I’ve paid close attention to this over the years, both in my own responses, and in society, in general. I have to admit, I had some internal tweaking to do. Just because I know what emotional/mental health looks like doesn’t mean I am always in compliance. I felt it necessary to make changes in order to more closely resemble the “ideal” health picture.
The difficulty I faced in meeting that goal was compounded by the fact that I had never seen that behavior appropriately modeled in any adult I was bonded to while growing up. This is the exact same problems that children face today. This is a generational legacy.
I am firm in my resolve that people are inherently good. It is the rare person whose vitriolic responses show not pain, but a void where there should be a soul (I don’t like it, but I can still face that some people are born psychopaths). But I think that otherwise well-meaning parents did not (could not) teach us how to life manage, or even how to build self-esteem from within. Entirely too much emphasis has been placed on outside opinions.
So, then…...what happens when parents expect results from a tiny person who doesn’t come pre-packaged knowing how to complete a given task successfully? Childhood is about learning, not already being able to perform as expected. When we pay attention only to end results to the exclusion of effort, even children who were very, very loved go on to develop a skewed, undeserved negative self image, and are then set loose in the world carrying unrealistic, even destructive, expectations of themselves and others.
Another contributing factor has been that, instead of learning to appreciate the uniqueness of who they are, children have been taught to squash those unique gifts and talents in order to better “fit in” to society. Imagine a world with a few little Copernicus’s running around touting that Earth is not the center of the universe, while his society was a great big Catholic world where everybody swears that it is.
Now, imagine how being excommunicated from a church (your whole society) can make someone feel hated, and what that does to a person, psychically. Is it any wonder we’ve grown up with a self-esteem deficit? Copernicus was an adult when that happened, and even HE didn’t do a great job handling it, emotionally. How likely is it that a child, who is utterly dependent on adults around them for their identity and self worth, would fare any better?
The systematic deconstruction of the intrinsically positive self image has cut deeply. It has thus spread exponetially within societies as each generation begat the next. This has created a wide chasm between how one views themselves and thier capabilities, and the actuality of who they are. In short, we remain forever conditioned from an early age that the adults were right, which is the platform from whence our adult actions spring.
In essence, we have precious little confidence that what is left inside us is worth much of anything, and that our gifts, which we originally saw as beautiful and interesting and wonderful, are merely worthless baubles. If we want any positive at all, we end up forced into looking for it from outside ourselves, making us extremely vulnerable to the whims, miscalculations in judgements, and dysfunctions, of everybody around us. When society and our loved ones let us down, we end up feeling tossed about in life, totally at the mercy of “fate”, which, in turn, forces us back toward seeking the approval of others in a never-ending cycle of negativity.
Outside affirmation is a valuable source of feedback, but with the problems outlined above, how we view that input can be as corrosive as the environment we came from. If there is any hope of fully escaping the destructive cycles we carry forward from childhood, we must examine ourselves, clean house, and start all over. This question is a good one, but is premature by it’s very nature, coming in secondary to the primary issue of self-image. Ideally, the question would have been asked in reverse.
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