By Dan Prendergast, M.A.
Adults in Haverhill, Massachusetts acted strangely when I was seven. In my little league, every game was rigged so that it ended in a tie. By this I mean that the coaches and umpires rigged outs and innings to spare either side from losing. We were told that we were all special little kids and that we all did a great job. In school we filled out notecards each week that read “(classmate’s name) is someone special because___________.” Each week one child would get notecards from all of their classmates listing reasons why they were special. Through most of my elementary and middle school education I took part in several self-esteem interventions that were meant to decrease the chances of drug use, increase academic performance or lead to several other positive outcomes in the long-term. Looking back, when I did well I was reinforced for my specialness, and when I did poorly I was probably given less negative feedback than was warranted in an effort to preserve my precious self-esteem. When I got older I was told that I could do anything I set my special mind to, and that I should follow my passion and good fortune would certainly come. Adults seemed to think that the most important thing for me to think was that I am special, and that a belief in my specialness would lead to all sorts of good outcomes.
I must admit that it felt awfully good to be told that I was special, but I was a bit of a contrary child and soon started to question what my teachers and coaches were telling me. Could all of my classmates be special? If so, did I live in a special municipality full of special children, and were the kids in other areas unspecial? Would someone always step in to protect my self-esteem and make sure that there was no negative outcome for me, even if my performance was poor? Was I guaranteed to have all of the things that I wanted regardless of what passion I followed, based solely on my status as a special child? Was there one true path to greatness waiting for my special self to discover? Should everyone walk around thinking that they are at their core awesome and wonderful regardless of what they do, avoiding a critical evaluation of behavior to spare self-esteem? As life went on both my peers and myself experienced setbacks and idealized dreams that did not come true – how could these disappointments happen if we were all special people following our special dreams?
I now see the notion of specialness as complete and utter hogwash, because when we believe that we are special we accept the misguided notion that a person’s worth can be rated. If there is are special people there must be unspecial people, but if nobody is unspecial than special is not really all that special. People have different rating systems to decide who is special and who is not, but however they decide to determine specialness they buy into global self-worth ratings based on arbitrary criteria. Some people decide that the special versus unspecial distinction should be based on salary, others decide it should be based on height or the lunchroom table they sit at or career achievement or performance or (in some of history’s ugly chapters) membership in one group or another. When we buy into this idea that specialness and therefore human beings can be rated we get to feel wonderful about ourselves when times are good, which reinforces the philosophy of specialness quite well. The price we pay, however, is that when times are bad we believe that we are unspecial worthless nothings who are knocked off of our high special pedestal to hang around with the unworthy. Despite my brief time on this earth I can guarantee that for the vast majority of us times will be tough at one point or another. In a world where “good kids do good things and bad kids do bad things,” there is superiority and inflated self-worth, but also inferiority and perceived worthlessness, all based on arbitrary criteria.
Why are self-worth ratings rubbish? First, because it is impossible to accurately and objectively rate people because we are too complex. If that is too hard to believe just now, it is at least true that coming up with a yardstick to measure the specialness of all people is so profoundly difficult that it is not practical or feasible. For instance, imagine how hard it might be to construct one scale to objectively rank Bill Gates, Mozart, Gandhi, LeBron James, a cardiologist, your self and your family in terms of human worth. Second, rating worth based on any characteristic (e.g., money in your wallet, friendliness) is logically problematic because people are not literally the thing that you are deciding to use as the measure of worth. Your money is something you have, and your behavior or traits are things that might characterize you, but you are not literally your money, traits or behavior. We can most certainly count your money or evaluate the outcomes of your actions, but deciding that that rating is exactly equal to self-worth is a fiction that makes no logical sense.
So what do we do if the notion of self-esteem and specialness is not helpful? REBT proposes that everyone is an inherently worthwhile and fallible person who has the capacity to do both positive and negative things and have positive and negative experiences. There is no one true path laid out for us just because we are special – just a chance at a good outcome given work and luck. We are more than comfortable judging behavior or life experiences based on a number of ethical, moral, hedonic or other standards, but we do not make the logical leap that these things determine human worth. The same can be said for our wacky human traits (e.g., chronic lateness). From this perspective we can take an honest inventory of our positive and negative attributes without the emotional roller coaster, then play to the positive and improve the negative. The takeaway is that people are not all good or all bad, but are instead inherently worthwhile human beings characterized by a complex combination of positive and negative behaviors, traits and lived experience.
An aside – I probably ended up quitting baseball because the league believed that kids couldn’t take a loss because losing would lower self-esteem, implying that a team’s record determines the human worth of players. They attempted to indoctrinate me into a philosophy where worth was defined by performance in little league baseball, and I’m glad that it didn’t stick. This probably prevented me from becoming invested in the sport, along with the lack of payoff for my efforts (we could never win, regardless of how well we did). I did take to hockey, where I could achieve a goal by developing my skills. Being encouraged to tell my peers that they were all special was also tiring, and might just have led to this blog – I’m afraid that my teacher’s strategy backfired.