Benefit #2: A potential for high self-esteem

This is part of the benefits of mental illness series. Previous articles: Introduction, Benefit #1

I wish I could tell you that my trip to the grocery store cured me of my panic disorder. But that is not how it works. The trip did, however, help me come up with a method that would eventually cure me. I like to call it plane crash crosswords. The idea was to try and treat the emergence of a panic attack as if I was trying to finish a crossword while on a plane about to crash. The panic made me feel like my life was about to end, so when one started, I would attempt to focus intensely on continuing whatever I happened to be doing at the time. In the case of the grocery store, this was getting to the till and paying for the sub roll.

Plane crash crosswords required quite a blasé attitude towards death. My panic would say “You are about to die!!!” and I would respond “Well, can you do it already? I’m trying to pay for groceries”. Suffice to say, it is much easier said than done. But, on the odd occasion, it seemed to work. After about eight months or so, I stopped having panic attacks altogether. It was the only anxiety condition I was able to cure through cognitive means.1

Towards the end of our work on panic, my therapist shifted the focus. We hadn’t even touched on my severe generalised anxiety yet. While not as incapacitating as when a panic attack arrived, it is the most painful of anything I have ever experienced. Every ten seconds I would find a new terrifying perspective on the fragility of my mortality. The worst part of my generalised anxiety was that a large aspect of it was rational. Death and sickness are going to happen to me. My generalised anxiety convinced me it was going to be soon. While the panic involuntarily forced me into incapacitation, the generalised anxiety persuaded me into it.

So, I found it a bit odd when my therapist started to ask about my self-esteem.

Indeed, before The Event my self-esteem was in the gutter. I had been suffering regular old depression since I was around eighteen. It slowly worsened through to my early twenties, prompting me to take the Sertraline that turned my life to bedlam. I didn’t think I belonged amongst the other physics doctoral students. I didn’t think I was particularly worthy of happiness and was terrified of failure. While not the cause of my depression, it did amplify it significantly.

I was, to put it lightly, bemused when my therapist started working on self-esteem rather than the anxious nightmare that was my existence, but I went along with it. I figured: what choice did I have? My bemusement changed to near incredulity after we started doing power poses.

To be specific, we started with the Superman pose. “How do you feel? More confident?” my therapist enquired while I stood there looking like a man particularly impressed with their current wee. “Erm, Yea, I think so” I responded, lying through my teeth.

Power poses were a fad at the time, instigated by the famous TED talk by Amy Cuddy. She said that the research she and her colleagues did showed that consciously changing your pose to broader shapes will make you feel and actually be more confident.

At the time, I thought the theories were credible. Now I don’t think it’s wrong, just nowhere near right. I think the research question is far too vague. What exactly is confidence? What is a body pose? When you conduct scientific studies with vague definitions, all you are going to get are vague results. Vague in, vague out.

Even if it was true that broader poses make a person feel more confident, that is most certainly not my impression looking at them from the outside. Take a look at this photo of the former British Chancellor George Osborne in a power pose.

Is this the epitome of confidence, or a man trying desperately to keep their balance on a new pair of roller skates? You decide.

My therapist and I tried power poses for a while, but I never really felt any different while doing them. Perhaps they work for some people, but it just felt odd to me. When my therapist started to move on to affirmations, I was seriously starting to doubt their methodology. But I continued. I trusted my therapist. I kind of had to. There weren’t any viable alternatives at the time.

My therapist gave me some homework. It was to say “I love you” to myself in the mirror at least once a day. For the first couple of weeks, saying the phrase made me want to vomit. I didn’t really understand the point. A month or so later something started to change.

On their own, affirmations do very little. The most you can accomplish is the successful portrayal of a narcissistic parrot. The real progress is made in the counselling room. My therapist would pick out the times I spoke negatively about myself and challenge them at almost every instance. My therapist was trying to provide an alternative picture. The reality my therapist was trying to paint was one where I wasn’t failing. Perhaps I was missing my small but significant displays of character. Maybe other people weren’t perfect. My therapist pointed out that, ultimately, we are all in the same boat. She showed me the damage others can and persistently do to themselves, hamstrung by a personality they do not yet understand.

I began to realise that I was valuable, but not in the corny “everyone is beautiful” kind of way, like I was some sort of imperfect diamond. I became aware that others cared about me and that I was worthy of it. I started to believe the affirmations I was telling myself in the mirror. They became reinforced and ingrained in the back of my mind. At any wobble of self-esteem or vulnerability, the affirmations would play in my head like a broken record. The affirmations became a protection.

I think most other people misinterpret what high self-esteem actually means. I think others believe that the transition from low to high self-esteem involves a complete change of thought pattern. From a negative set of thoughts to a positive set. This has not been my experience.

While a lot fewer in number now, I do still think the same thoughts compared to the time I had low self-esteem. The change has been how I feel about those thoughts. There are occasions where I think I’m useless, or stupid, etc. The difference is that after the “low” feeling happens, a certain “comfortable” like one emerges. I feel, I guess, “authentic”. There is an acceptance that I, as a person, will always lie between flawed and perfect. By giving me alternative perspectives, my therapist helped me to understand that there is never only one narrative. It is impossible to be completely terrible, with the general trend towards learning and evolving. My focus changed from performance to improvement.

It was only later that I understood why my therapist started with self-esteem. There seems to be a common perception that in the throes of mental illness, low self-esteem is a given. I learned it is possible to have high self-esteem and be hideously depressed. I will grant you it was a bit bizarre to experience. I had long periods of time where it felt like the world was a horrible place to be, I held little hope for the future, and nothing gave me any pleasure. However, had you asked me “Is life worth living?” my answer would be “Of course silly. Look at what I was surviving through and doing despite the illness. How could I not think of myself as an impressive person?”

When I was trying to get back to my PhD, high self-esteem meant I had the confidence to do all the work that was ahead. Only someone with high self-esteem could utilise the courage I had learned. My perseverance through my mental illness reinforced my self-esteem. The more trials I got through, the greater my self-esteem became.

Of the many things I learned on my journey from low to high self-esteem, perhaps the most ironic was to discover that I was hurt by others more when I had high self-esteem. Curiously, it was my friends with low self-esteem who were usually the ones who unintentionally hurt me. They wouldn’t trust me when I told them they were capable of doing something they were doubtful about. I didn’t ever get the impression that they understood I helped them in the times they needed it because I liked them as a person. They always seemed to attribute my actions to some other motive. I suppose if you don’t think very much of yourself, surely everyone else must have come to the same conclusion?

I couldn’t really tell my friends with low self-esteem that they were hurting me. If I told them, then that in itself would’ve made them feel worse, which would have lowered their self-esteem, which would’ve made them feel worse, etc. They would have been caught in an infinite loop!

I would rarely ever be seen as someone who was in a crisis, sometimes even if I let the other person know directly. I was confident, self-assured and open about taboo issues. How could I be in a crisis?

I am someone who has a crippled mind. It took an inordinate amount of energy to get through each and every day. Yet if someone (on rare occasions, a stranger) told me about a problem they were having, as long as I felt good enough, I would ask them how I could help. If they responded with something I was unable to help with, I felt able to say no.

It is now seven years since The Event,2 and I can only remember a handful of times when someone asked how they could help me. I don’t help others for reciprocation; the feeling of helping is good enough. But it doesn’t half make me feel exhausted.

I believe the dangers of low self-esteem occur when an individual begins to experience a mental health problem. The low self-esteem makes it extremely difficult to get out of the downward spiral these problems can produce. My last safety net is high self-esteem. In my lowest moments I would think “Why would I kill myself? Despite all the pain, I am a person that other people would want to know”. It not only kept me alive, it allowed me to dare to believe that I could return to my PhD.

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