your meaning structure don’t have much influence on the rest of your meaning structure. You mightn’t be greatly concerned about what kind of biscuits you have for morning tea or whether your aunt sent you a Christmas card, although if pressed you would admit that you prefer a crisp biscuit to a gooey chocolate mess or that you do think it important that family members keep in touch.
However, there are two structures in your meaning structure which are central to it and influence every other part.
They are:
1. How you feel about yourself
2. What the top priority is in your life.
I have talked about how we are all born full of unselfconscious self-confidence and how we lose this. We become self-conscious and so acquire a vital part of our meaning structure, namely, ‘How I feel about myself.’
Having a visual image of an idea, even if it bears no relation to reality, can help in understanding that idea. Suppose you imagined your meaning structure to be not you-shaped, coterminous with your skin, but egg-shaped. If you stood it on end and pushed a skewer from top to bottom the passage of the skewer through the egg would mark the central position of the particular meaning structure, ‘How I feel about myself.’ Every other part of your meaning structure is attached to and revolves around this structure.
Now let’s think of this central meaning structure as being a straight line or dimension which measures just how you feel about yourself.
At the top is that blissful state of feeling at home with yourself, not criticizing yourself, feeling that you’ve got everything right and that everyone who matters to you loves you.
At the other end is that most unpleasant state of feeling yourself to be alien and hateful, criticizing yourself for everything you have ever done and ever been, feeling that you have made a mess of everything and that everyone who knows you hates and rejects you.
Daily, how you feel about yourself moves up and down this dimension.
Most days there mightn’t be much movement.
If you’ve retained or recovered some of the self-acceptance with which you were born you stay above the mid-point, but if your cellar is jam-packed full of the darkness which you see as bad, you hover between the mid-point and the depths of self-rejection.
In both cases, there might sometimes be a wild swing to the heights when something has gone extraordinarily right for you, or to the depths when something has gone devastatingly wrong.
Whenever you have to make a decision on any matter, however trivial or important, and whenever you create an interpretation about any matter, how you feel about yourself will play an essential part in that process.
A simple example.
You wake up in the morning and you think, ‘I feel sick.’
What are you going to do about this?
If your feeling about yourself is in the top half of the dimension your thinking will go along the lines of, ‘I’ll take care of myself,’ ‘I’ll stay in bed,’ ‘I won’t go to work today,’ ‘I’ll get the doctor to come and see me.’
If your feeling about yourself is in the bottom half of the dimension your thinking will go along the lines of, ‘I can’t stay in bed. I’ve got work to do,’ ‘I’ve got to go to work or they’ll think I’m slacking,’ ‘I can’t trouble the doctor.’
While you’re lying there making up your mind what to do you switch on the radio and listen to the news. There is the usual litany of tragedies, deaths, destruction and infamy. How you interpret all of this depends on where you are positioned on your ‘How I feel about myself’ dimension.
If your feeling about yourself is in the top half of the dimension you don’t feel threatened personally by such events although you might deplore the stupidity, immorality and greed of the people who brought such events into being. You might even heighten your resolve to improve the world in some way.
If your feeling about yourself is in the bottom half of the dimension you do feel threatened personally by such events. You deplore the stupidity, immorality and greed of the persons who brought these events into being, but all this only supports more strongly your conclusion that the world is a wicked, evil place and that all the future holds for you is despair, doom and disaster.
The better you feel about yourself, the better the world and the future look.
The worse you feel about yourself, the worse the world and the future look.
If you don’t understand how your decisions and your interpretations are influenced by how you feel about yourself, you will, like those people who suffer from the delusion of intellectualization, think that you are making decisions and interpretations on purely objective grounds when in fact you are not.
If you don’t realize that how you feel about yourself is an interpretation and instead think that your feeling of badness and unacceptability is an irrefutable fact of the universe, a part of the natural law, you will always feel trapped and miserable, no matter what good fortune comes your way.
If you do realize that how you feel about yourself is an interpretation you know that when good fortune eludes you or friends betray you or you make mistakes you are free to create whatever interpretation suits you best. Be miserable if you want, or lay the blame on others, feel guilty and vow to improve, enjoy the comfort of self-pity, or tell yourself that things are bound to get better.
You are free to choose.
Choosing to change how you feel about yourself and actually changing can be very easy. It can also be very difficult for three important reasons.
The first reason has to do with our relationships with other people.
Suppose you’re one of those nice, quiet, amenable people who never disagrees with anyone and who always fits in with what other people want. You do this because you think that this is what being a good person means, but as a result other people use you and trample over you. At work you get the jobs no one else wants and at home the family take you for granted. So you decide to change.
You make a very big change. You give up judging yourself on a ‘good/bad’ dimension and choose a ‘making the most of my life’ dimension. From now on all your decisions will be based on what you need to make your life satisfactory. You will still continue to be kind, caring and helpful when you feel it is appropriate but you will no longer be at everyone’s beck and call. You state your needs and where necessary you criticize and argue. You now feel much happier.
Are your friends and family pleased with your change?
Not for a minute.
If you change they have to change. They have to see you differently. They have to behave differently towards you. They don’t mind you being happy but not at their expense.
So they decide to push you right back where you were.
Just how they try to do this can range from violence (‘She answered back so I hit her’) through guilt (‘I never thought I’d see the day when you wouldn’t take care of your mother after all I’ve done for you’) to humiliation (‘You must be crazy’). Any attempt to do anything that you haven’t done regularly before can be met with a hand applied to your forehead with the implication that you must be in delirium to behave in this way.
You have a choice – defend your own interests or be conquered.
The second reason why change can be difficult has to do with secondary gain. You might be suffering but you’re also getting something out of it.
I used to run courses on self-confidence which were attended by business and professional men and women who felt that they were lacking in self-confidence. At the beginning of the course I would ask them to write down their answers to several questions, one of which was, ‘What advantages do you get out of lacking self-confidence?’ There would be protestations that there were no advantages but then everyone would settle