Article 2 of a five-part series exploring whole person self-esteem.
Cognitive distortions do not tell the truth. Never have and they never will be. They are just thinking habits that you have developed to distort reality in all different kinds of unreal ways. But boy they sure seem real when you hear them from that voice inside your head.
The inner voice in your head seems to know you so well. Sometimes even better than you know yourself, because it can include subconscious thoughts, comments or voices that you have heard and forgotten, but still resonate at some level. However, that voice doesn’t care about you or reality? It can cheerlead your attempts at the absurdly unrealistic and insult your minimal efforts at the minuscule and mundane.
What your inner voice says to you reveals the judgments, ideas and challenges that you will have to face to improve your self-esteem. Everyone has an inner critical voice that they create, listen to, and use to see and judge their worth, abilities, relationships and place in the world. In a sense, your inner voice is an intimate virtual self-evaluator that lives in your mind. Sort of like your own personal artificial intelligence (AI) that offers insight and advice. The problem is that your AI inner voice can include input from voices that don’t belong, and can inflate or amplify negative voices and devalue, ignore or distort positive ones. Voices from a critical parent. Disapproving teacher. Harsh coach. Inconsiderate friends. Random hurtful comments. Advertising. Marketing. Fashion. Social media. Culture.
Sometimes your AI inner voice even pulls negative info about you from no voices at all, such as poorly fitting clothes that are used to shame you as being too big, small or not normal. Unexpected emotions that are judges as wrong and a weakness. Or a new body odour or other physical feature and your inner voice screams “freak”, “ugly”, or “loser” inside your head.
Those voices in your head impact your self-esteem. But it is confusing. That critical voice is you and also not just you. You are the person listening, but also the one talking. But one often overlooked yet vital aspect is the process used to create and listen to your inner voice. That is your algorithm of self-esteem.
Your level of self-esteem as high or low, healthy or dysfunctional, realistic or distorted, is impacted by your internal algorithm, which is your rules, processes, and tools of how your inner critic is built and maintained to judge and evaluate you. If you suffer or struggle with low self-esteem, your algorithm is highly critical, unfair, unrealistic, and very distorted. The negative algorithm seeks out or even creates negative info to put you down, but to you that process seems normal. Normal and feels bad. But feeling bad is not normal, it is learned. And what is learned can be re-learned and changed.
Changing your rules, processes and tools is hard. Hard because it challenges how you see and define yourself, reality, and life. Yet, if you can’t face it, you can’t see it, name it, tame it, or change it. Hard, but not impossible when you break it down into the smaller building blocks of self-esteem.
Each of your self-esteem building blocks (self-worth, skill-worth, social-worth) is judged. Self-worth is inherent, so low self-esteem requires a distorting inner voice that will deny, ignore, or actively fight against your own worth to denigrate and put you down. In contrast, skill-worth is not inherent but is learned, so low skill-worth requires a judgmental inner voice that distorts reality to create unrealistic expectations, unfair comparisons, imaginary faults, and dysfunctional focus to disregard, invalidate, or downgrade your true abilities and skill competency and mastery. Finally, social-worth is about sharing your life and involves input and connections with others, so low social-worth requires a deceptive inner voice that projects, mind-reads, fantasises, mislabels, and fortune tells to create a sense of public shame, rejection, condemnation, and vilification.
To create low-self-esteem, the distorting/judgmental/deceptive inner critic uses the tools and techniques of cognitive distortions. As stated earlier, cognitive distortions are thinking habits that you use to consistently interpret reality in an unreal way. Unreal because they are based on your subjective beliefs about reality and yourself, not your objective understanding of reality.
If I may digress for a moment, the concept of cognitive distortions began in 1957, when American psychologist Dr. Albert Ellis created what he called the ABC Technique of rational beliefs. The ABC stands for the 1) Activating event, 2) Beliefs that are irrational, and 3) Consequences that come from the belief. Dr. Ellis wanted to prove that an activating event is not what caused the emotional reasoning behaviours or the negative consequences, but rather what did was the distorted beliefs of how the person irrationally perceives the events that essentially create the consequences.
This idea was further expanded when psychiatrist, psychoanalyst, and cognitive therapy scholar Dr Aaron T. Beck started to notice these automatic distorted thought processes when practising psychoanalysis with depressed clients. He realised that his patients had distorted thinking processes which lead to focusing on negative self-talk, catastrophising minor external setbacks, mindreading other’s harmless comments as ill-intended, using emotional reasoning that feelings are facts, and other cognitive distortions.
Building upon those insights, psychologist Eugene Sagan coined the term “the pathological critic” to describe your critical inner voice that encourages you to use cognitive distortions to put yourselves down and reduce your self-esteem.
The 1987 book, Self-Esteem by Matthew McKay and Patrick Fanning expanded the distortion tools of the pathological critic. Dr. McKay and Dr. Fanning identified and defined several types of cognitive distortion, such as overgeneralisation, filtering, black and white thinking, control fallacies, mind reading, or emotional reasoning.
The BCA approach to mental health looked at the self created rules, processes, and tools impacting self-esteem and discovered a second side to cognitive distortions.
On one side, you have the pathological critic as a negative inner voice that judges you harshly and puts you down by using negative cognitive distortions. The pathological critic puts you down.
On the other side, there is the vulnerability guardian which puts reality down. The vulnerability guardian is an all-powerful inner voice that judges and distorts reality to protect you from any discomfort or vulnerability by unconditionally and irrationally supporting everything you do with positive cognitive distortions. The vulnerability guardian allows you to deny your existence, disavow the consequences of your actions, create alternative truths, and avoid self-reflection of any conflicting thoughts or unwanted changes in your life. The vulnerability guardian unconditionally defends you against facing any uncomfortable reality.
The vulnerability guardian’s primary cognitive distortion used to avoid consequences or any real change or growth is the pivot escape. The pivot escape occurs 1) When you realize that your view, information or perspective is inaccurate, incomplete, conflicting, harmful, or that the consequences of your actions are not what you wanted. This conflict with reality or unwanted consequences is confirmed by your feelings of being uncomfortable, confused, or vulnerable. 2) You don’t validate, recognize or acknowledge your feelings, the correct info, the conflicting views, or the unintended consequences and refuse any honest dialogue, discussion, growth, or change. 3) You pivot or jump to another point or issue to maintain your narrative of being right, which is confirmed by you feeling good about your choices or perspective. 4) You ignore, deny or re-write reality or history to what is acceptable to you. You also reject any voice or perspective that diverges from your comfortable, self-defined reality. And often there is 5) your inability to face reality is accepted as normal, and there are no immediate consequences, correction or push-back to your delusional approach to life.
This pivot escape is a repeated short-term cognitive distortion to avoid any discomfort of self-reflection or admit any responsibility or errors in your life. It brings a temporary pleasure from believing you are in complete control and the master of reality. Metaphorically, you are Emperor Nero playing music … as Rome burns. Or just a blameless virtual entity in the real world. Nothing is ever your fault.
The pivot escape doesn’t stop the real consequences that need to be addressed, nor dismiss real accountability, but in the short-term, blame is avoided as no mistakes are claimed to be made. If you watch the news, the pivot escape to avoid validating, facing or dealing with the real issues is currently a common and accepted practice in social media and politics. The denial of reality is especially apparent when “yes or no” questions are answered by avoiding an answer.
When it comes to low self-esteem, the pathological critic and vulnerability guardian use different tools but cling to a common perspective that reality is bad and to be feared. That you are not and never will be good enough. This idea is expressed in the book Self-Esteem, “When self-esteem is low, we are often manipulated by fear. Fear of reality, to which we feel inadequate.” Along with the contrasting perspective, “High self-esteem is intrinsically reality oriented.” Authentically engaging with reality, even when in conflict or disagreement, reveals inner strengths and high self-esteem.
Self-esteem levels are impacted by your internal view of yourself, which impacts how you see the world. In reality, there is always a relationships between you and any problem you face. However, that relationship can seem to change based on how you see yourself. When you struggle with low self-esteem, you see yourself as small and a victim of a problem that suddenly seems bigger. However, when you see yourself as even smaller, you have to present a super self to fight on your behalf and protect you from big problems. And finally, when you see yourself as smaller still, you can’t face any problems at all so you isolate in fear and project a protective self to deny reality and the existence of any problems.
Self-esteem doesn’t change reality. It changes your internal perception of how you see and approach reality. It changes how you see yourself, your skills, abilities, and relationships for how you can manage reality. It impacts your approach to and development of your process of mental health. In short, you could say that low self-esteem changes how you be you, do you and share you.
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Image credit: BKXC
Dane Jorento, MSW, LICSW is a speaker offering keynotes, seminars, and workshops on mental health, trauma, ADHD, and relationships. He specialises in BCA Holistic Therapy, EMDR, and DBT approaches.