How to Raise Your Self-Esteem: The Proven Action-Oriented Approach to Greater Self-Respect and Self-Confidence PDF
Preview How to Raise Your Self-Esteem: The Proven Action-Oriented Approach to Greater Self-Respect and Self-Confidence
YOU ARE HOW YOU FEEL—ABOUT YOURSELF How we feel about ourselves crucially affects virtually every aspect of our experience, from the way we function at work, in love, in sex, to the way we operate as parents, to how high in life we are likely to rise. Our responses to the happenings in our everyday life are shaped by who and what we think we are. Self-esteem is the key to success or failure. Self- esteem has another value—it also holds the key to understanding ourselves and other people. I cannot think of a single psychological problem that is not traceable to a poor self-concept. Positive self-esteem is a cardinal requirement of a fulfilling life. How do we grow in self-esteem? How do we break the cycle of self- defeating behaviors generated by a deficient self-esteem? These are the questions this book is written to answer. —Dr. Nathaniel Branden HONORING THE SELF HOW TO RAISE YOUR SELF-ESTEEM THE SIX PILLARS OF SELF-ESTEEM HOW TO RAISE YOUR SELF-ESTEEM A Bantam Book Bantam hardcover edition published March 1987 Bantam paperback edition / November 1988 PUBLISHING HISTORY All rights reserved. Copyright © 1987 by Nathaniel Branden. Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 86-14644. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. For information address: Bantam Books. eISBN: 978-0-30779042-2 Published simultaneously in the United States and Canada Bantam Books are published by Bantam Books, a division of Random House, Inc. Its trademark, consisting of the words “Bantam Books” and the portrayal of a rooster, is Registered in U.S. Patent and Trademark Office and in other countries. Marca Registrada. Random House, Inc., New York, New York. v3.1 Contents Cover Other Books by This Author Title Page Copyright Acknowledgments Preface 1 The Importance of Self-Esteem 2 Self-Concept as Destiny 3 Living Consciously 4 Learning Self-Acceptance 5 Liberation from Guilt 6 Integrating the Younger Self 7 Living Responsibly 8 Living Authentically 9 Nurturing the Self-Esteem of Others 10 The Question of Selfishness 11 Summary: The Impact of Self-Esteem A Note to My Readers Appendix Recommendations for Further Study About the Author Acknowledgments I wish to express my appreciation for the many helpful suggestions of my editor, Linda Raglan Cunningham. I want to acknowledge my wife, Devers, not only for her invaluable editorial assistance but for her innovative work in the field of subpersonality psychology. She has contributed greatly to my understanding of the importance for self-esteem in integrating subselves. In this book, I deal only with the child-self and the teenage-self; in therapy we work also with an opposite gender-self—that is, a female component in males and a male component in females—and a mother- self, a father-self, an infant-self, and a higher self. Preface “It’s not easy for me to be in love or to give love,” says an attorney, “because in my heart I don’t feel lovable.” “Whatever I do,” says a college professor who is also a mother of three, “there is always a voice inside me saying, ‘Not enough. I’m not enough.’ There’s not much joy in what I do, always trying to prove myself, just increasing exhaustion.” “What’s the point of trying to accomplish anything?” asks an unhappy teenager. “I always feel as if everyone else knows something I don’t know—and can’t ever know. It’s as if I were born missing something everyone else has.” “Happiness frightens me,” says a man who has a drinking problem. “I have this sense that if I’m happy, something terrible will happen. So if things are going too well, I take a drink, and then another, and pretty soon things stop going well, but at least I’m not so scared—I’m in control, sort of—I know what to expect—I’m not waiting for lightning to strike.” “I know I sleep with too many men,” says a woman twice married, twice divorced. “For a few minutes, when I’m being held, I feel that I matter to someone, that I have value. But that’s self-deception and I know it. Afterward, I feel more alone, and I despise myself worse than before, which drives me to the next man. But how do I find a way out? How do I stop? How do I learn to love myself?” How do we grow in self-esteem? How do we break the cycle of self-defeating behaviors generated by deficient self-esteem? These are the questions this book answers. I began to see that such a book was needed when, while being interviewed following the publication of Honoring the Self, I heard a particular question again and again: “Dr. Branden, you have presented a comprehensive picture of the role of self-esteem in human life, and the devastation wrought by a poor self-concept, but in simple everyday terms, what can a person do, without the aid of a psychotherapist, to raise the level of his or her self-esteem? What can we do to believe in ourselves more, trust ourselves more, feel more confident about who we are?” I saw that there was one more book on self-esteem I had to write. This book is not an extension of the theory of self-esteem, but an amplification of its practice. Its basic concern is with the actions, both mental and physical, that advance self-esteem or undermine it. The strategies for building self-esteem that I recommend in the following pages have been thoroughly tested with thousands of clients in the three decades I have been practicing psychotherapy. On the more personal level, they also have been tested in the arena of my own ongoing pursuit of self-actualization. I have seen my self-esteem strengthen or weaken depending on the degree to which I consistently practiced the principles and practices this book advocates. I do not write as a detached observer, remote from the field of action, but as one who has lived that which I am writing about. These ideas work. If your goal is growth in self-confidence and self-respect, this book is addressed to you. However, because the book is action oriented, because it details specific exercises and behaviors in everyday life that raise self-esteem, it is addressed to professionals no less than to nonprofessionals. Psychotherapists know how badly our field needs specific procedures for transforming a poor self-concept. I hope they will choose to experiment in their own practices with the tools this book provides. Chapter 1 The Importance of Self-Esteem How we feel about ourselves crucially affects virtually every aspect of our experience, from the way we function at work, in love, in sex, to the way we operate as parents, to how high in life we are likely to rise. Our responses to events are shaped by who and what we think we are. The dramas of our lives are the reflections of our most private visions of ourselves. Thus, self-esteem is the key to success or failure. It is also the key to understanding ourselves and others. Apart from problems that are biological in origin, I cannot think of a single psychological difficulty—from anxiety and depression, to fear of intimacy or of success, to alcohol or drug abuse, to underachievement at school or at work, to spouse battering or child molestation, to sexual dysfunctions or emotional immaturity, to suicide or crimes of violence— that is not traceable to poor self-esteem. Of all the judgments we pass, none is as important as the one we pass on ourselves. Positive self- esteem is a cardinal requirement of a fulfilling life. Let us understand what self-esteem is. It has two components: a feeling of personal competence and a feeling of personal worth. In other words, self-esteem is the sum of self-confidence and self-respect. It reflects your implicit judgment of your ability to cope with the challenges of your life (to understand and master your problems) and of your right to be happy (to respect and stand up for your interests and needs). To have high self-esteem is to feel confidently appropriate to life, that is, competent and worthy in the sense just indicated. To have low self- esteem is to feel inappropriate to life; wrong, not about this issue or that, but wrong as a person. To have average self-esteem is to fluctuate between feeling appropriate and inappropriate, right and wrong as a person, and to manifest these inconsistencies in behavior—sometimes acting wisely, sometimes acting foolishly—thereby reinforcing the uncertainty. The ability to develop a healthy self-confidence and self-respect is inherent in our natures, since our ability to think is the basic source of
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