The Foundation of Self-Confidence
In nature, something can only give what it has received. This general principle about life holds in a special way in the personal growth of an infant. At birth he is hardly more than a bundle of potentialities, wholly dependent upon the environment to influence his development.
The ministers of the infant’s environment are the parents. The infant himself is utterly incapable of adequately satisfying his basic human needs, physically and emotionally he must receive from others. His tiny being is simply too frail to dominate the environment in a determinable way. Psychologically, infancy may be referred to as a phase of passive dependency.
Because of his body, the infant possesses an emotional life: he can feel pleasure and pain. Quickly he relates himself to objects that soothe or offend his feelings, and comes to identify, very early, the principal minister of his environment, the source of his feelings of well-being, mother. Mother brought him into the world and mother especially continues to lead him into the world during the phase of infancy. The role of the father is, of course, indispensable, but his preponderance intervenes later in the infant’s growth.
To evolve a human being through infancy, childhood, adolescence and, finally, into adulthood requires and demands herculean efforts on the part of the parents. For some it is an unendurable labor. For others it is a labor of love, a love that is a preservation of the child’s life and growth, an attitude which instills in the infant a love for living.
Motherly love, outside the special elements that surround the intimate, spontaneous, natural relationships between mother and child, is quite similar in substance to the love she manifests as an adult. Love yearns to communicate itself to the beloved. The mature lover is one who experiences himself as one who can confer of his self to others. In loving, you express to another all that is alive in you, so that in sharing yourself the other person becomes that much richer. Love is a quality gently imposed on another, whereby the receiver, in response, becomes a giver:
To love means to commit oneself without guarantee, to give oneself completely in the hope that our love will produce love in the loved person.[1]
Ultimately, you can’t love this other, this person, unless you yourself are fundamentally person. Your love comes from the condition of inner freedom and independence, there being no starved compulsion to appease or become so wrapped up in the beloved that I ignore my own identity. To love another, as other, is possible only when I can transcend my will-to-pleasure on self-aggrandizement in order to see the other in terms of himself. In yielding to the other’s identity, mature love accomplishes, paradoxically, a true union, yet under the condition of mutually preserving and fostering the other’s integrity, the other’s individuality. Finally, we observe in adults that:
The ability to love as an act of giving depends on the character development of the person.[2] What matters in relation to love is the faith in one’s own love; in its ability to produce love in others, and in its reliability…[3] It presupposes the attainment of a predominately productive orientation…has acquired faith in his own human powers, courage to rely on his powers in the attainment of his goals.[4]
Alongside of the child’s physical requirements, the basic nutrient necessary to promote a salutary development of his person is love. To love the infant, to affirm his being as a distinct individual, though within responsible care, this affirmation must be sustained with all the seriousness that parents would lavish upon their own preservation and growth. Ordinarily, supplying bodily needs for physical growth are easily met. But on the psychological level, the realm of intangible needs, even more discernment and care are required. For any unattended privation here may result in arrested development. Life is sufficient struggle without having to cope with it in a debilitated condition. From the very beginning the pathway to reality ought to be paved with love-that protective, enveloping presence which softens the starkness of reality, and gently, assuringly, moves the child forward discovering himself and the world about him.
Love is the indispensable and irreplaceable medium, needed by the human being if he is to attain to full participation in life, the one and only medium that enables him to be at home in the world, despite its sinister depths, and allows him to develop the core of confidence which is always, at one and the same time, self-confidence and confidence in the world.[5]
The prime object of infancy is to nourish within the infant an unfaltering sense of security, indispensable to venture forth and keep pace with life’s currents. Love not only provides security but even banishes exaggerated fears. Those imminent fears that can exert a retarding havoc upon the personality of the growing infant are especially found in the area of self-preservation: fear on the level of bodily survival and fear for the lack of his psychological nourishment-love.
If the child receives too little love, it misses the warmth and security it so greatly needs and grows up lacking in self-confidence and in the courage to face life.[6]
Obviously, the greatest and most damaging blow to his tiny sensitive ego is to be rejected, denied love and support from the mother of whom he is a part.[7] Positively, emotional security is an internal response, which stabilizes as the child sees and senses that he is wanted and being cared for. This security s bred from the external manifestations of the parents’ sensible affection for him, and through these outward signs the child perceives the genuine moral support behind them. This unconditional love for the child, however, must also be unremitting because: children are pitifully weak and insecure. The more they can identify with, become a part of their parents, the more they borrow from them much-needed emotional strength.[8]
Love has always been characterized by a melting heart, a pouring forth. The “heat” love can really warm those it touches; that is why we say that love is creative. St. John (1.4:19) spoke this in its ultimate context: “therefore love God, because He first loved you.” Divine love is a mystery, but what divine love is to people in the spiritual sphere, parental love is to the child in the psychological sphere. In fact, the parents’ love can be the sign of divine love for the child.
What is seldom pointed out is that at the basis of everything we do is an implicit self-love. Psychologically it can’t be otherwise. A proper self-love is even necessary to love others, including God. Freud may have thought that self-love was selfishness, a kind of morbid narcissism, but what he did not see is that unless I love myself, I cannot love others-because I do not think I am worthy enough to give myself to them. Experience often corroborates that when someone is insecure in himself, and therefore, overly concerned with his own ego and its protection, he cannot venture forth with mature love for others.
Self-love, then, is the springboard for self-confidence. Without the abiding love of the parents, the child’s self-love will seldom be properly generated. Unless the child sees that he is loved day in and day out, he will with difficulty come to understand that he is worth something. Before the child can go out to others joyfully and to reality under his own power, he must first be loved, for this gift supplies the matrix of his self-concept-the abundance or poverty therein becoming the justification for the depth of his self-love.
The experiences of the elemental love coming from the parents normally enables him to answer by himself giving love. Free from anxiety about himself he is ready to make the venture.[9]
With love instilled, the child believes in himself. Belief in oneself is the very definition of confidence. Now he can risk loving life. However, these tiny creatures are still too impoverished to go very far on their own. Self-confidence will fade unless the child receives the encouraging support of the parents. This expectation of support is the very definition of hope. Even scripture refers to hope as “the firm anchor of the soul.”
Love encourages the child to advancement into life, and advancement for the child is paved with hopeful desires. The parents’ love breeds concurrently hope and self-confidence or magnanimity in the child. Without love, there is no hope, without hope advancement will wane. Unless the child draws upon hope, that inspiring expectation that his loved ones will assist him, his magnanimous desires to move with life will falter, for he cannot long desire or love something when he loses hope of attaining it.
For the child the awesomeness of the immediate environment, his first and daily steps into the world, can become a frightful experience. The strange, the unknown, produces fear and fear makes one shrink from its cause. With the abiding care and gentle encouragement of the parents, however, the child’s initial fears can abate and be supplanted by the hope and magnanimity to cope with life’s adventures.
This confidence is the dynamic function of our life, possessing the inner power to transcend, to thrust ahead despite obstacles, and t break new ground all along the line of human life.[10]
Although nature implants a strong urge of curiosity in the child to help combat the psychological defensiveness in the face of the new world, still the gentle, directed bolstering by the parents must supplement nature by continually feeding the child’s emotion of hope, if he is expected eventually to cope with the unknown on his own two feet. Otherwise, with self-doubt plaguing him, the newness of life will loom too foreboding.
Anything new does not signify a tempting suggestion to venture forth, to struggle against difficulties, and finally enjoy victory, as it should do for a healthy child; it is felt as a threat, releasing a rigid, fearful reaction, driving the child back into some system of defense.[11]
The challenging environment may be met with the tendency to flee and take refuge in the infantile past-his world the familiar surroundings which nature is encouraging him to outgrow. Keeping up with the demands of reality is impossible for an insecure child, and thus he will retreat to former behavior patterns tinged with fantasies-at least there he felt a minimum of protection from the harshness of the world. Now, while the bodily growth continues, the emotional development starts to lag.
With the parents accepting their challenging roles, the child can face the future realistically. Their gentle, fostering anticipations of his future gives rise in himself the faith and hope to discover his talents and the engaging world. His potentialities are actuated through love. He learns to value himself by witnessing his parents honoring him by their love. With confidence in his own value, he has the staying power to take up the adventure of life and later see it through to his destiny.
[1] E.Fromm, The Art of Loving, p,127-8.
[2] Ibid, p.25.
[3] Ibid, p.124.
[4] Ibid, p.25.
[5] R. Herzog-Durst, Conquest of Anxiety,p.2.
[6] B.F. VonGagern, Difficulties in Married Life, p.199.
[7] E. Strecker, Their Mother’s Sons, p.41.
[8] E. Strecker, Basic Psychiatry, p. 388.
[9] B.F. VonGagern, op.cit., p.48.
[10] Herzog-Durst, op.cit, p. 16.
[11] Ibid, p.23.
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