BUILD SELF-ESTEEM: IT IS WHO AND WHAT YOU ARE!

BUILD SELF-ESTEEM: IT IS WHO AND WHAT YOU ARE!

By James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© January 2007

Is it nature or nurture? WHO WE ARE remains constant. It is what we’re born with, our essence or “real self.”

WHAT WE ARE constantly changes. It is our nurtured self. It is a product of our culture and conditioning, which is dependent on our maturity, discipline, focus, performance, stability, ability to handle adversity.

WHAT WE ARE is fed by WHO WE ARE, so there is much overlapping. Psychologists call WHAT WE ARE “our acquired self,” or personality. It is not easy being human. It has been difficult throughout history to have WHO WE ARE (our character) work in harmony with WHAT WE ARE (our personality).

Psychologists try to show how WHAT WE ARE never escapes any stage of our development — from child to adult to parent. When we interact with each other, the child, adult or parent comes to the fore and acts out the role. So, WHAT WE ARE is a thinking, behaving, and feeling being. We bring all of this to our interactions with others.

HOW THIS PLAYS OUT IN A MACRO SENSE!

WHO WE ARE and WHAT WE ARE were once assumed to be interchangeable. Our father was a farmer, our mother was a homemaker, and we would work the family farm and marry a farm girl and she would be a homemaker like our mother. The same was true of the factory worker, teacher, doctor, or lawyer.

The battle of nature and nurture, of nurturing parent and critical parent is being played out before our eyes every day on television. Dr. Phil feels there is too much nurturing parent and so he leavens the mix of his tough love with a large dose of critical parent. Oprah Winfrey feels there is too much critical parent and leavens her mix of enabling love with a large dose of nurturing parent. Both are popular, and both appeal to WHAT WE ARE without a backward glance to WHO WE ARE.

They are involved in the self-esteem without mentioning it. These talking heads are parent surrogates for those of us who are looking for answers in all the wrong places. It doesn’t stop there.

Forty years ago, parents abandoned the role of parenting their children with both mother and father becoming well-heeled breadwinners. This meant leaving their children to mainly fend for themselves. The parents were having so much fun working and playing and neglecting their traditional role as parents that they, too, didn’t want to grow up because they didn’t want to grow old. It became fashionable to be eternally young.
So, while children had the pleasures of adults without adult constraints, or the maturity to handle such freedom, adults tended to imitate the behavior of their children in dress, manner, and attitude with a total disregard for consequences.

Education became a factory of discipline to compensate for the complete mismanagement in the home environment. While education has been the critical parent, industry has become the nurturing parent. Corporations believed they could bribe poorly prepared workers into learning the appropriate skills and becoming productive workers with generous entitlements, recreational facilities, and meaningless performance reviews. Instead of creating a culture of contribution, they became the workers’ surrogate parent in a dependency relationship. They launched programs they couldn’t guarantee — such as lifetime employment. Workers expected to be educated on the job, not seek education on their own time, even with the company paying for it. They expected the company to pay for all of their health care insurance. Showing up for work on time was made more important than what was accomplished in a day’s work.

Management expected to realize quality of work without changing anything, except cosmetically. Hence, the workplace has gone from a culture of comfort, or management-dependent, to a culture of complacency, or workers counterdependent on the corporation for their total well being. Workers don’t want to grow up, and management would prefer them as children rather than challenging adults to its authority.

HOW THIS PLAYS OUT IN A MICRO SENSE!

From birth onward, we experience joys and disappointments, all the while being told by others WHAT WE ARE as we experience these events. So, it is not surprising that that our true vocation based on WHO WE ARE gets little attention.

I lost my daughter when she was 17. The pain was so deep that it crippled me emotionally. I thought I knew WHO SHE WAS, but I could not fathom WHAT SHE WAS apart from what I expected her to be. I didn’t recognize the changes in her, only saw smooth surfaces with no bumps in the road. I guess I expected her to sublimate from a little girl into a grown women without any messy fluidity between the solid stage of childhood and blissful stage of adulthood. I wasn’t ready for her to become a woman.

WHO SHE WAS up to that time was a devoted daughter, and then she discovered the Florida beaches, and boys discovered her. Guys that looked like movie stars would bring her home in their fancy cars. Then she went off to college at the University of Chicago, where she was discovered by an international modeling agency. WHAT SHE WAS, a model who loved the business and still does, melted nicely with WHO SHE WAS, a six-two, blond, blue-eyed beauty.

For 10 years, I never saw her, but then she had the maturity to come back to her father. She is now the mother of Rachel and Ryan. She still models, and still beautiful in her forties. We play tennis, grab a bite to eat occasionally and share our love of her children.
The teenager years are difficult for both parents and teenagers. It is impossible for the children to remain what parents believe them to be, when they are trying to find out WHAT THEY ARE in terms of WHO THEY ARE. It is impossible for teenagers to be honest with parents because they are struggling to be honest with themselves. Parents forget children grow up with the tape recordings in their brains of their youth.

The genetic code is WHO THEY ARE. They are like an acorn that must grow down into fertile soil in order to rise up to become the mighty oak. We as parents make this natural process unnatural by projecting our fears, being obsessed with control, confusing the roles of critical and nurturing parent.

HOW THIS PLAYS OUT IN A COMPARE AND COMPETE WORLD!

When personality (what we are) becomes more dominant than our essence (who we are), we are likely to chase ambition at the expense of others in a compare-and-compete world. We thus cultivate a desire to distance ourselves from others to win admission into a more elite or prestigious group. It is the dominant code of our society. The downside is that it creates a synthetic culture.

Since most of us are unlikely to become rich and famous, we can imitate them by buying the cars they promote, purchasing homes that resemble theirs, and living imitative lifestyles that approximate caricatures of theirs.

Fewer still would question the merits of competing. We take pride in being a competitive society. Comparing and competing destroy the individual and WHO HE IS. It puts the focus on others at the expense of gaining a grasp of one’s essence.

Psychiatrists Willard and Marguerite Beecher write: “Competition enslaves and degrades the mind. It is one of the most prevalent and destructive forms of psychological dependence. Eventually, it produces a dull, imitative, insensitive, mediocre, burned-out, stereotyped individual devoid of initiative, imagination, originality, and spontaneity.”

WHO WE ARE is likely to encounter many potholes along the road, even though it is all we are. If we pay attention, don’t allow ourselves to be sidetracked, we can realize our potential and satisfy our destiny — but it is not an easy journey.

The combination of WHO WE ARE with WHAT WE ARE in harmony can produce a happy, healthy and satisfied person. When WHO WE ARE dominates WHAT WE ARE we are likely to become out-of-sync with the world around us.

Aside from ambition, when WHAT WE ARE dominates WHO WE ARE, we are likely to be attracted to celebrity worshiping and to lead vicarious lives through second-hand identities. Such a life is mainly that of spectator rather than participant. We live through the achievements of others as doting admirers. We are unlikely to read newspapers, but watch tons of television. We want summaries of information, not details, which television provides in network news three-minute dosages. And we work a job and live a life on automatic pilot without variation.

When WHO WE ARE becomes more dominant than WHAT WE ARE, we can develop an attitude. We don’t need to learn new things because we are already smart enough. We don’t need to meet new people because what can they teach us? We don’t share information outside our specialty because people are too thick to understand. We are suspect of global warming so we drive our SUV tank, dump our spent batteries in the garbage, think nothing of throwing our trash in a vacant lot, and see no point in voting as elections are rigged anyway.

To restore balance, we must get beyond comparing and competing, living second-hand lives, waiting for someone else to take the lead, and criticizing doers to having the gumption to join them. We are contaminated with conflict, which leaves little time to focus on WHO WE ARE to pursue WHAT WE ARE consistent with it.

When children reach a certain age, they try to find out WHAT THEY ARE opposed to WHO THEY ARE. This is a stage of rebellion. They want to separate themselves from their parents, not emulate them. They want their own identity, which is unlikely to differ much from their parents, that is, if the parents allow them the room.

Ironically, I never rebelled until I was married. I was a young executive in South Africa during apartheid. I also saw my Roman Catholicism in a new context as it acquiesced in the midst of this contemptible policy. Suddenly, my life made no sense to me. I resigned a promising career when I was 35 with a wife and four small children to support. For the next three years, I read books, wrote one, and when nearly broke, went back to school to pursue a Ph.D., consulting on the side.

In a sense, I have been rebelling ever since. It has been a tortuous road to marry WHO I AM with WHAT I AM. I am today a writer that hopes this helps to marry your two sides of your divided self into one whole.
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Dr. Fisher is an OD psychologist and the author of The Taboo Against Being Your Own Best Friend. Confident Thinking to be published in 2007. They are available on this website or other Internet providers.