Читать книгу Self Esteem: Simple Steps to Build Your Confidence - Gael Lindenfield, Gael Lindenfield - Страница 18

A clay pot sitting in the sun will always be a clay pot. It has to go through the white heat of the furnace to become porcelain.

Mildred Witte Stouven

Emotional pain is the basic food of low self-esteem junkies. It often seems that the more they get the more they crave. Like any other addicts, the victims eventually cry out for more and more, kidding themselves that they have risen above its power to hurt (‘Go on spit in my face, I don’t care anymore’).

Rarely do psychological wounds receive a comparable amount of healing attention as physical ones. Why in our culture is there such a distinct difference in the way they are commonly treated?

Emotionally broken hearts hurt just as much as the physically damaged ones and they can be just as disabling and life-threatening.

The answer, I believe, is not always that people care any less about emotionally hurt hearts, it is simply that in our culture they are very often much less informed about what they can usefully do to help heal the wound. Once the ‘tea and sympathy’ approach has been tried and found wanting, the only other options most sufferers believe to be available are patience, distraction, or costly psychotherapy.

Perhaps any one or a mixture of all these options may satisfactorily ‘cure’ minor emotional bumps and scratches, but they are usually grossly inadequate remedies for the degree of psychological pain which tends to inhabit the hearts of people with low self-esteem. They tend to have had their feelings hurt so often, and so deeply, that they could literally spend a lifetime awaiting the uncertain healing mercies of Father Time. (And in the meantime their self-esteem weakens and weakens and the vicious addictive cycle revolves again and again.)

As a direct result of my own difficulty in healing a deep emotional wound of my own, a few years ago I began to take a special interest in this subject. I spent a considerable amount of time observing and noting the specific processes which seem to promote efficient emotional recovery. Eventually I began to gain a much clearer idea of what I believe we can ourselves do to encourage more efficient healing of psychological pain.

The first five stages seem to be particularly essential to the emotional healing process; the final two are more like welcome bonuses because they give us a boost of additional but not necessarily crucial psychological strength. In a ‘normal’, healthy healing process it seems that these stages may sometimes overlap, but I have never yet felt or observed anything being gained from trying to work through them in a different order.

To make this developing ‘theory’ easier to discuss and translate into a practical strategy I eventually decided to call each of these identifiable stages by the following names:

1. Exploration

2. Expression

3. Comfort

4. Compensation

5. Perspective

6. Channelling

7. Forgiveness

There are seven predictable stages we can help ourselves work through step-by-step.

During the last couple of years I have talked about these stages to hundreds of people with whom I have worked, and I have been told very many times that just hearing the mere outline of the process has had some immediate healing impact. I suppose this should not surprise me because I have always found that once I can clearly see the road I need to take to work through any problem, I know I am well on the way to recovery. So I trust that simply by gaining some understanding of the theory you too will get an immediate boost of motivational hope and will feel more inclined to test out the strategy.

I have also found that this theory can be a very useful diagnostic tool because it helps us to pinpoint the exact stage we have reached in our healing process. This makes it easier for us to plan the next step more effectively. Discussing it can reveal the point where someone may have become emotionally ‘stuck’, because it often becomes very obvious that he or she may have skipped one of the essential stages.

In my book Emotional Confidence I expand on these thoughts, but in view of the importance of emotional healing to the maintenance of high self-esteem I will now summarize the strategy.