Doing esteemable things is a piece of advice often given to people in recovery who struggle with the own self-image or self-esteem. Whilst it may seem practical to make yourself feel better by doing good things, it can easily act against your own best interest by making you feel you have to earn a sense of self.
Contents
- Sayings in Recovery
- Sense of Self
- You are Not Your Behaviour
- Self-Esteem
- Conditional Love
- Unconditional Love
- Action Programme
- Living at Peace with Yourself
Sayings in Recovery
All fellowships have a lot of slogans and sayings. Some of these come from the literature and some are more anecdotal or simply rooted in people’s own lived experience of what has helped them.
Some of these things such as doing esteemable things are almost like catchphrases, and often go unchallenged because they seem very obvious, and seem to make sense.
Sayings in recovery can also be a very quick way of giving someone what they feel to be an instant way out of a particular problem. Sometimes that can be true, other times it can be an illusion and can mask the fact that deeper work needs doing.
Sense of Self
Having a sense of self is can be quite difficult to put into words at times, but it’s primarily about having a sense of your own identity. A sense of your own place in your own life, a sense of being there for yourself, a sense of internal safety that allows you to live at peace with yourself.
Generally speaking, most people’s sense of who they are is formed in the first seven or eight years of their life, their basic sense of their own identity. These years are the building blocks of how they see themselves, how they relate to themselves, how they relate to other people and how they relate to the world.
Although anecdotal, it is generally accepted that an awful lot of people in recovery grew up in what are often referred to as alcoholic homes. This normally meant that there was a lack of safety in the home, at many different levels.
One of the effects of a lack of safety in a home like this is that children grow up with a fractured sense of self because they do not have the safety to grow up in a healthy and loving environment.
This fractured sense of self is normally carried through into adulthood, and for people in recovery usually manifests itself in their behaviour and active alcoholism or addiction, often referred to as a way of acting out.
You Are Not Your Behaviour
The AA 12 step programme puts a lot of emphasis on coming to understand how someone’s sense of self and their behaviour has contributed to their alcoholism, in the context of alcoholism being seen as an illness.
One of the most important takeaways for people in recovery is to come to a place where they realise that they are not their behaviour.
Their behaviour is an expression of what is going on inside them, for better or worse, and in early recovery especially is often best seen in the context of another saying ‘hurt people hurt people’
This is really saying that someone’s behaviour is often an expression of an internal pain that is unmanageable and overwhelming, and that people act out to try and give themselves some sense of feeling safe, or feeling in control of their life.
The emphasis in AA is that in recovery people need to own their behaviour, both past and present, but understanding its context is crucial in order to be able to do this.
Sometimes this is easier to understand if you can think of someone you love or are close to or feel a degree of warmth towards. If they do something or say something that seems out of character or odd you might well challenge it, but it doesn’t fundamentally alter the sense of what you feel towards that person.
There are obviously limits to this and extremes, but generally speaking it can act as a guide to help separating out someone’s behaviour from who they are as a person.
Self-Esteem
Whilst there are many different words for a sense of self, the phrase self esteem is often used in recovery, in part because it is the phrase used in step four of the AA programme to help people understand and deal with their level of resentment or anger.
Given that for many people their fractured sense of self is part of their alcoholism, it is the area that many people struggle with in recovery, trying to get some sense of self or peace once you get and stay sober.
Whilst there are no easy answers to this, repairing a damaged sense of self created in childhood inevitably means doing some type of inner child work to heal the fracture, and to allow the adult self to function as an adult rather than as a broken child.
Someone once described meditation as being the art of learning ‘how to be’. The sense of learning to separate out a sense of being from a sense of doing is again really important.
It can be likened to a sense of being as being someone’s inner world, and a sense of doing being someone’s behaviour.
Healing a sense of self is healing someone’s inner world, which should inevitably result in changed behaviour. The flip side is that if someone changes their behaviour without changing their inner world, that may be ok for a while, but they will inevitably come a point where the tension is too strong.
It is a healthy sense of self, a healed or healing inner world, that allows someone to express that in a loving and healthy way.
Conditional Love
This really goes to the heart of the problem with the expression or advice of doing esteemable things. The intent behind this advice to people, is that if you want self-esteem, or to improve your self-esteem, then do esteemable things.
In non recovery language this would really be saying if you want to fix your inner world change your outer world and this is really the wrong way.
Firstly, in order to heal your inner world, the work required involves somehow healing the sense of safety that was broken in childhood. There are many ways of doing this in recovery, but they are virtually all about internal work not external work.
Secondly, this idea of doing esteemable things is saying to someone that you have to earn a sense of self, an acceptance of yourself, a sense of internal peace.
The sense of having to earn it makes it very conditional, very superficial, and doesn’t change the internal dynamic except on a temporary and illusory basis.
Doing esteemable things might make someone feel better for short time, but that will wear off until they start the treadmill again of doing things that make them feel better.
This is not to knock doing esteemable things, whatever they may be, it is simply saying that the danger lies in looking for external solutions to internal problems.
Conditional love, either of self or of other people, isn’t really love at all, it’s a coping mechanism, often a much needed one, but a coping mechanism nevertheless.
Unconditional Love
Unconditional love is quite different. It can probably best be thought of by the example given above of separating out behaviour and person. That you can still love a person whilst not liking or challenging their behaviour.
This is also fundamentally true of your own sense of self. Whilst some people struggle with the idea of loving yourself, at its heart is an acceptance of self, unconditionally, whilst at the same time understanding your behaviour, and working towards expressing that behaviour in a more loving way, both towards yourself, other people and the world generally.
Perhaps the best way of understanding this is to look at the parable of the prodigal son in the Bible, and really come to understand one of the major points behind it that the father never stops loving the son, irrespective of his behaviour.
This is not meant to provide easy or glib answers or definitions of love and unconditional love. These are powerful felt emotions that people really need to experience for themselves in order to understand them.
It is simply trying to make a point that unconditional love is where this programme helps to guide people towards, for themselves and other people, whereas the idea of conditional love is more superficial, more of a treadmill.
Conditional love is like a road that takes you in the wrong direction, but the further you go down it, the more difficult it is change direction.
Action Programme
One of the reasons this idea of doing esteemable things can seem so attractive is the continued repetition of the idea, in AA, especially that 12 step recovery is an action programme.
This in part comes from some of the language in the book Alcoholics Anonymous, where the emphasis on action is quite heavy, often at the exclusion of empathising the need for self-awareness and self-reflection.
There are reasons for this emphasis on it being an action programme, most of them historical in terms of the development of AA.
It is often easier for people in recovery to focus on doing things, often referred to as supporting or helping other people, rather than looking at themselves and moving their direction of travel internally rather than externally.
This is not meant as a criticism of people, simply as an acknowledgment that in recovery it is often easier to focus on fixing other people, or doing things that you think will fix other people, then focus on fixing yourself.
Living at Peace with Yourself
Ultimately, all of this is about someone doing what they need to do to help themselves stay sober. One of the key elements of this will be their ability to live at peace with themselves, unconditionally.
Learning what this means and how to do it is really based on how people interpret and use the 12 step programme, as well as any additional sources be they medical, spiritual or therapeutic.
All of this refers to someone’s own individual journey. That journey can be quite complex and meandering for lots of people, but it is unique to the individual.
Having an awareness of the destination, in terms of an unconditional love of self, is perhaps the most useful signpost for how people as to how to navigate the road ahead.
