fact, already occurred.
To pursue the possibility of discovering a world beyond this special, exclusive relation is fraught with danger. One ‘waits for the phone call’. One simply doesn’t move on and engage – often screened by ‘I can’t’ – protected by a secret conviction that one shouldn’t have to. The trauma and pain must be undone, not re-experienced. Therein lies the strategy: to avoid the pain of an unobtainable recovery.
It is no accident that low self-esteem is often allied with a reluctance to assert oneself and engage the world beyond complaint. The underlying fear beneath that lack of assertion is, perhaps, a conviction that the surrender of waiting and searching will result in one’s evaporation. In fact, all rejections are laced with the terror of evaporation.
Awful as the challenge may be, suffering the risk of engagement is the only way one knows oneself with another, not simply by another. Where that risk has been discouraged or denied, one can’t feel the real possibility of fulfillment and repair in the world beyond the special relation. Healing cannot be found with another who only ‘sees’ and ‘knows’ but with another who also allows spaces of inquiry, dissonance and spontaneous response. In such a relationship is found intimacy and an opening to the world.
***
Where do we find God?
We don’t.
God finds us.
Really?
Where does God find us?
… on the other side of our desperation.
Ask Job.
Before I knew you only by hearsay
but now, having seen you with my own eyes,
I retract what I have said …
Job, 42: 5-6
Job
James Donnelly
© 2015 James Donnelly, DSW.LCSW
All rights reserved
South Garden Press, New York
For thoughts and comments, please e mail to: jdonnellydsw@gmail.com