TRANSCRIPT
Where does self-esteem come from? Well, the first part of it for me is, what is the self? I know a lot of people out there who are considered to have very high self-esteem, who consider themselves even to have high self-esteem. But when I look at them, I think they don’t really even have a true self. They actually have a false self. They’re grandiose. They’ve got a persona, not a person on the inside. They’re not a person who’s connected with their own inner self. Instead, they’re just a hologram of a person. They’re fake.
They may be very successful in society. A lot of times, people who are grandiose and have a persona do very well in our society, sometimes better than people who have a real self. Because this world, in many ways, is so artificial, so fake, has values that are so screwed up. But do those people have self-esteem? Well, if you don’t have a real self, I don’t think you can have real self-esteem. Instead, what I see is people who have a false self, a fake self, have false self-esteem, fake self-esteem, grandiosity, image, arrogance, even hyper-confidence that’s not really connected to anything inside about who they are.
So how do you get real self-esteem? Well, how do you get a real self? You get a real self by being connected with who you are on the inside, by being self-reflective, by looking within and knowing who you are, by being truly introspective. And in a lot of ways, that’s not easy. For me, coming out of my childhood family system, it was nearly impossible. I wasn’t allowed to be myself. Myself was stripped from me. I had to be dissociated. I had to be a persona. My parents wanted me to be a persona. They wanted me to have false self-esteem in the world, be grandiose. But that’s not what I wanted. I rebelled against that. I fought for me.
And for me, that came down to healing my trauma, by grieving, by going through the pain of looking at what really happened to me, acknowledging my loss, by going through the suffering and the anguish, not blocking it out and ignoring it and burying it. Instead, facing it, getting away from the people who harmed me, acknowledging what they did to me, feeling my feelings again. Can’t be a real self if you don’t have your real feelings. That’s what I found. Having my real feelings was something I wasn’t allowed to do. And a lot of consequences I’ve experienced by becoming a real self—so much rejection from my family system, so many of my ancient family historical allies rejected me. They didn’t want me to be a real self and having real self-esteem. They didn’t like that because when I had real self-esteem, I stuck up for myself. I’m like, you can’t violate me. I started having boundaries. That’s a big part of having self-esteem—fighting for myself, saying, you know something, I have value. I know I have value. I love myself.
I wasn’t raised to really love myself. I was raised instead to love the false selves of my parents because that’s where I got the early experience of love that I knew. And I had to reject all of that in order to get real love, starting from myself and then to build allies in the world. That’s helped me have self-esteem, to realize, wait a second, I attract good healthy people. And also, I give something back to good healthy people.
So then, having a real self is the basic ingredient of having real self-esteem. But then there’s another part for me—that’s the side of doing good in the world, being a useful human being, being altruistic, nurturing the true selves of others. And kind of ironically, but also logically, actually being able to be useful in the world, being able to be useful to others, to nurture others’ true selves, comes actually out of the first part of having self-esteem. It comes out of having a true self. The more I have gained a true self, the more I empathize with others on the journey to gain a true self, to build a true self, and to nurture a true self.
And what I find is, the more I have a true self, the more I have a surplus of me to give to others. And what I find is, the more that I give to others and really nurture who they are, and sometimes don’t say what their false selves want to hear, I’m not exactly an ally of the false self. I sometimes am an enemy of the false self—my own false self, my parents’ false self, my family system’s false self, and everybody, the world’s false self. And a lot of people don’t like that. A lot of people pull away from me, reject me, even want to harm me. But for me, all the more reason to fight for myself and to fight for the true selves of others who are evolving.
That’s a big part of why I make these videos. I’m trying to be useful to others who are on the healing path, who are growing, who are trying to find out who they are, how they can heal, how they can grieve, how they can become more healthy. And what I find, and have found—I certainly found it as a therapist. I found it before I was a therapist, which is why I became a therapist, and I found it since then—is the more I’m useful to others, really help them on their paths, nurture them on their healing paths to become more true selves, the word actually makes me feel good. And that’s something I don’t hear too much out in the world—that actually altruism feels good.
A lot of people think of altruism as sacrificing one’s own self. Well, what I see is altruism as coming from the surplus of the self. It makes other people feel good and grow and heal and become more true and gain more self-esteem. But it reflects right back to me. When I nurture others’ true selves, I nurture my own true self. And what I found on this path of life, this painful, confusing, sometimes anguishing journey of life through this world that’s becoming more and more disturbed and crazy, is that in spite of it, sort of like the sailboat that’s going forward into the wind because they have learned how to tack, I’m tacking into the winds of life, and my self-esteem is continuing to grow.