Last night I had a very long conversation with a close friend of mine. We've been living in the same house for several years and I have seen him go through quite a few changes in his way of being. He has made a lot of progress towards improving his life, but most of it has come when he has been pushed to do it by others who are concerned for his well being. Not much has come from any personal motivation that he has had.
When I asked him why this was he said that he has very low motivation due to low self esteem.And that lead to further probing questions about why he had low self esteem. I asked him how long he had been dealing with this issue and the answer was a little surprising for him I think. His general belief structure up until this point had been that his life pretty much started falling apart around ten years ago.
Once he really started thinking about it he realized the self esteem issue started several years before that. See, the image that many people have of my friend is that he is a white trailer trash redneck from Texas. They think he is functionally illiterate and too stupid to ever amount to much.
And while he is white, and he is a redneck the other parts are just ridiculous. Though, when he first came to live with us it was the impression that pretty much everyone got. He was stubborn and argumentative and didn't want to be told anything by anyone. At one point, it seemed like I was the only one holding out any hope of there being something different underneath. I saw what was on the surface, but I've learned that it isn't just beauty that is skin deep.
Almost everyone has a facade that they show the world. It is made up of all the things that they want to be true, all the things that they are afraid are true and all the things that other people have told them are true about themselves. But it's all bullshit. None of it is real.
When we are open and confident and honest with ourselves we know it isn't real and we can function sanely. It's when we start to buy into the facade that we start to implode. And that's what happened to my poor friend.
Circumstance compounded circumstance to create "absolute proof" that a certain lie about my friend was true. And believing that lie was destroying my friend from the inside out. What am I talking about? How about I explain the circumstance and how he got to where he was and you can see for yourself.
At some point while he was in grade school he did badly on some test. Maybe it was early in the morning and he was tired. Maybe it was because he just didn't know the material. Or maybe he just made a lot of careless mistakes. Why it happened doesn't make a lick of difference. What other people made up about it is what ended up causing a problem. See someone said something to the effect of only a stupid person could do that poorly on such an easy test. Maybe it was a parent, maybe a teacher, or maybe one of his fellow students. He does not remember. And again who specifically started the snow ball rolling down hill doesn't matter.
The bottom line is that before this he was a normal everyday kid. He loved life and had no damaging beliefs about himself. However, from this point on things started spiraling out of control. He may have ignored the one person calling him stupid if it had stopped there. But other people started doing it, other kids that did well on the test, or at least better than him. Then it comes time for him to take some other test and he does poorly on that one too. More people make fun of him for it and he starts to feel bad about himself. Maybe he is stupid. A lot of people are starting to say it about him.
He doesn't want it to be true. He is afraid it's true. So he starts looking for evidence to support the theory that he is stupid because he has to know. And lo and behold he finds it everywhere. Plenty of other kids did fine on both tests that he did poorly on and many of them make fun of him for it. His parents start to wonder if he is stupid. More tests come along and because he is starting to buy into the theory that he is stupid, he does poorly on them as well, reinforcing the belief that he is too dumb to learn, further perpetuating the cycle each time adding more and more evidence that what he fears to be true is true.
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