Self-Esteem 101
August 3, 2013 12:41 PM   Subscribe

How do you square having good self-esteem without becoming a narcissist?

In some areas of my life, I have very good self-esteem, but in others, not so much. I have some very good friends, but sometimes for the life of me can't figure out what they see in me that is likeable. This has gotten more acute since I had children and I have been introduced to the new world of the Uber-Mom of Pinterest. I find myself almost being embarrassed to be my kids' mom.

The thing is, whenever I start to feel good about myself, a little voice warns me that I'm going to become a self-absorbed narcissist with no grasp of reality and no friends if I keep it up. I know where this comes from - my dad, trying to help me make new friends, explained that I was too self-centered, selfish and self-absorbed to be a good friend (this was pretty much through all of my school years). I internalized the lesson a little too well and now I feel fairly paralyzed by this dilemma.

I am in therapy, have been working on this particular question, but I haven't yet found either a) readings on this problem or b) concrete solutions, both of which would be helpful. Has anyone else had this issue? How do you have a healthy sense of self without falling into the narcissist pool?
posted by tafetta, darling! to Human Relations (15 answers total) 40 users marked this as a favorite
 
Best answer: First of all, the Uber-Mom of Pinterest is a lie. It's like Facebook. You see all these women projecting - literally, projecting to the world - these perfect lives: totally crafted activities for their perfect children, amazing partners, immaculate houses, organic cooking, etc. I assume anyone who is that desperate for you to know how perfect their life is deeply unfulfilled, mainlining their kids' Ritalin to hold it all together and sobbing in the shower every night into their fourth glass of pinot.

Second of all, self esteem is not a competitive sport. I am fucking awesome. Am I more awesome than you? I assume not, but I don't know because I have never thought about it. Narcissism is about seeing yourself relative to others, and is to be avoided; self-esteem is about your relationship with yourself and is to be embraced.
posted by DarlingBri at 12:53 PM on August 3, 2013 [48 favorites]


Having healthy self-esteem helps you be a good friend. You can't be a good friend to others if you're not a good friend to yourself. So you can tell that little voice to shut up. Literally. Next time it happens, say to yourself, "I know where this comes from. I internalized a false concept a long time ago. But I no longer believe it." If you're not in cognitive behavioral therapy already you might want to look into that because it specializes in this kind of problem.
posted by bleep at 1:13 PM on August 3, 2013


Best answer: People lie on social media. Not just exaggeration, but actual fabrication of being out on the town while sitting at home. So, do not let that get you down. The fabricators (and even the truthful ones) as the narcissists.

I am generally against self-esteem. Instead, I prefer the old-fashioned notion of self-respect. If you have self-respect, that will help to keep overweening self-esteem in check.

Also, bear in mind that there is always someone richer, smarter, better looking, more talented, and happier than you. If you peg what you think of yourself by comparing yourself to others, you will continue to feel poorly.
posted by Tanizaki at 1:15 PM on August 3, 2013 [11 favorites]


The objective opinion of a professional (such as your therapist) is so, so helpful here. I can't tell you what it was like when I cataloged all of the social faults that I felt made me an essentially unlikeable person (I talk too much, I use too many big words, I act like a know-it-all...) to my therapist, and he responded, with a tone of mild surprise, "But I don't think you do those things at all." Like a 5-ton weight was lifted off my shoulders.

If a friend or family member told me this, I would have shrugged it off as them just being nice. But my therapist... this was a dude I was paying money to give me an objective opinion, so I found that I took him at his word instead of second-guessing his motives.

To a large extent, I've stopped beating myself up over those things. But I don't feel that it has made me a narcissist, just someone who is no longer unnecessarily self-critical about the wrong things.
posted by Compared to what? at 1:17 PM on August 3, 2013


Best answer: Cognitive Behavioural Therapy helped me with my negative self-talk. It teaches you to take a more logical, rational view of your thoughts and to apply common sense to them to see if they stand up to scrutiny. There are several "cognitive errors", as they're called. It's generally recommended for things like depression, but I've found the techniques useful when applied to lots of areas in my life.

I found the book CBT for Dummies to be really helpful. Feeling Good is another that is often recommended on Ask. Both are good. I ultimately found that I didn't need to do anything extra to boost my self esteem. I just needed to stop hating on myself. Doing good things for other people is nice and accelerated the process, but it wasn't necessary. I just needed to stop telling myself that I was worthless. Feeling Good has a chapter specifically about self esteem, which I found particularly helpful.

Also, those uber-moms on Pinterest? They took a half-second snapshot of a single moment in their day. That picture doesn't show you how much hard work they had to be involved in to get to the point where they could actually take that picture. A cake looks really nice once it's ready to be displayed, but you still have to go to the store, get the ingredients, find a recipe, mix the ingredients, bake the cake and then apply the decoration to it before you can put a picture of it on the internet. People don't show pictures of them in the store in their sweatpants, waiting in the queue, or of them with cake mix in their hair and flour all over the floor and the dog with its nose in the garbage after the eggshells. Those things still happen, though.

Another thing to remember is that there will always be people out there better than you at a specific thing, but there will always be people out there worse than you at a specific thing. And that goes for every thing that exists - childrearing, cookery, brain surgery, picking one's nose, etc. Nobody is perfect. Ever. People can be very very good at one specific thing and put pictures of that thing on the internet, sure, but you're missing 99.9% of their actual life.
posted by Solomon at 1:21 PM on August 3, 2013 [5 favorites]


When you esteem yourself honestly, you are aware of your faults and your strengths, and happy with them. When you are narcissistic, you inflate or invent your strengths and pretend you have no faults.

With good self-esteem, there's no need to compare yourself to others, either to feel better than them, or to bring yourself down, because you happen to like yourself plenty. A narcissist would feel the need to always come out on top, often through ignoring the strengths of others or highlighting their faults.

So, I think you already have good self-esteem, and you should happily accept it.
posted by General Tonic at 1:28 PM on August 3, 2013


tafetta, darling!: "Uber-Mom of Pinterest"

I don't really understand what this is, but you should get over Pinterest. Pinterest is aspirational hoarding. The whole point is to show off things that aren't actually your own to show you have good taste. Which is perfectly fine, just don't confuse it with reality.
posted by mkultra at 1:58 PM on August 3, 2013 [4 favorites]


Best answer: Self esteem and narcissism are not opposite ends of the same spectrum. Comparing SE and narcissism would be like comparing apples to giraffes. Self esteem is the pursuit of liking yourself, being permissive with yourself, nurturing yourself and healing those hurts that bring on negative thinking. It is a normal developmental process for all humans. Narcissism is a pathological state of inner fragility that is manifested in harmful ways--manipulating others, controlling others, shaming others. I respect your fears about how working on your self esteem might feel unpredictable and think that those fears are the first thing to be worked on. I am a therapist and 100% sure that if you were to work on your self esteem (and fears about self esteem) that you would not end up in a state of narcissism. People with Narcissistic Personality Disorder develop this pathology early in life (usually by teenage years) and it's pervasive through the lifespan. You wouldn't just develop it or get it of nowhere. Hope this helps and feel free to memail me with questions!
posted by rglass at 2:12 PM on August 3, 2013 [11 favorites]


Best answer: The psychologist Kristin Neff has written quite a bit of insightful stuff about the self-esteem/narcissism problem. (For example: Why We Should Stop Chasing Self-Esteem and Start Developing Self-Compassion.)

I found her book, Self-Compassion here on AskMe (thanks, chickenmagazine!) and it really helped me through a rough time in my life, when my kid was a baby and super-tough (wakeful, persistent, demanding) and my mom friends seemed to have compliant angels who slept through the night within weeks of birth. Start with the website, self-compassion.org.
posted by purpleclover at 2:26 PM on August 3, 2013 [10 favorites]


Best answer: When I get annoyed/jealous of people you're talking about: the moms of Pinterest, the super happy amazing fun always doing something exciting people on Facebook, etc., I think of something I saw on TV as a kid. It was some show where they were trying to get kids to be critical of media, and they showed a "documentary" of someone's day in two different ways. One shows them being really nice, happy, having lots of fun, friends, etc. The other shows them being mean, unhappy, lonely, etc. It was the exact same day, but you only saw clips that are put together to show one side of the person. This is what social media is like: people show you what they want to show you.
posted by radioamy at 2:27 PM on August 3, 2013 [6 favorites]


Jezebel had a silly but poignant article about the "CTFD Method" of parenting that I think is a good reality check for parents.
posted by radioamy at 2:29 PM on August 3, 2013


Best answer: It's a cliche, but there are "perfect" parents whose idea of perfection ignores or contradicts what the kids actually want. I've known kids whose living rooms were so nice that they literally weren't allowed to go in them. I once worked at a summer program at a prestigious university, and quite a few of the kids were there because their parents thought it'd look good on a college application, and it "seemed the least lame" of the parent-approved options. Not every perfect Pinterest photo has a disappointed kid off-camera, but it helps to remember that the image isn't the whole story.

Regarding self-esteem: you know the quote "a friend is someone who knows everything about you and likes you anyway"? Self-esteem is the internal version of that. Narcissism, in the layperson's definition, is thinking you have no flaws and can do no wrong. Self-esteem is being aware of your shortcomings and acknowledging that you may mess up, but knowing you have worth no matter what. Narcissism is being better than others; self-esteem is not needing to rank yourself among others. It sounds like you're doing good work in therapy, and I think if you're working on developing a healthy sense of self-esteem, you're probably not going to swing into narcissism.
posted by Metroid Baby at 2:34 PM on August 3, 2013 [13 favorites]


The thing is, whenever I start to feel good about myself, a little voice warns me that I'm going to become a self-absorbed narcissist with no grasp of reality and no friends if I keep it up. I know where this comes from - my dad, trying to help me make new friends, explained that I was too self-centered, selfish and self-absorbed to be a good friend (this was pretty much through all of my school years).

Move towards a model for coping with these intrusive thoughts. Learn first to be as aware as possible of when you have these thoughts. Whenever you hear that voice, use a mantra like "the fact that I am having those thoughts right now does not make them true." Focus on making this a real habit--noticing and responding.
posted by Ironmouth at 3:36 PM on August 3, 2013 [1 favorite]


You can have positive self-talk going on in your head all the time and nobody will ever know, but you, so don't worry about being a narcissist as long as you don't share it with others.
posted by empath at 5:51 AM on August 4, 2013


You can have positive self esteem, and still have empathy. Appreciate that other people have feeling and successes and needs - narcissists don't do that. You can feel good about yourself without taking anything away from anybody else. Friends support each other and enhance each others' self-esteem by appreciating the good things and helping each other through bad times.

I'll bet many of those Pinterest pictures are of the best moment of that day, the rooms that were just renovated, the project that came out really well. Nobody posts the picture of their child having a tantrum at the family picnic, the kitchen after making the cupcakes, with flour and icing everywhere, the lopsided cupcakes with icing that melted off. You can't take a picture that shows that your child learned to read because of the nights you spent reading bedtime stories, or your child feeling comforted after you hugged them and reassured them. I love seeing other people's beautiful gardens, art projects, houses, etc. It's great that they can do that. Self esteem is about appreciating what you do well, who you are, and still being able to appreciate what other people do, and who they are. You really don't sound like you're in danger of becoming a narcissist. I suspect there's some more family messages at work there, keeping you from being happy with yourself.
posted by theora55 at 8:35 AM on August 4, 2013 [2 favorites]


« Older Music request   |   Best Android phone for an alarm clock Newer »
This thread is closed to new comments.