Self-Compassion versus Self-Esteem

It's famously noted that the Dalai Llama needed someone to explain to him the concept of self-esteem. He didn't understand it--didn't understand why so many people in Western countries would hate themselves. In non-capitalistic societies, individuals do not need to "prove their worth" in order to justify their waking breath. They never need to justify their own existence. In less "advanced" cultures where Buddhism still thrives, people aren't bombarded with images and messages from the media telling them that they are somehow deficient and must purchase things in order to better themselves.

Admit it: we don't get the message in our culture that you're fine just the way you are. If you're at all observant, you see a thousand messages a day telling you that you're wrong. That's mostly what consumer capitalism is all about--a system geared entirely around making you see yourself as an incomplete, unworthy person who can be completed only by earning enough money to buy the shit that will make you whole.

And so there's a mental health danger to consumer capitalism being the organizing framework of our society. You and I, as adults, often shrug--we look at the world and say, "Ok, sure, but surely being an adult means you have to bolster yourself up against that." Never mind how or with what resources (we skip that part).  We look down on people with self-esteem issues, as if it's some weakness of character or immaturity. And then we treat it likes there's some software out there that unhealthy adults can download to fix themselves. "Go to therapy," as if psychoanalysis will patch the bug. We rarely interpret the situation for what it really is: "Wow, I guess the pervasive message of unworthiness cut a little too deep in that one."

We rarely treat this kind of pain and suffering with empathy. We pathologize it so we can condescend to it. We'd rather support a system that diminishes you at every turn rather than say, "Yeah, actually, I can see why you would feel that way."

And so there's a mental health danger in rearing children in a culture where all adults are assessed, valorized and slotted into an unequal hierarchy of privileges. Effectively, much of what "education" is in Western society is preparing children for a future where they can expect to be graded, rated, weighed, measured, and sorted for their ultimate position in what is our vastly unequal society.

For our system to work, we can't have adults going about claiming inherent, inalienable rights to love, care, health and happiness. So we tell our kids in every way possible: you have to earn all the good stuff life has to offer. And then, in the same breadth without any second thought, we say, "But you have to love yourself for who you are, too."

Some kids grow up fine with the contradiction. But I'd wager most of us didn't. We struggle with evaluating ourselves on whatever value system we have adopted to measure the worth of a human being. We measure ourselves up against this metric and decide, "Well, today I am thin enough to be worthy of self-love." Or, "Today, my job isn't high-status enough to be worthy of self-respect."

Most of us, when scratched deep enough, will admit to having problems with this. Self-esteem is a frustrating concept because so much of what we esteem in others is pretty much what we're taught to esteem in others--their jobs, their education, their looks (for women), their height (for men). If you're especially forward-thinking, you might value someone's philanthropic contributions, their kindness shown to friends or their commitment to social justice. But esteem is synonymous with worth. And the problem with that is our notions of worth are warped. No matter where we get them, our value systems alienate us from the basic notion that we don't need to justify our lives.

None of us ever asked to be born.

And the fact is, there are more reasons to hate yourself in our society than there are stars in the sky. If you're an especially analytical person, you've probably already identified several hundred if not thousands of reasons by now (and why, statistically, you're the most likely to be depressed and/or a stand-up comedian). And the entire self-esteem movement falters precisely because you can't convince someone who falls short  by his or her own metric to like themselves. Logically, they can't fathom how or why they should. All they need to do is see the traits they believe themselves to carry be depreciated and rejected to give themselves all the reasons they need to go on hating themselves. When a little girl hears a cruel remark made about a fat woman in a restaurant, she's always going to know and worry that her value, her worth as a human being is in some part determined by the weight she carries on her body. It's not something any hallow talk about loving herself is going to fix.

And so, our mental health rides a roller coaster. Self-esteem just goes on supporting this idea that you should just value yourself, goddammit, despite whatever you see elsewhere. It's a ridiculous notion.

Self-compassion, though, isn't about worth. It's about really understanding that you don't need to justify your existence--not even to yourself. That even if you were flawed beyond measure, you're still just a piece of the universe inhabiting a human form and thus totally legitimate just as you are. The universe isn't wrong or right, it just is. And as such, you are neither wrong or right, you just are. Self-compassion is taking refuge in this idea. You see your self-hate for what it is: just ideas you have about how people should be valued and how you don't live up to them. They're just thoughts. Some people share them with you, some people don't. But in the end, they're just thoughts.

Instead of teaching kids to re-calibrate their value system to some "better" value system, we need to recognize why we feel we need value systems in the first place. In our culture, it's usually because we feel a compulsive need to assess where in the unequal spectrum of human worth people should be slotted. We want to know where we sit. And from this idea, most of us, we hate ourselves for not being more (and we can always be more).

But these are all thoughts. They have a ton of power over how we feel, but in the end they are just thoughts. The most depressed of us will think them a thousand times an hour. The most enlightened of us--the monks who have to be taught what self-esteem even is--they don't have these thoughts. They don't need to justify themselves to the world--just being born is justification enough. The universe needed me to be me, so here I am. They aren't happier because they have different value systems or "like themselves;" they're happier because they don't have this compulsion to measure up to anything. They have the same compassion for themselves a mother would for her child, brought into this world confused and crying, hungry for love and anxious to learn. Beyond that, it's thoughts and to our detriment, a lot of our thoughts come from systems of thought that have nothing to do with human nature.