Home » Dorms » Women's Hall

In Search of a Self-Esteem Fix

My Own Vote of Confidence

I didn't do many of the campus visits they say you should do when choosing a college. When I visited my first choice, I wandered around campus with my mom, a friend and a nice guy named Todd from admissions. After chatting with the head of the nursing department (I considered nursing for approximately seven minutes my senior year), it was time to talk about financing.

My scholarship options seemed somewhat limited. I did run cross-country, though, and Todd suggested I meet with the university's coach. I balked. Collegiate athletics? Seemed a little out of my range.

Before we parted ways, Todd said kindly, "Be confident in yourself!" in an encouragement to go out for the cross-country team. I was puzzled, having never made self-confidence much of a priority.

I ended up not pursuing a college running career. One night right after college, I sat in a retreat center cafeteria with several other youth workers. I don't remember what we were talking about, but in one of those strange, serendipitous turns, Bryan, an older fellow sponsor, said, "Whoever Jessica marries is very, very lucky."

This moment is burned into my memory — I remember what I was wearing, the plastic grain of the table and the smell of instant mashed potatoes. This was so different from other, more quantifiable affirmations like my GPA and middle-school track medals. It was an affirmation of me as a good person — a good woman, even. Priceless.

I held this compliment close to my heart, marveling at feeling good about myself. I'd grown up considering self-esteem an undue self-indulgence, mindless psychobabble.

It's not that I hated myself all the time. But sometimes I did, which generally made my life miserable. And scoffing at self-esteem definitely set me apart from the way the rest of the world approached their sense of self.

America the Self-Confident

America has had an unyielding devotion to self-esteem since I was a little kid. It's a major component of our education system and a staple theme of Oprah shows. I guess there are worse things. Peace with self is by all accounts a necessity for emotional health. There's something deeply embedded in the human psyche that demands self-esteem, a sense of being all right.

But sometime in the last decade or so, the self-esteem talk reached a new high. Low self-esteem became the great and only societal ill. Why did we become so obsessed? Was it just American excess, taking a good idea to extremes? Are we just too wealthy — do so many of us have so few problems that we need to panic about trans-fats and self-esteem? Or is it something more fundamental?

Christian comedian Brad Stine mocks self-esteem as a cultural phenomenon. He attributes our overemphasis on self-esteem to our waning consciousness of God: Because we're iffy at best on the concept of God, we miss out on seeing ourselves as created in His image, and we have to make up for it by stroking our egos.

He's probably not wrong. But the average American does believe in God — specifically, a god who has little or no trouble dishing out gold stars. But I wonder if our self-esteem obsession also has something to do with a postmodern loss of meaning.

Of God and Self

One element of postmodern thought is a rejection of a metanarrative — a rejection of an all-encompassing story that gives order to history. No longer does a postmodernist wait for human history to arrive at a point of resolution. Instead, he or she cocks a skeptical eyebrow on universal truths because he thinks they're nothing more than fabrications used to advance particular religious, political and social agendas.

This is obviously an interesting idea, one that has distorted slightly as it has trickled into popular culture. I've never heard anyone say that they believe in multiple truths, but I have heard friends say they don't believe any one thing is true, which doesn't reflect a very heartfelt belief in a singular meaning of human experience. If there's no target of human history, no story in which to participate, what's the point — of anything?

If there's no big story, there's only my little story. And my little story is about me finding myself or finding love or finding happiness.

Maybe I'm over speculating. But sometimes I look at the way we're running — sprinting through life in tight, isolated circles — and wonder if this is where we're going wrong. Our lives are so highly individualized that we lose each other. And thus we insatiably need self-esteem because we're lacking love and connectedness in our lives.

In any case, our lives certainly seem to be more about ourselves than anything else.

Unto Others

My cousin just graduated from high school. At his commencement, a perky valedictorian recited a string of New Testament passages, things like "In humility consider others better than yourself" and "If someone strikes you on the cheek, turn to him the other also."

I couldn't help but think all this sounded a little antithetical to a doctrine of self-esteem, at least the most extreme variety. Does that mean God frowns on self-esteem?

There are obviously some important considerations in these Bible passages. For one thing, a lot of the self-and-others statements were written to believers about their relationship with each other, so "Consider others better than yourself" is not the same thing as saying "Look for ways to subject yourself to the humiliation of others because you're not as important as they are."

Still, biblical mandates are inescapably more others-absorbed than self-absorbed. Why is that? Why does the Christian worldview place such a high esteem on others?

For one thing, the Christian faith places everything at the foot of Christ — in Him all things hold together; from Him and to Him and through Him are all things (Colossians 1:17, Romans 11:36). Among other things, He's our role model. And His method of relating to others and to Himself was strikingly marked by selfless love.

Plus, God has enacted redemption in Christ, creating a saved community. Selfishness is out of place in the Christian community — it denies Jesus' values, and it doesn't reflect God's redemptive work.

I don't think God intends group identity to completely overtake individual identity, though. Jesus spent intensive time with individuals. Paul says that Christ "loved me and gave himself for me." Redemption isn't conferred on some faceless throng; it's experienced deeply and personally by individuals.

If God adopts each of us as His children, that means that our me-stories do matter, they do have meaning. Each of us has a redemption story, and each of our stories makes up God's big redemption story.

So what am I to do with the concept of self-esteem? Do I remedy my bouts of self-hatred with little pep talks ("I'm good enough and smart enough and doggone it, people like me") or pretending that I embody every virtue known to woman?

C O F F E E  S H O P

---

Do you think our culture's obsession with self-esteem could be linked to the rejection of the idea that we are part of God's overarching plan for mankind?

Join the discussion!

Probably not. A healthy self-image is a slippery thing, something that takes time and struggle to achieve. But the good news is that I don't have to make self-esteem the centerpiece of my life just to feel okay about myself, because my little life story isn't the only source of meaning.