Why Feeling Good About Ourselves is Good for Those Around Us

How do your feelings about yourself affect how you treat others? I think there are two very different views about this, and people can feel quite strongly about it.

Some people assume that feeling good about yourself makes you self-centred and arrogant, and leads to treating other people badly. Others assume that feeling good about yourself makes you less defensive and threatened and leads to treating other people better.

This is an empirical matter, and one that can be settled by psychological research, and I think the answer is very clear: feeling good about yourself leads to treating other people well.

There are many studies showing a positive correlation between self-esteem and helping behaviour (and positive attitudes to other people). But there is now experimental evidence to back this up, in a recent British research summarised in Psychology Today.

Some participants (teenagers) gave themselves mini self-affirmations. They were asked whether they had forgiven someone else, or been concerned about their happiness, etc. If they said ‘Yes’, they were asked to give examples. They were compared with people who were asked neutral questions about the weather, etc.

A month later, the people who had recalled acts of kindness to other people were more likely to have engaged in more such acts. The researchers thought that was because the questions had led to self-affirmations, which in turn had made the teenagers less defensive and more outgoing. That interpretation fits a large body of other research.

I think this has broad social implications. Society seems to be getting more cynical and less inclined to treat each other well.  This is evidenced a lot on social media and especially true of those who feel under threat. For example, it is those who feel most insecure about their own employment or personal circumstances who are most concerned to stop immigrants ‘taking their jobs’. That can lead on to all sorts of hostility.

If society is not to fall apart we need to find ways in which people feel affirmed and supported and supportive rather than threatened. Only then will we be able to feel good about ourselves and treat each other well. 

This article was originally posted on www.frasernwatts.com 

Coming to Terms with Loss

Loss runs through human life, and it is one of the hardest things to cope with. At the very beginning of life there are times when we feel cared for by one or both of our parents, but then they go away and leave us alone. At first we have no understanding of why that happens, and no ability to do anything about it. Bewilderment and helplessness are intertwined with our experience of loss from the outset.

We have to cope with so many losses through life, and they are very varied. People who were important to us move away or lose interest in us; or their circumstances change in some fundamental way, so that they don’t seem the same people who we once depended on. Marriage may give some stability for a time, but partners can change over time, just like anyone else, and eventually they die (unless we die first).

Read the full article on my website.

Darkness and Light are Intertwined Deep Within Us

Many people have mixed feelings about themselves. Of course some people have a very dark view of themselves, especially when they are depressed. Other people think highly of themselves and can’t see anything wrong. But most of us see both good and bad in ourselves; sometimes it is hard to see the connection between the two, hard to understand how the same person could do both good and bad things.

Read the article in full on my blog.