A Psycholgist on the Loose
Posts tagged confidence
The Wrestler: Praise Can Be Dangerous
Feb 10th
If you were famous enough to have YOUR OWN ACTION FIGURE would you have Self Confidence and Self Esteem? More to nail on the Psychobabble Wall of Things that Aren’t True: If you get enough Praise . . .
you will have SELF CONFIDENCE and SELF ESTEEM.
But wait! Praise is a good thing, right? After all, praise makes us FEEL good. We’ve even told parents and teachers that praise (social reinforcement) is the way to get kids to accomplish tasks. We’ve told husbands and wives that praising their spouses can MAKE THEM FEEL LOVED. Can’t get too much praise, can’t give too much praise . . . right?
Maybe. But, What is, “Do these pants make me look fat?” but one more attempt to suck approval out of another person and duck responsibility for ourselves? (By the way, you regular readers know and have taken the pledge to never, ever, ask anyone that question, or any similar question. You guys remember that any part of your body or personality that you complain about grows to enormous proportions in the eyes of the other.)
The problem is, if you buy that enough love and praise results in Self Confidence and Self Esteem, it follows then that, if you DO NOT FEEL loaded up with these feathery showstoppers, self-confidence and self-esteem, you must have–somewhere along the line–missed out on sufficient praise. 
Now, I wish the worst part of this misguided notion is that we will overblame others (See “What’s Love Got to Do With It?) . . . but that’s not the worst part. The most damaging result of this belief is believing – “I don’t have self confidence and self esteem because I did not get the love and praise I needed AND I did not get the love and praise I needed to be a person with self confidence and self esteem BECAUSE I’M NOT DESERVING OF LOVE and PRAISE”. 
And that’s just not right. The whole chase approval, get praise routine is a dead end. The movie The Wrestler speaks to this issue with clarity, pain, and beauty.
Warning: Plot information to follow. If you haven’t seen The Wrestler and you want to be surprised, stop now. Also, you probably want to avoid the movie if a lot of nudity, a lot, is going to bother you.
The Wrestler, Randy the Ram (Mickey Rourke), reaches physical maturity to discover he doesn’t know how to participate in adult relationships. At about the same time he starts spending hours at the gym and learns what body-building enhancing drugs can do for him. Wha-la! The Ram is getting noticed. Being admired. He even has his own Randy the Ram action toy on the market.
Tomorrow: Is having an action toy in your image the same as being a real person?
Confidence, Ssmonfidence
Feb 6th
Yep. Nail another of the reliable psychobabble topics to the wall. Just rip it out of your head and ram a spike through it.
We’re supposed to have this SELF-CONFIDENCE BEFORE we accomplish tasks, projects, and relationships. Fine. So Just where are we supposed to get S-C?
We can’t buy it, obviously, since people with lots of stuff are missing S-C as often as the rest of us bargain hunters. Okay, so your parents, right? Your parents, if they loved you, 
were SUPPOSED to GIVE you Self-Confidence. So that worked, right?
Well, no. So, phooey there. Every parent I’ve ever worked with loved their children and most desperately wanted to GIVE their children S-C. Their love didn’t do it, and given that little confession, I guess you get it that a psychololgist can’t GIVE it to you, either.
Things are looking pretty desperate. But wait! We can marry someone who loves us enough to GIVE us Self-Confidence. Right. Talk about a way to wear out a relationship. And your kids? Even if they do everything right and the family is doing great. . . Nope, they can’t GIVE it to you. Even when they try very hard.
So what now? Oh, yeah. We already nailed that S-C business to the psychobabble-I’m-not-going-to-look-for-Stuff-That-Doesn’t-Really-Exist-WALL.
This Self Confidence business has held us back long enough. Part of the effort toward a life based more on facts, and less on wild emotions, toward a life with more solid successes that come from steady progress (no eat-cookies and lose weight, send in your old gold and go to Tahiti, 
or borrow more money to save yourself money funny business) . . .
Means facing the REALITY that to accomplish anything, we have to take the first step, SELF-CONFIDENCE or NO SELF-CONFIDENCE. The only thing that matters is that first step. Then the one after and the one after. Knowing we will fail sometimes. That if we aren’t knocked around a bit, our goals are way to low.
As for where having 14 babies while unemployed and single comes from? . .
. Now there’s a woman taking LIFE RULED by the EMOTIONAL GUIDANCE SYSTEM TO A NEW LEVEL.
OPTIMISM can be POISON
Feb 4th
“OPTIMISM” and “CONFIDENCE” are good things, right?
Not always.
Sometimes, optimism and confidence are ACTION STOPPERS. 
Often we do NOT ACT because we believe that to accomplish our goal, we MUST HAVE CONFIDENCE. Before we start, we must be OPTIMISTIC.
The myth of Self Esteem falls in here, but that’s for another day.
First let’s tackle “optimism.” Optimism is not enough. Two examples–
The Case of the Optimistic Husband: A wife left her husband after being disappointed with her husband’s involvement in, and his lack of enthusiasm for supporting, the family. As the weeks went by, I’d ask him how it was going as he very much wanted to keep the marriage. His response was invariably, “I’m optimistic. I think being optimistic is important.” The problem– he wasn’t DOING ANYTHING to save the relationship. He was just “being” optimistic. 
Optimism didn’t change his functioning and thus, worked against his goal.
The Case of the Aspiring Novelist: Now I write, (TOO RICH comes out in June.) and I’m the World’s Biggest Weinnie when it comes to showing my work. As I mentioned in an earlier post, I was so afraid of criticism that at my first writer’s conference, I didn’t even go into a meeting. Yep, just drove by the hotel, ducking down like someone would be standing on the sidewalk, pointing and saying, “Look at her. Who does she thinks she is, thinking someone wants to read her manuscript?”
But, a problem I see at writing conferences (Yes, I finally came in. I used an alias, but hey, baby steps, okay?)– is that many writers think that what’s needed for them to be published is to visualize future success and stay optimistic. And I see that attitude holding them back. Yes, optimism is needed to send out those queries. But optimism is a problem if the writer doesn’t improve their product because he or she is OPTIMISTIC that some agent will eventually like their early draft just the way it is. Or accept a topic which she can’t sell.
I see this problem in couples therapy where one partner believes that if someone loves you, he’s supposed to put up with you just the way you are–when some of the ways you are –are annoying. And if he loves you he won’t ever complain. I’m not talking about doing the pretzel change thing. I’m talking about the kind of work on yourself that makes your life better.
Yep. We’re back to MANAGING YOUR OWN ANXIETY. 
Again.
This is too important to not do more. And CONFIDENCE deserves it’s own post. So later.
And tomorrow, The “I DON’T DO MORNINGS” Incident. Postponed to a later date.
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