I have explained this in other “back at the office” posts but as I have recently expanded the reach my blog has, it bears repeating.
Some of the psychological posts I write are in the form of a conversation I have in my office with a patient. The patient in these stories is not an actual person but a conglomerate of many of my patients. The subject is real, in that it is an actual psychological concept, but it is completely fictional, in that I make all of this up as I type. I know what I want to talk about and to some degree how, but I fabricate all the details, dialogue, and everything about the patient.
That being said I know enough about projection (and have written about it quite a bit) to know that some of you may see yourself in the conversation. That is part of the point in me writing these things this way, and my hope is that if you do struggle with any of the issues I write about by recognizing yourself in the “session” I am writing about maybe you will also take advantage of the information on that issue I provide. Think about it as a free session with a seasoned psychologist.
Can this article help you? I sincerely hope so. Is it about you specifically? No, it is not.
He sat silently in his chair, staring intently into the upper right (from his perspective) corner of my office. He hasbeen coming in treatment for about a year, but very inconsistently. He would go weeks, sometimes months without coming in but then come in for several weeks in a row before disappearing again.
Today makes the first time I have seen this patient in four months.
Inconsistent session attendance is not unusual for patients in this age group, mid-twenties, with abuse orneglect histories. The twenties is a very busy time in most lives for a lot of reasons, not the least of which it is around this time that a person has their second major crisis of identity (the first since forming their first independent or individual identity in adolescence) which begins for most around the midpoint of this decade of life around the time their brain actually finishes major development and adolescence actually ends.
Also not that unusual was his particular stage in life, job transitioning, which is another great reason to deprioritize session attendance.
He got a good job out of high school and thought he had life figured out. Then his girlfriend got pregnant and hegot married. Though getting married is not required for this particular crisis. Essentially he woke up one day andrealized with his current skillset he was making about as much money as he would ever in his current positionand he did not really qualify for much else (at least not in his opinion) however unlike many of my olderpatients in this particular predicament, he decided to go to college. I know this is a big step for him and that hewas struggling with the gravity of the decision he had made and I suspected he had come in to discuss thisissue.
I was wrong.
He started out hesitantly, “You see the thing is,” he paused seemingly embarrassed by what he was about tosay, changed his mind about saying it, then changed his mind again and continued speaking, “I don’t knowhow to like say this right, but the thing is I don’t like myself very much because I don’t have very much confidence and I want to change that but,” he seemed to be teetering back toward changing the subject again,”I don’t know Doc. I’m probably saying this all wrong.”
He stared toward the upper right corner of the room again and an embarrassed smile would occasionallybroaden across his face then quickly be replaced by a frown only for the smile to come back. He silently staredwith his emotional conflict playing out across his face as he considered what he wanted to say and how it was”supposed” to be said.
I waited in silence. I desperately wanted to encourage him to speak, to tell him he was safe and that I wasn’tgoing to judge him or ridicule him for whatever he was about to say, but I sat in silence and waited. Often timesthe most useful part of psychotherapy is the therapist’s silence which allows the patient to wrestle with and overcome their emotions. Often this is the most difficult part as well.
It seemed like a long time before he spoke again.
“What I want to know is how do I improve that, my confidence, my, I don’t know,” he threatened to stop speakingagain but this time only for a brief moment before the urgency of his question overcame his embarrassment ofneeding to ask this question, “but how do I like myself, you know raise my self confidence or whatever andbalance it out right? You know what I mean? Oh I’m not making any sense, am I?”
He stopped speaking but this time he made eye contact with me and something in his eyes looked to me like aplea for help. So I threw him a floatie.
“I think you are making a great deal of sense” I started but not wanting to say too much I paused to see if hewould start speaking again and when he didn’t I continued, “why don’t you tell me what you mean by’balanced?’”
“You know like some people you see them and you can just tell they know what they are about and what theyare doing but they are, I don’t know, cool about it and then you see some other people and they maybe areconfident too but they are just like, eh, I don’ t think I am saying this right, they just are too pushy about it. Howdo I become more confident but not turn into like a total dick about it?”
What a wonderful question.
What this patient, and so many of my younger patients, but also a surprising number of my older patients aswell, was worried about was becoming a person he didn’t like and he was afraid that he would in some way be required to become this person if he became more confident in himself and his abilities. This concern stems from the quality of examples, that is the role models, a person has grown up with. If those people where healthy in their development they would provide a person unsure of him or herself a beacon to guide their own development toward, but if they were a toxic example they become a warning of what they could become if a person changes at all.
The problem with being afraid of what you may become is that everyone has aspects of themselves which they don’t like and want to improve upon, but that can set up a person for an internal conflict–how can I improve theparts of me that need to be improved without breaking or losing the parts of me that I don’t want to change?
I think that is a question all people have to wrestle with as a part of the Identity Formation process, maybe it isan integral part of that process. In a perfect world as a person goes through the adolescence process,experimenting with different identities as they build their first independent or individual identity, their parents, teachers, and family members would be accepting of every change and not just supporting but loving theperson as they go through this very difficult process. this love and support would foster the growth ofconfidence in the adolescent and becomes the basis of their self-esteem and confidence (which are two of thecomponents of self-perception).
Unfortunately we don’t live in a perfect world and most people go through adolescence feeling some degree ofjudgement and condemnation as they try to build their first identity. This doesn’t mean most people are abused, though that is an extreme form of this issue (and maybe depends on how you define the word abuse) but if a person does not feel accepted by their family of origin, their parents, their siblings, then what can happen is instead of developing a sense of purpose or confidence in developing one’s identity a sense of hesitation or even fear can develop. A core belief can grow that says if a person does not do or become what others want then they may be rejected because the pain of that rejection when mom or dad told the teenager to get a haircut or quit being so lazy all the time, or asked ‘why can’t you do anything right,’ or ‘be like your brother/sister,’ still burns brightly inside of them.
Some people, like my patient, went through an extraordinary amount of judgement and pain in adolescence and didn’t have a masculine role model to base his identity off of. He grew up without a father, his mother hada stream of abusive boyfriends which were augmented by uncles and a grandfather who were also less than ideal role models. The one thing all these men had in common was they told my patient from a young age heneeded to become more confident in himself “like me.” That and they would physically abuse him, horrifically, when he committed even the most slight or imaginary sin in the family.
The last thing on this earth my patient wanted to do was emulate one of the people who abused him as a child,even if that meant he had to remain not confident (which he did not appear to be) and resulted in him notliking himself very much. That dislike of himself was likely a result of how he was abused and the way he reacted to it as a child, which sadly is to blame himself for his treatment. As unjust as it sounds children, especially young ones, believe that everything happening to them or around them is because of some thing they did or in extreme cases such as abuse, who they are. That is what is meant by ‘egocentric world view’ which all children have.
Confidence is at its core a simple concept. It is the knowledge that a person has in him or herself to complete atask with some degree of accuracy.
That is the knowledge that a person has in their ability to do something, hit a baseball, drive a car, type a blogpost, and have the result of that effort come close to the imagined outcome. A confident person knows thatthey know how to complete a task.
Not all tasks are things, for example being confident in a subject would mean a person can trust their ability to discuss that subject with another person for example, but maybe it is easier to conceptualize if we stick with doing of things.
A confident auto mechanic trusts his or her knowledge of how a car or other vehicle works to be able to figureout why yours doesn’t and then make the necessary repairs to bring your currently nonoperational vehicleback into the sphere of operation.
More than that confidence is also a person’s knowledge that there are things they do not know. Confidenceactually builds or grows with the acquisition of knowledge about what a person does not know much faster than by acquiring knowledge alone.
Socrates was once referred to as the wisest man alive because when a queen (I forget who) asked him whathe thinks he knows he replied, “I only know that I do not know anything.”
My first sales manager used to say there was three stages of confidence: Unconsciously incompetent, consciously incompetent, and consciously competent.
Using words Socrates may not have used, a person begins completely unaware that there are things that theydo not know, moves into a space where they become aware there are things they do not know, and comes torest in a place where they know things. This is how confidence and knowledge acquisition fundamentallyworks. Each time a person moves through these three stages they become more confident.
The second stage literally means a person learns some of the things they do not know.
The more you know as well as the more things you learn about a subject that you do not currently know, themore realistic your appraisal of yourself becomes. As you continue to acquire new knowledge and skills, andthe more you practice using that knowledge and those skills, the better you will be in the application of thoseskills, and that dear readers is all confidence really is–the outcome of knowledge or skills acquired andpracticed.
Going back to our auto mechanic example. A good auto mechanic knows how a car works and can make the necessary repairs to fix a car that does not work. These are the things they know. When you bring your car to this person and tell them the car makes a “burr-wrr-wrr clunky type of noise” and you want you car to stop doing that the mechanic now knows two things: you car makes a funny noise and cars are not supposed to make funny noises. He does not know why your car is making that noise yet, which is something he knows that he does not know.
If a person has knowledge about themself and practices using that knowledge they will develop and growconfidence in themself and their abilities. That is to say that person will develop self confidence.
That is the first part of my patient’s question. The second part, that is not becoming a total jerk about it is also afairly simple concept and one I believe Master Miyagi in the first Karate Kid film explain quite well, “There isalways someone who knows more than you do.”
or something like that anyway.
You are not the best at anything you do, and by the same token you are not the worst. These two positionsindicate perfection which is simply not possible. You can’t be the best and you can’t be the worst because thatwould require you to be in a position of perfection which cannot exist.
You know more than some, maybe you know more than most, but you cannot know more than everyone forever which is what it would take to be the best.
Is that making sense?
You are in the middle somewhere between best and worst at everything you do and all that you know.Remembering that is what humility is. One of the keys to not becoming a person with an overinflated sense of confidence, or as my patient stated so eloquently, a narcissistic dick, is to remain humble. I think humility, or a healthy perspective, is paramount to not becoming overly inflated in the confidence arena but not playing in the realm of narcissism requires a bit more.
A narcissistic jerk is a person who not only is overly confident in their abilities but also approaches anotherperson or situation from a position of superiority. Some part of them, maybe all parts of them, exude “I ambetter than you” in any or all situations and this literally drives people way. Psychologically speaking this sort ofperson and his or her overly inflated ego can take up so much space in the environment that it either pushesother people away or suffocates them in place. This is the type of person my patient, and hopefully you, doesnot want to become.
If you are accepting of your place, that is being in the middle somewhere, and you approach every person andsituation from that position you will remain humble (or perhaps realistic) in your abilities and by default cannotbecome a narcissistic jerk. Maybe you will learn something from this person, or maybe you could teach them something, the only way you will know is if you approach the meeting with a degree of openness.
I explained all of this to my patient and then was compelled at the end of session to add just one more thing.
“I don’t think you have anything to worry about in that regard.”
He looked confused, maybe scared/relieved so I continued, “a narcissistic jerk would never ask if he wasbecoming or was a narcissistic jerk. he would just assume the people fleeing from him couldn’t keep up or weretoo intimidated by his greatness. Only a humble man would ask how to improve himself without losing himself,as you did today. So no I don’t think you have much to worry about in regard to becoming a narcissistic jerk.”
He looked very relieved at this point which felt good but I knew my job wasn’t done yet.
Holding up my finger in warning I said, “so long as you don’t lose sight of your place in the middle and never stop asking yourself if you are losing yourself in your quest for confidence.”