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Child Development
Can You See Yourself as Good Only by Seeing Yourself as Bad?
What—however irrational—might you have “learned” about yourself in childhood?
Posted May 25, 2016
All children need—and desperately—to establish a secure bond with their caretakers. After all, absent such a vital connection, how can they not feel anxious and apprehensive? Being so dependent on their parents for food and shelter—not even to mention such emotional necessities as time, attention, guidance, empathy, understanding, and warmth—it’s essential that they feel loved and accepted. In short, children need to feel their parents truly want to take care of them and protect their welfare.
From their earliest days out of the womb (and considerably before they can begin to articulate their core needs), on the most primitive, instinctual level children experience the urgency of comfortably “belonging” to their family. So how might they go about doing their best to secure this critical union?—particularly if they begin to sense that their caretakers may not unequivocally love and accept them? For if those on whom they so greatly depend betray in various ways ambivalence or resentment toward them, they’re left feeling as though they’re not really seen as important or valued.
How do parents reveal such an unsettling (if not terrifying) message to the child anyway? Parents rarely reject their children outright. But all too frequently they convey to them the notion that their love is conditional, that it’s contingent upon the child’s ability to meet certain—usually unrealistic— criteria. And if the child regularly fails to live up to these demands, then (whether these requirements are made explicit or simply implied), the child is left to draw the troubling conclusion that they must not be good enough to warrant their parents’ full acceptance.
That’s the age-old dilemma associated with so many parents’ habit of routinely criticizing—or even hitting—the child whenever the child’s behavior, however understandable and age-appropriate, seems disobedient or indicative of poor impulse control. Such disciplinary measures might reflect the authoritarian manner in which their own parents raised them. Or, symbolically, depict a “re-enactment” of their own unrectified childhood wounding (but with themselves now in power). Or, too, it might represent a woeful lack of sophistication in their knowledge of how to take optimal “advantage” of their child's errant conduct by—sympathetically and non-critically—teaching them more cooperative, pro-social behaviors.
All the same, when severe, punitive child-rearing methods are practiced over and over again, and on a daily basis, their ultimate effect is to lead the child to see themselves as defective or inferior. Coming to believe that they don’t have it within them to make the grade, that they don’t (and maybe can’t ever) measure up to what’s expected of them, they can end up with what’s now designated a “shame-based identity.” When a child is young and repeatedly judged as inadequate by their parents, the child simply isn’t old enough to grant themselves the authority to take exception to such adverse assessments. Experiencing themselves, as it were, as receiving an “F” in “selfhood,” they wind up perceiving themselves as—in a word—bad. They’re pretty much doomed to envision themselves indefinitely as factory seconds.
Nonetheless, and independent of how hopeless the child may view their situation, they may yet feel compelled to search for ways to gain their parents’ relative acceptance. For feeling as secure as possible in their family relationship is likely to seem critical to them.
So, if the child is convinced that their parents don’t believe they’re “good enough” to be loved, how might they “align” their sense of self to better coalesce with their family’s (presumed) negative perception of them? In their cognitively immature state, they’re likely to reason—and this is something that would be totally out of conscious awareness—that if they can fall in line with their parents by concurring with their negative evaluation, then that itself could effect a more harmonious connection to them. Such an agreement might at least strengthen this all-too-tenuous bond.
Deep in the child’s psyche, they’ve decided that the most beneficial “return” message to their ambivalent caretakers is: “Hey! I don’t like myself—or see myself as good enough—either. So now can you accept me?—’cause I feel the same [antagonistic] way about myself as you do.”
And here may be the deepest explanation of why so many of us go through life doubting our intrinsic worth—feeling, despite all our successes and accomplishments, that, at bottom, we’re still not good enough. For, regrettably, we’ve learned to be just as hard on ourselves as our parents were.
In their Self-Esteem: Paradoxes and Innovations in Clinical Theory and Practice (1989), Richard L. Bednar et al. focus specifically on the grave psychological harm deriving from indifferent (i.e., neglectful) or hostile (i.e., cruel) parenting styles. The consequences to the child of such child-rearing deficiencies is pointedly summarized in their stating:
Children before the age of 8 are incapable of articulating a separate sense of self (Harter, 1983), and they are hence unable to define themselves otherwise than that which is communicated by parents. . . . Therefore, being hurt, chastised, or pointedly ignored is equivalent to being punished, and being punished means to children they must have done something wrong. Unable to recognize the possibility that their parents’ responses to them may be coming from the parents’ unresolved difficulties, the children blame themselves, coming to believe that they are somehow defective, unable to be good enough to be loved.
As I’ve already suggested, regarding themselves in the same unfavorable way as (assumedly) did their parents when they were children serves the painfully adaptive purpose of “joining” them with their deficient caretakers—even as they continue to experience abuse or neglect at their hands. At least now they can extrapolate something positive, or good, from seeing themselves as bad.
Admittedly, such an adjustment may be a most lamentable substitute for genuinely feeling good about themselves. Still, despite its negativity, this self-denigrating perspective enables them to have a defined role in the family. As weird as it might seem, in seeing themselves as bad, they’re now in accord with their disapproving parents.
It’s definitely a bitter pill for them to swallow. But any pill that can address such a malady may be better than none at all. . . .
NOTE 1: An earlier, complementary post of mine that centers on parents and their ability to meet universal childhood dependency needs is “Grade Your Parents! The Ten Crucial Criteria.” Other posts that relate to this one—and also suggest solutions to this childhood dilemma—include (but are hardly limited to) “The Path to Unconditional Self-Acceptance,” “The ‘I Feel Like a Child’ Syndrome,” and, especially, “Bonding vs. Bondage: What We Learn from Our Parents.”
NOTE 2: If you could relate to this post and think others you know might, too, kindly consider forwarding them its link.
NOTE 3: To check out other posts I’ve done for Psychology Today online—on a broad variety of psychological topics—click here.
© 2016 Leon F. Seltzer, Ph.D. All Rights Reserved.
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