Back in her college dorm room, in the 1980s, Anneli Rufus had a revelation: "I saw that my roommate looked in the mirror without automatically saying bad things about her body or clothes or face. She just did her best to get ready for the day and went out the door. Watching her once, it dawned on me that other people don't automatically assume the worst about themselves."
Around that same time, Rufus met her future husband (the two were married in '89.) "He'd say things like, 'You're wonderful, you're beautiful.' I thought, 'Well, he's saying that because that's what guys say, or because he feels sorry for me, or because he knows that I'm psychologically fragile, and he doesn't want to upset me.' I never believed a compliment. Information comes to me and I process it in a completely different way than a 'normal' person would," she says. "This is life with low self-esteem."
Rufus can look back on her college years and say that she was an intelligent, kind, interesting, humorous, nice-looking young woman, and that it was not at all unreasonable for someone to fall in love with her. But she would never have been able to see that then. Although she was an aspiring writer, after graduating from UC Berkeley she didn't try to get internships or introduce herself to editors. "I walked around like a shlump," she says. "I didn't know how to present myself or look good or dress right. I didn't think I deserved it, and no one taught me how, and I didn't seek to find out how."
Despite years of such self-undermining behaviors, Rufus's talent and hard work shone through. She's published well-received books and writes regularly for top magazines and websites. She and her husband have kept their relationship strong and happy. "I've had accomplishments," she says, "and I've spent my entire life not really appreciating them. Let's say I win a writing prize. Do I go out to dinner to celebrate and feel great? No. The person with low self-esteem just wants any acknowledgement to be over in this weird subconscious way."
For decades, psychologists pushed people like Rufus to work at raising their self-esteem. Countless books and articles urged those with low self-esteem to build it up by thinking positively, listing achievements and good qualities, and airing shameful feelings, among other methods. Legitimate researchers and self-help gurus alike told them that learning to love themselves—or at least like themselves—would lead to more success at work and at home.
So they tried. They wrote post-it notes listing their best qualities and stuck them to bathroom mirrors. They muttered mantras under their breath. They told their kids they were extra-super-special.
"At one point I was in a women's group with a few friends," Rufus says. "We'd get together and have these talks about how women are fantastic and can rule the world. One night we took turns chanting our own names, loudly. It made me feel worse."
Psychologists have proved what Rufus felt to be true: Direct attempts to build self-esteem generally do not work. A few years ago, Joanne Wood, a professor of psychology at the University of Waterloo in Ontario, set out to test the notion that affirmations and other such self-talk make people feel better about themselves. The subjects in her study who started out with high self-esteem did report feeling a little better after engaging in positive self-talk. But those with low self-esteem—the very people you'd expect to use such techniques—felt worse. "The blithe recommendations to engage in positive self-statements are based on an intuition that they'll work," Wood says. "And they don't, often." Because these positive statements are so starkly different from the negative thoughts of the person with low self-esteem, they likely underscore the discouragingly long distance between where the person is and where she would like to be. The low-self-esteem sufferer is left feeling like a double failure.
Jennifer Crocker, a psychologist at the University of Michigan, studies "contingent self-esteem," or feelings of self-worth that depend on outside validation or praise in a particular realm that matters to a person. Scoring a victory in that particular area does raise self-esteem, but the boost doesn't last. "How does it feel after you pass your dissertation orals?" asks Crocker. "You feel good for a day, but then your worries come back."
The more a person's self-esteem is contingent on particular outcomes, the harder she will crash if she fails. Success is not extra sweet for these people—but failure is extra bitter.
Contingent self-esteem is by definition a chimera. Even the most accomplished, beautiful, and celebrated human beings don't get a steady stream of compliments and positive feedback. And chasing the chimera can, paradoxically, lead to
self-sabotage. "When people want to boost self-esteem or avoid a drop, they may do things that undermine them as a whole," says Crocker. Her research shows that those with contingent self-esteem often
shy away from situations that might produce even a temporary dip in how they view themselves—which can make them more prone to failure: Imagine a surgeon reluctant to practice new techniques in the operating room because he might not do them perfectly at first—hardly an attitude that would help his
career over time.
