truths’. I hope that you will be able to use my suggestions as starting points for your own experiments with a whole variety of behaviours and strategies. Although I have worked with people of all ages from a wide range of cultural backgrounds, I am still aware that some of the learning I have had from my experience will not be relevant to everyone reading this book. A suggestion which may prove to be invaluable ‘advice’ to one person may not be even remotely relevant for someone else. Unfortunately the only sure way of testing the usefulness of some of the strategies and guidelines will be through experimentation! Once you have tried them you can then adapt them to suit your particular personality, culture, circumstances, family, organization or relationships.
I know only too well that working in this way may prove to be more difficult than it sounds. When my self-esteem was at a very low ebb, I can remember being insatiably greedy for infallible advice and strict guidelines. In fact, the shakier my self-confidence was, the more desperately I sought magic solutions from esteemed idols. But, of course, the very essence of self-esteem building is about learning to have more respect for your own potential, skills and knowledge. One way to begin is to read and work through this book, always aware that you are your own best guide and mentor when it comes to shaping and selecting the behaviour, values and lifestyle which can build and boost your own self-esteem.
Monitoring
Regular appraisal in any learning programme is essential and, as I have already implied, in this particular field the only judge and jury worth listening to is you. You will always need to build into your action plans time to do regular and thorough assessments of your progress. This is often difficult for people who have been suffering from low self-esteem for a while because they may have lost their ability to make even the simplest self-appraisals. This is particularly true in the area of feelings. When our self-esteem begins to dip, we tend (unconsciously) to adopt defensive psychological behaviours which ensure that we have neither the time, the energy nor the inclination to assess whether or not we like or love ourselves. Some of the most common defences which you may immediately recognize are:
– throwing ourselves into non-stop activity – allowing ourselves to become exclusively passionate and exhaustingly caring for others or a ‘good cause’
– focusing all our emotional energy on a particular fear, phobia or obsession
– deadening our senses with drink or drugs.
If any of this kind of activity is familiar to you, you may need to do some serious healing work before you can begin honestly and effectively to monitor your progress. The next chapter could therefore be a crucial one for you. After all, monitoring our self-esteem should never be a wholly cerebral activity, it must be done by both our hearts and our heads – which can be exceedingly difficult if we are still emotionally crippled with a backlog of buried hurt and pain.
Strategy for Emotional Healing
A clay pot sitting in the sun will always be a clay pot. It has to go through the white heat of the furnace to become porcelain.
Mildred Witte Stouven
Emotional pain is the basic food of low self-esteem junkies. It often seems that the more they get the more they crave. Like any other addicts, the victims eventually cry out for more and more, kidding themselves that they have risen above its power to hurt (‘Go on spit in my face, I don’t care anymore’).
Rarely do psychological wounds receive a comparable amount of healing attention as physical ones. Why in our culture is there such a distinct difference in the way they are commonly treated?
| Emotionally broken hearts hurt just as much as the physically damaged ones and they can be just as disabling and life-threatening. |
The answer, I believe, is not always that people care any less about emotionally hurt hearts, it is simply that in our culture they are very often much less informed about what they can usefully do to help heal the wound. Once the ‘tea and sympathy’ approach has been tried and found wanting, the only other options most sufferers believe to be available are patience, distraction, or costly psychotherapy.
Perhaps any one or a mixture of all these options may satisfactorily ‘cure’ minor emotional bumps and scratches, but they are usually grossly inadequate remedies for the degree of psychological pain which tends to inhabit the hearts of people with low self-esteem. They tend to have had their feelings hurt so often, and so deeply, that they could literally spend a lifetime awaiting the uncertain healing mercies of Father Time. (And in the meantime their self-esteem weakens and weakens and the vicious addictive cycle revolves again and again.)
As a direct result of my own difficulty in healing a deep emotional wound of my own, a few years ago I began to take a special interest in this subject. I spent a considerable amount of time observing and noting the specific processes which seem to promote efficient emotional recovery. Eventually I began to gain a much clearer idea of what I believe we can ourselves do to encourage more efficient healing of psychological pain.
The first five stages seem to be particularly essential to the emotional healing process; the final two are more like welcome bonuses because they give us a boost of additional but not necessarily crucial psychological strength. In a ‘normal’, healthy healing process it seems that these stages may sometimes overlap, but I have never yet felt or observed anything being gained from trying to work through them in a different order.
To make this developing ‘theory’ easier to discuss and translate into a practical strategy I eventually decided to call each of these identifiable stages by the following names:
1. Exploration
2. Expression
3. Comfort
4. Compensation
5. Perspective
6. Channelling
7. Forgiveness
| There are seven predictable stages we can help ourselves work through step-by-step. |
During the last couple of years I have talked about these stages to hundreds of people with whom I have worked, and I have been told very many times that just hearing the mere outline of the process has had some immediate healing impact. I suppose this should not surprise me because I have always found that once I can clearly see the road I need to take to work through any problem, I know I am well on the way to recovery. So I trust that simply by gaining some understanding of the theory you too will get an immediate boost of motivational hope and will feel more inclined to test out the strategy.
I have also found that this theory can be a very useful diagnostic tool because it helps us to pinpoint the exact stage we have reached in our healing process. This makes it easier for us to plan the next step more effectively. Discussing it can reveal the point where someone may have become emotionally ‘stuck’, because it often becomes very obvious that he or she may have skipped one of the essential stages.
In
