By Peg O Connor
We tend to shrink ourselves and our world when we lack self-respect.
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- Active in our addictions, we shrink ourselves so that we and our use may go unnoticed.
- We may believe that we do not deserve to take up space in the world, which is a deficit of self-respect.
- Self-respect is an achievement of moral development that depends on love, care, and support.
- Addictions can cause us to lose self-respect. Does a deficit of self-respect contribute to addiction?
Active in our addictions, our worlds often shrink. We prune people from our lives who question our use. We remove ourselves from events and activities that once brought us joy. We become less willing to do or try new things. Where before possibilities had seemed like opportunities, now they just feel daunting and even threatening.
We make ourselves smaller. We start to take up less space in our own lives. As someone once said, I felt like a mouse running around the trim board of my own life. Our making ourselves smaller goes hand in hand with our social and physical worlds contracting; they aid and abet each other.
Why do we skitter around the margins of our own lives?
Some of us want to go unnoticed. We may tell ourselves, better to stay off the radar screen than have people judging us. We may take our not being noticed as evidence that we aren’t doing so badly.
If people do notice us and our use, we may automatically assume that they are judging us in the same harsh ways that we judge ourselves. Of course, there are plenty of instances when this is true. We cannot even imagine that they are standing by us and offering their support because, well, we don’t deserve it.
Others of us believe that we do not deserve to take up space in anyone’s life, including our own. This is especially true for people who lack self-respect.
Self-respect
Self-respect is an achievement within moral development; it is a lived conviction that a person has intrinsic worth and dignity. It is a basic sense that “I matter.” Self-respect is created against a background of care, love, and security. A person develops self-respect through having the opportunities to engage with others. Self-respect is not innate.
A person with self-respect understands that she deserves to be treated respectfully by others because she has the same moral worth as everyone else. She also understands that she needs to treat herself in ways that recognize and preserve her dignity and autonomy.
Self-respect is what enables a person to judge that she is measuring up not just to others but to her own standards. When a person with self-respect recognizes that she is not meeting her own measure, she may change her actions so that she preserves her self-respect.
Self-respect and addiction
Self-respect is easily lost in addiction. There are many cases where a person has had self-respect but has lost it, often through their own actions. Someone who has had a good, meaningful, and happy life may lose respect for himself when he develops an addiction later in life and begins to act in ways that are out of character.
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We may start trading away our values and commitments. We may do things that cut against our grain. Instead of seeing ourselves as having dignity and worth, we come to see ourselves as insignificant and worthless. We start to treat ourselves this way.
The more we feel worthless, the more we contract into ourselves. In the worst throes of addiction, the world is reduced to us and our substances and behaviors. Our minds and the entire world may seem like a hellscape.
Some people have only ever had a very small degree of self-respect because they never had the opportunity to develop the skills and arts that underpin self-respect. Where love, care, and security are missing, it becomes far more difficult for a child to develop the arts and skills that are necessary to create, reinforce, and cherish self-respect.
Children who have been traumatized may have had many of the opportunities necessary to develop self-respect foreclosed. A child who has never been treated with love and respect or treated in ways that twine abuse with love will not have the opportunities to learn how to create, act on, and protect their self-respect. They have not been treated respectfully by others, so it is challenging to learn how to treat themselves and have a clear sense of what they rightly deserve.
Traumatized children, and later adolescents and adults, are more likely to develop an addiction than children who have not been traumatized.
While a loss of self-respect is a consequence of addiction, I believe a lack of self-respect is also a driving force of addiction. People who have experienced childhood trauma and haven’t been able to practice self-respect have already known a world of pain, insecurity, and uncertainty. They may already have a sense of just how unfair the world is along with a fatalism about their place in it. They understand what it is like to have few good opportunities available to them. They see others around them suffering and can’t even imagine their lives going differently.
When a person believes she has no value and that people like her deserve no better, the allure of addictive substances and behaviors may seem great. She may know that her world is full of pain and suffering; shrinking that world and finding some relief from the suffering makes sense.
Those addictive substances and behaviors can also ignite a sense of being alive, having fun, and making connections to others, all of which childhood trauma hinders. The addictive substances and behaviors most often bring us something we want or need in the beginning. Their bill comes due at some point, putting whatever shards of self-respect a person has at risk.
In recovery, we begin to gain or regain self-respect, which is crucial to flourishing.
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