Memories of Self-esteem, Compartmentalization and Relationships

Sometimes I find it funny and a little baffling what we remember of our earlier life... and what we have completely forgotten.

Is there rhyme and reason to it?

Yes, I went through therapy a number of times.

Not because anybody told me to or because a doctor referred me to, but because I recognized that something about my life was sincerely screwed up and I needed to figure out how to unscrew it.

My first therapy "season" — in my twenties — gave me just enough information to start getting seriously involved in self-development and self-improvement.

I ended up quitting the therapy, not because I thought I had learned everything, but because I decided I would do better learning on my own at my own pace, and my relationship with my therapist had gone off in a strange direction where she was both my therapist, while I was teaching her how to use computers at the same time, as my client.

Yes, there are all kinds of rules and regulations concerning the relationship between client and therapist, including "getting too personal" and such, but they don't actually cover the unlikely situation in which I work for you and you work for me.

It wasn't that I was in any way attracted to Jonelle — quite the opposite. That said, some of the things we had been working on started rearing their ugly heads when our client/therapist relationship seemed to slowly — and rather seamlessly — transition to something that resembled coworkers and almost friends.

My first therapist had actually been a man, but he soon revealed himself to be an arrogant sexist prick and it didn't take me very long to intuit that he was covertly disappointed that I wasn't an attractive young woman. So I said goodbye after a couple of sessions and Jolene was one of the three referrals he gave me when I left.

All in all, I was probably a therapist's nightmare because I came to the sessions with a keen interest in psychology, having taken many psychology classes at University, and having been a dedicated student of human behavior since my teens — both out of curiosity, as well as a survival technique — and so I wouldn't necessarily just take everything that was served up to me without testing and questioning it.

Jolene and I had our fair share of what you might call "intense discussions," particularly about the subject of self-esteem.

Self-esteem is a slippery beast and in its broadest sense — and how most people evaluate it — it is something an entire person has some of, a little of, a lot of, and so on and so forth.

The wrinkle I brought to the equation (that seemed to confuse and confound) was the fact that I had very solid self-esteem when it came to believing in my intelligence, and believing in my abilities to problem solve, and believing in my ability to get along with people, and my ability to be a good worker and employee... and then, as soon as I would get in the company of a woman in a dating context, I suddenly went to a sense of anything beyond "has a pulse" constituting "punching upwards" beyond my reach.

It was a bit baffling to many including many of my friends who couldn't understand why I invariably seemed to only date or have relationships with singularly unattractive and needy train wrecks. As I said, self-esteem is a slippery beast.

It was many years later, during my second therapy "season" that my subsequent therapist and I got on the topic of compartmentalized self-esteem... that is, a person being "a different person" in different scenarios. Self-esteem as situational, rather than a single "thing" that attaches to a person in an overall sense.

Life is not without irony. As I progressed though life, my good self-esteem in work contexts and my lousy self-esteem in relationship scenarios ended up swapping places.

Thanks for stopping by and have a great Friday!

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Created at 2024-04-05 01:32 PDT
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