The Facets of Life

 You can never do enough to please everybody. Negative feedback is a liberal commodity. There are folks who seem to thrive on helping others feel less enthusiastic about themselves. Childhood abounds with experiences of gratuitous cruelty. Games among children can be quite malicious. Playground incidents can undermine one’s self-appreciation, especially for the player repeatedly put into the role of loser or reject. Remember what it was like to be the last one picked when captains were choosing team members. The same strong and popular kids were among the first selected. The same smaller and less coordinated ones were always the ones who were last or left out completely. Youngsters with early growth spurts had an advantage until the slower to mature caught up.

The pecking order influenced some of the self-approval ratings. Popular youngsters were invited to see themselves as special. Some of them developed skills and attitudes for lifelong success on the playing field. Some of them learned to coast on popularity and prowess within games that were stacked in their favor due to size and strength. Some learned to persevere and play by rules for the fun of it. They were smart enough to work on skills and look for chances to show up the hotshots by finesse and proficiency. The pecking order was reshuffled in the classroom. Playground duds could become the blackboard champs. Then there were those who stood out in both games and studies. Many were double blessed with good looks too. Admit it. Didn’t you just hate those stars a little bit? What you have done about all that is a reflection of how those experiences have helped form your acceptance of yourself.

Most insidious throughout life are traditions that seem to legitimize gratuitous scorn and guilt. Some religious precepts are stretched to distortion. Officious gatekeepers thrive on keeping followers in line by doling out guilt or opprobrium. The prospect of denunciation or excommunication restricts proscribed behaviors to the extremely resistant, who then are awarded a variation of shunning. To put it more simply, the enforcer of fundamentalism says, “It’s my way or the highway.” The reward for “my way” is approval. The highway is the road to exclusion. 

“The most terrifying thing is to accept oneself completely.” Swiss psychologist, Carl Gustav Jung said that about a hundred years ago. If early experiences put fear at the center of a child’s life it may take root and obstruct the individual’s chances for self-acceptance. In such instances, the tendency to overgeneralize goes beyond useful comparisons in coping with new situations.

However, if our internalized notions float toward perfectionism, we may set ourselves into a pattern of continually reinforcing self-rejection. Perfectionism assures failure because we are never able to live up to unrealistic demands. It’s doubly tragic when impossible demands are the self–imposed criteria for self-approval. We withhold our right to consider ourselves worthy because we have set up an unrealistic demand as a precondition for self-acceptance. Humility is a laudable governor of hubris. Self-denigration takes modesty too far by denying the birthrights of a human being. You wouldn’t do that to a friend, would you? How does it make sense to treat yourself worse than you would a friend?