Daniel A. Bochner, Ph.D.

Everyone knows what is meant by low self-esteem, but why is it so hard to overcome? We know of people who just cannot seem to get beyond the bad things that have happened to them. They come to believe that the world will continue to frown upon them - that things will not work out. They feel people have hurt them and will hurt them again and again. Some people with low self-esteem will need to be the boss as often as possible. Some will never think themselves worthy of decent treatment. Some will lack any motivation to move ahead in life because they just cannot see the possibility of things going well. Low self-esteem does indeed have many faces, but the one thing that all sorts of low self-esteem have in common is the belief that one's general circumstances will continue on as they have always been. With low self-esteem, there appears to be an inability to separate what has happened in the past from what could happen in the future.

The question is, how does that happen? The belief that things are the way they will always be, in its essence, is a belief about where a person fits within the world community. It is also a belief about how the world community works. A person can grow up in a relatively harsh and critical environment and thus the pain of the past is transferred into a need to be top-dog within the dog-eat-dog world where there is little room for kindness lest it be taken as weakness. Another example: if a person does not think highly enough of themselves to work toward achievements, it is often because they’ve been broken down by disparaging comments and have come to believe that they are not good enough to achieve within a world where everyone else is better than they are. Yet another example: if life experience leads one to believe that nothing in life will ever work out, then that person likely will come to believe that making an effort, no matter how diligent, is meaningless within a world that only rewards the lucky few.

The important connection to understand here is that the relatively permanent feeling state a person experiences within one's mind seeks a permanent explanation about whom he or she is in the world and how the world works. This seeking for explanation within one's mind and psyche is an automatic process that occurs due to cognitive dissonance, a concept that has been well-studied within the field of psychology. Cognitive dissonance is the discomfort we develop when we hold two conflicting ideas or beliefs. When we do hold two conflicting ideas or beliefs, a change in our thinking becomes necessary to reestablish consistency in our thoughts or integration within our minds. The stronger the dissonance, the bigger the necessary change in thinking.

Of course, it’s obvious that we tend to look for explanations of our ongoing experience almost constantly. We tell ourselves someone reacted in a certain way because of something either we did or because of something they feel. We look for circumstances within our experience that help explain the ongoing behaviors of others and outcomes we perceive. Interestingly, however, it is when things just don’t seem to make sense that we change our thinking or beliefs the most. The most common examples for how this change works are in everyday occurrences. People trying to be Vegans (people who will not eat meat or dairy products) who sometimes eat fish somehow try to think of fish as lesser animals. When charitable people act in greedy ways, they typically chalk it up to taking care of their own or even survival of the fittest.

Cognitive dissonance plays an especially important role, however, when accidents happen, or more importantly, when we try to understand why we have experienced some kind of trauma. That is, cognitive dissonance plays its largest role when the world seems to have gone mad or out of control in some particularly hurtful way. When accidents happen, we often look for ways the accident would have been prevented if only we would have done something differently. Often we blame ourselves for the accident even if it seems to have little to do with us. In the mind, making sense of the accident seems to require some understanding of how our actions are part of the cause. Perhaps the most prominent example typically given is Stockholm Syndrome. A victim of Stockholm Syndrome is a person who starts to believe and espouse the very different values of their captors after being held and tortured. In these cases, only the possibility that the captors’ beliefs are correct and momentously important can allow the victim to make sense of how badly traumatized they have been. It becomes more important in the psyche to feel there is a good reason for the chaotic abuse that has occurred than it is to maintain the belief that the captors are criminal or hateful. The need to turn traumatizing chaos into something seemingly logical is the paramount factor in the development of low self-esteem. When we have been traumatized, the explanation we give ourselves to make sense of the torture we have endured almost always makes it our own fault or responsibility. If the trauma was our own fault then it would seem to be within our control. If things are within our control, on their surface they seem to be less threatening.

Although most childhood experiences are nowhere near as traumatizing as torture, the fact that we are with our families for so many years, and the fact that those years are the most formative within our experience, make cognitive dissonance crucial to our development. To put it simply, we become convinced that there are very good reasons for how we were treated as kids...

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