Author’s Corner

How Does a Good Self-Image Become a Building Block?

It is important to realize that a good self-image does not guarantee morality. It does, however, enable the growth of morality. A good self-image helps a person have the courage to stand up for what he or she believes. At times it even helps a person trust in the enablement of God. If people are too filled with self-doubt, that doubt may keep them from believing in themselves or in God.

For many the counseling office can become a temporary safety zone of growth where they can develop a better sense of self-worth. Psychiatrist Viktor E. Frankl is fond of a Goethe quote: “If we take man as he is, we make him worse; if we take him as he ought to be, we help him become it.”1

Paul Tournier comments: “If one thoughtlessly calls a child a liar, one makes him a liar, in spite of all of his aspirations towards honesty.…Call a child stupid, and you make him stupid, incapable of showing what he has it in him to do.”2 What is true of the child is to some extent true of all of us who are adults.

To take people as they ought to be and can become should be the creed of all counseling and psychotherapy. In that atmosphere of acceptance and confrontation, the counseling office becomes a place that fosters growth and wholeness. It is a place where people assemble the building blocks of self-esteem, the various dimensions of what it means to become whole.

Whether or not a person develops a good self-image can determine the whole course of a life. In describing a desperate period of his life, the late Sammy Davis, Jr., told an interviewer in 1989, “I didn’t like me. So it made all the sense in the world to me at the time that if you don’t like yourself you destroy yourself.”3 After such insight and pain, to me it was a tribute to man’s God-given potential for growth when Jesse Jackson could say at Mr. Davis’s funeral, “He recycled pain into joy.”

Counseling is in the business of recycling lives. In the safety zone of the counseling office, many people truly recycle pain into joy, failure into success, futility into meaning, and sorrow into understanding. The end result is dream blocks that can then be used for building dreams. The raw material of these dream blocks is a good self-image.

Footnotes

  1. Goethe quoted in Viktor E. Frankl et al., Are You Nobody? (Richmond: John Knox Press, 1973), 30.

  2. Paul Tournier, The Meaning of Persons (NewYork: Harper & Row, 1957), 50.

  3. Edward J. Boyer, “Consummate Entertainer Sammy Davis Jr. Dies at 64,” Los Angeles Times, 17 March 1990, p. A28.

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For more of Elizabeth Skoglund’s writing, please visit her Books page or read her online material available on the eBooks and eArticles pages.