Honoring the Self: The Pyschology of Confidence and Respect

In a virtuoso effort to integrate Western and Eastern psychologies, Wilber develops a concept that he describes as “the spectrum of consciousness,” which interprets different schools of psychology and therapy as being applicable to different levels of the evolutionary development of consciousness, with the Eastern vision not contradicting the Weste

In the area of action, there is the man or woman who, impatient with thought and scornful of emotions, runs compulsively from one activity to another, dreading to face the question of what these actions are adding up to, what benefits they bring or fail to bring to his or her life—the person who uses action as a means to avoid facing the meaning an

Apart from the environmental factors we have already discussed, there are at least four factors that can motivate—not necessitate—a person’s default on the responsibility of independence and cognitive self-reliance: Thinking requires mental work. A policy of responsibility toward truth and facts, practiced consistently as a way of life, forbids one

the issue and the challenge in all such situations remain the same. Should one honor one’s inner signals or disown them? Independence versus conformity, self-expression versus self-repudiation, self-assertion versus self-surrender.

I can recall my often acutely painful teenage feelings of loneliness and of longing for someone with whom I could share my thoughts, interests, and feelings. But by then I had accepted the view that loneliness was a weakness, and longing for human intimacy represented a failure of independence. I clung to self-alienation as a virtue. I convinced my

Taking actions contrary to what we believe to be right, we may escape the implications of the actions but not their existence. We are left with self-distrust: the implicit knowledge that mind, judgment, convictions are expendable under emotional pressure.

We can note here the two fallacies already mentioned: the belief that if we accept who and what we are, we must approve of everything about us, and the belief that if we accept who and what we are, we are indifferent to change or improvement.

Many people feel they do not deserve happiness, are not entitled to happiness, have no right to the fulfillment of their emotional needs and wants. Often they feel that if they are happy, either their happiness will be taken away from them, or something terrible will happen to counterbalance it, some unspeakable punishment or tragedy.

A commitment to awareness—the will to understand—is the central pillar of positive self-esteem.

When I began working with the sentence-completion technique, I found the way to demonstrate easily, to myself and my clients, the functional utility of much of their self-condemnation. The essence of the sentence-completion technique is that the client is given a sentence stem by the therapist and asked to keep repeating the stem, adding a differen