Honoring the Self: The Pyschology of Confidence and Respect

For a man to feel responsible for his actions, he must sense that the behavior has flowed from “the self.” In the situation we have studied, subjects have precisely the opposite view of their actions—namely, they see them as originating in the motives of some other person. Subjects in the experiment frequently said, “If it were up to me, I would no

Instead of complaining that people are so often taking advantage of her, the client learns to say, “Why and how do I invite or encourage people to take advantage of me?” Instead of complaining, “No one understands me,” the client asks, “Why and how do I make it difficult for people to understand me?” Instead of saying, “Why do women always turn awa

When I began working with the sentence-completion technique, I found the way to demonstrate easily, to myself and my clients, the functional utility of much of their self-condemnation. The essence of the sentence-completion technique is that the client is given a sentence stem by the therapist and asked to keep repeating the stem, adding a differen

The life appropriate to a human being—the life appropriate to a rational being—is not a luxury above the basic requirements of survival. It is the basic requirement of survival. On the individual level, the person who refuses to think, to act, to pursue values, either perishes outright or exists as a parasite on the efforts of persons more rational

High self-esteem seeks the stimulation of demanding goals. To the extent that we doubt the efficacy of our minds, we do not persevere. And we are likely to fail more often than succeed, confirming and reinforcing our negative self-evaluation. Low self-esteem typically seeks the safety of the familiar and undemanding.

The battle was lost on the day I conceded there was anything that needed to be proved. I can free myself from the negative verdict that burdens my existence only by rejecting this very premise.

An analogy may prove helpful. If a person’s life is in physical danger as a result of having contracted a major disease, the primary concern in such an emergency situation is not the pursuit of enjoyment but the removal of the danger, the regaining of health, the reestablishing of a context in which the pursuit of enjoyment will again be possible a

In contrast to the conventional perspective of psychotherapy, however, which tends to view aspects of this struggle in terms of illness or disease and to see human beings as more or less helpless pawns manipulated by forces outside their control, I see the endeavor as potentially heroic. It contains all the elements of great myth or great drama, fr

Since positive self-esteem is a fundamental need, human beings who fail to achieve satisfactory self-esteem are driven by anxiety to counterfeit self-esteem. Pseudo-self-esteem, a pretense at self-confidence and self-respect, is a nonrational, self-protective device to diminish anxiety and to fulfill the need for positive self-regard.