Where Does Self-Esteem Come From?

My mother wanted us all to have positive self-esteem.  So she separately told me and my sisters that we were each her smartest child. 

That worked reasonably well, I suppose, until one evening when we were all together and we compared notes. 

We confronted her with it, and she said, “alright, you got me.  But it’s good to know that at least you’re talking to each other.”

Generally speaking, positive self-esteem is something we want our children to possess, something we want to possess ourselves; but self-esteem is elusive.

I believe that appropriate positive self-esteem – not arrogance, but self-esteem – is a cornerstone of family, community and society.

And I want to speak about three pillars of self-esteem which, I believe, emerge from the Biblical tradition.
First is freedom.  We need to feel that we are free in order to get the ball rolling.  We need to feel that we have the capacity to make decisions and to take risks, within appropriate parameters, of course. 

Many of us probably read the article in the recent Sunday Times Magazine about sexual abuse that took place over years and perpetuated by multiple faculty members at Horace Mann.

It’s hardly the only place where it occurred; we know of others and there are more that we don’t know of. 

The author of the article describes, in painstaking detail, the emotional devastation that the abuse caused the victims, many of whom suffered terribly, some of whom actually took their lives. 

The non-mutual, and in many instances coercive, nature of the abuse wrought havoc with the psyches of the victims.  In many instances, it led to a kind of emotional paralysis.

This is an extreme example of a systematic deprivation of the kind of freedom that is necessary to promote appropriate emotional growth and as I said recently, the community of concerned adults has an unambiguous mandate to do everything it can to prevent such abuse from taking place. 

We also know, unfortunately, of numerous repressive regimes that derive power from the systematic suppression of human freedom.

However, on a far less heinous level, and with the best and most loving of intentions, we sometimes deprive the next generation of the freedom they need in order to achieve proper self-esteem.

In age-appropriate ways, across the lifespan, people need to be given the freedom to make decisions, even to fail at times. 

I understand that each situation needs to be weighed separately – sometimes we can’t stand by and watch a child make a mistake that we know will have devastating consequences, but sometimes we take our interventions too far.

My wife is currently working with parents whose children are unhappy with the bunk assignment they were given for summer camp. 

Some parents write about the bunk assignments as though, God forbid, the child was conscripted in the Czar’s army and slotted for some outpost in Siberia, as opposed to being placed in Bunk 19, rather than Bunk 20.

I know we all realize this, but parenting, “aunting” and “uncle-ing” require careful balancing and calibration all the time.

We say we want to raise a generation that is independent, confident and resilient and then we rush to rescue them from all sorts of things, much of which, if we let them experience it, would help them grow.

Freedom is a major precursor to self-esteem.

Next is accomplishment.  How does this work?  We do something well and we feel a sense of satisfaction.  So often we rush to tell others, children especially, how smart they are and how great they look and how kind they are.  But that usually doesn’t lead to self-esteem. 

More effective, generally, is the dyad of accomplishment and self-acknowledgement.   If a child or a friend does something well and they realize it, a high five following that realization is generally worth more than hours of cheerleading. 

The freedom to act, choose, fail and act again; the satisfaction that comes from accomplishing something. 

And, finally, a sense of responsibility. 

As the CEO of Timberland put it in a lecture he gave at a professional conference I attended years ago, it’s important, not just to do well, but to do good. 

He revealed that, in his experience, the two can be mutually reinforcing.  Timberland, Starbucks, and other companies have discovered that playing the prophet and turning a profit are not incompatible. 

The CEO of Starbucks was recently interviewed on CNN, speaking about how his company opened stores in economically depressed areas, with the result that jobs were created and the community benefited overall.

When people do good, when they offer help that is needed in whatever setting, they generally have a positive sense of themselves because they know they are making a palpable, positive difference.  One flows naturally from the other.

This morning’s Torah reading features a quintessential crisis of self-esteem.  10 scouts come back from the land, they feel it’s impenetrable, they claim to see the nefilim, a race of giants, and they say vanehi v’einenu kachagavim v’chen hayiynu be’eineihem. 

We were like grasshoppers in our own eyes, and so we were in their eyes. 

Rashi says, “we heard them say to each other that we were like grasshoppers.”  Why does Rashi make that comment?  Because he probably wondered how the scouts knew what the “giants” were thinking.  So he assumed that they overhead.

Another possibility is that they didn’t know what the giants were thinking; they just assumed that the image they had of themselves was the image that others had of them.

Such projection is a classic outcome of insecurity.

I would argue that the Torah itself provides an arc from freedom to accomplishment to responsibility.

Starting with freedom from Egypt, which the Israelites yearned for in the wilderness – either alive or dead, they wanted to be in Egypt.

Proceeding with a template for accomplishment – building a sanctuary, surviving the wilderness, conquering the land.

And ultimately establishing a framework for exercising responsibility.   A code for how to protect the vulnerable, how to do tzedek, that which is right, how to engage the stranger and protect the downtrodden.

Having choice, doing well, doing good.  That tripartite standard will guide the children of Israel through the wilderness, into the land and then, ultimately, through millennia of exile and return.

If you like acronyms, you can say that Freedom, Accomplishment and Responsibility have taken us FAR.

Self-esteem is not easy to achieve.  Well-meaning as we are, we can’t force it.

It grows with each failure and recalibration. 

It grows when we give each other the space to achieve and the inspiration to reach out.

When one brother and two sisters say to each other, years after both of their parents have passed on, “all things considered, we’re ok.” 

With freedom, accomplishment and responsibility the seeds of genuine self-esteem are sown. 

And if we want to, periodically along the way, we can say, as I hope our loved ones can say, vanehee be’eineinu keev’nei adam.  we were decent human beings in our own eyes.  And so might we appear in the eyes of others.