Hello
Elaine,
A
great pleasure to read you again - I like how you have drawn us out - thank
you Gary for passing her words along to me. I am in BLUE
----- you said
----
what particularly struck me was the following
question in David's letter:
--how do we create environments in
which children have the opportunity to learn to participate rather than be
passengers in their feelings and thoughts?
That is such an important ingredient to a child's
learning, and living, flow of making meaning out of his/her life.
And the direction schools are now forced to take is its complete antithesis.
I just now received the further Self-Esteem
correspondence, so my responses are becoming a little disjointed. But respond
I must. I'm so glad you got yourself involved in this, since shame has
always been such a missing link here. David and John agreed on a definition of
self-esteem that said:
'I believe what you mean by the
term self-esteem is simply: human nature free
from the self-disesteeming psychological reflexes we learn to modulate our
negative-to-self, feelings and thoughts.
"Negative-to-self feelings and thoughts"
can be accepted as important tools of self-learning by parents
who are trying to learn that fact for themselves.
YES,
negative to self feelings and thoughts are natural - we can't stop having them
any more than we can stop feeling 'ouch' when we stub our toe or skin our
knees. We can't make a child's environment free from the risk of
injury and we certainly can't create environments free from the risk of
negative-to-self experiences. What we can do is:
1)
help people become aware of how critical this kind of learning is and
how they could be more alert and conscious in their relating to children when
they are going through negative-self terrain (wouldn't so abuse them here by
their added shaming) - The greatest benefit of the 'self-esteem movement'
was/is that it raises the 'general consciousness' to a sensitivity level in
this area that it didn't have before and that we need. Such is the stuff
of John's legacy - taking on and bringing to a greater general awareness
needed challenges.
2)
we must help children grow through this great barrier reef by supporting their
inside-out learning within the actual happening of negative to self feelings
and thoughts. To do this parents and teachers need to have an inside-out
orientation inversion - they have to stop thinking they have something to
teach (out here from me/us) that is more important then how the child is
actually participating in their learning (inside-out from within them) - it is
I believe this very point that is the glue that holds together the framework
in which the self-disesteeming assumptions take roots and get so well
reinforced.
I believe so strongly that the child who is
valued, not shamed, from day 1 for his or her (DB red bolded) every
expression of affect,
feeling and thought is the child who takes the "vaccination" of
self-esteem with him/her into relationships with others and into
situations that others may find to be "rejecting."
Its
not just the pervasive lack of being shamed. We will be shamed. We will
experience shame regardless of other's intentions. The question is how will we
learn to participate in our shame so as to not be co-opted by shame - to feel
it and see it and know it without getting lost in or become subject to it?
(same with fear and the other affects)
Granted, that child is not out there in huge
numbers, but they are there, and their very presence may help the world
understand. I am not talking here about over-valuing (over-inflating
their importance and accomplishments) or about "telling" them they
are valued when they feel otherwise. Once shame has begun to pervade
their thought processes and resulting scripts, they need more help than
"telling" can ever accomplish. YES!!
I also believe this kind of nurturing self-esteem is so far
superior to the kind they may work very hard to develop later in life, it is
worth trying to "teach" parents who may not feel that kind
of value within themselves.
Very little extra effort needs to be put into
creating the right learning environment for children with
self-esteem, because they carry that environment within them.
Elaine,
I agree with your main intent here and I don't think in terms of 'children
with self-esteem' - 'self esteem' is not a possession - this I feel is the
trap the movement fell into and what makes it so vulnerable today. Children
don't have self-esteem - children are more healthily who they are when
they are not 'caught' within negative to self feelings and thoughts. As
we can't prevent them from having episodes of negative-to-self feelings and
thoughts the work is to help them learn how to learn through them when they
are happening.
This
is where we must focus much effort - without the right kind of learning
environment we humans are susceptible to developing self-dis-esteeming
assumptions (nuclear scripts). I think we need to develop an explicit
awareness campaign and a working pedagogical scaffolding through which parents
and teachers orient themselves and learn to respond to and resource children
in their learning into shame - we need to explicitly intend to learn to do
this - as a species, as a body politic, as a loving parent or as an ethical
teacher. We can't wait for the adults to change - this is how they will
change.
For those already riddled with shame and doubt, an
environment of trust and acceptance becomes so big an issue, no school, as
presently designed, can begin to furnish it. So where do we start? And
how do we begin to undo the damage that continues to escalate every day
of a child's life?
We
drop the past - the damage done is how they learned to process/manager their
affects - the only way out is through learning when its happening - we need to
create environments that are analogous to 'performance support systems' for
learning-guide-resourcing their participating in negative to self feelings and
thoughts.
I intend to look up the reference to the Rowntree
study, but it's hard for me to even take seriously any study that tells us
"low self-esteem is not a risk factor for
delinquency, violence, drug abuse, alcohol abuse, educational under-attainment
or racism."
RIGHT
ON ENERGETICALLY - I AM WITH YOU and your passion - AND - we must take it very
seriously because what we are really attempting to do here is beyond political
polarity if its understood deeply enough. They aren't necessarily stupid or
uncaring - they are pointing to the holes in how 'self-esteem' is a,
though helpful and relevant at the time, mislabel of what we are really trying
to address: 'healthy inner well being' These anti-self esteem articles have
their ground in the misattributions of what we really meant by
'self-esteem'. They are great learning opportunities if we don't attack or
dismiss them - but come from a place more implicate and communicate back
through them. I believe if we were in a dialogue with the 'other side' our
values systems could come to agreement about our real intention.
Nice
to read you again - I can see that retirement is not diminishing your passion
- thank you for being so alive and caring.
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