Super-Size Me: Shame Part 2

So one question that has always rolled around in my head has been this: how is that people can in be overflowing with confidence bordering on arrogance in one moment and then within just a few seconds swing in the complete opposite direction towards self-hatred and self-despair?

It would seem that the two are related, but I didn't really get the depths of the connection. And then this summer, I read a tremendous book that pulled the two extremes of arrogance and self-hatred together.

The book is called Sin, Pride and Self-Acceptance. I posted on it multiple times over the summer as the book pulled the curtain back on these issues for me. If you're interested, click here and scroll down to the June 20th post and then scroll back up from there.

The author draws on the work of Karen Horney, an early 20th century psychologist. Horney suggests that early on in our lives we experience anxiety on two primary levels: inter-personally and intra-personally, that is, within our own selves about ourselves.

To deal with the intrapersonal anxiety, Horney contends that the way that we cope is by creating in our imaginations our "idealized selves."

The idealized self is an image of ourselves where we take all of our own understandings of our own best qualities and blow those up exponentially. It's us, super-sized and super-human, performing perfectly. Here's how Horney explains this:

"A person builds up an idealized image of himself because he cannot tolerate himself as he actually is.

The image counteracts this calamity; but having placed himself on a pedestal, he can tolerate his real self still less and starts to rage against it, to despise himself and chafe under the yoke of his own unattainable demands upon himself.

He wavers then between self-adoration and self-contempt, between his idealized imgae and his despised image, with no solid middle ground to fall on."

So returning to my battle with shame over the bounced check. If shame is fundamentally working out the equation "I owe me," where is that "me" coming from? Who's telling me that I am "the type of person who doesn't bounce checks?" Where does that idealized image of myself come from?

We've created our own monsters, a super-sized image of ourselves that is impossible to actually live up to and that continuously looms large over us. When we actually "hit the mark" of that supersized person from time to time, it results in pride. When we miss that mark (which is most of the time) the result is shame: I owe me.