Self Worth versus Self Importance

flashgordonv

flashgordonv

The Living Force
FOTCM Member
I am currently working my way through the above concepts and endeavouring to establish where the difference lies - what is self worth and how does it differ from self importance? I am assuming that the "righteous indignation" I feel when my boss misinterprets something I have done and dumps on me is self importance manifesting. If I have dealt with self-importance in myself, am I right to assume that this reaction will no longer occur? And what about my self worth. If I hold that I am an individual of worth and one who contains all within myself, how doies this manifest differently to self importance.

Apologies but I am struggling to differentiate here and am looking for keys to tell the two things apart.
 
Well, maybe..self worth manifests with rational ACTION, while self importance sparks RE-ACTION.
 
IMO self worth is a psychological reality reflecting inner health, and self-importance is a compensation mechanism for lack of self-worth. The reactions of self-importance stem from being reminded that your worth is very little. Since there is little or no self worth, this reminder affirms one's inner perspective and dissonance is generated. Then to compensate and decrease dissonance one reacts in terms of self-importance, either directly to the event, or in one's life in other ways.

One has to look at this objectively. If one is slapped physically the pain moves one to react, to prevent further slapping, or one turns the other cheek and is slapped repeatedly, especially if the slapper is a psychopath. Being slapped psychologically is no different, and many of us are put into a position where we must endure such pain.

Denying the pain and turning the other cheek psychologically will not make it go away. The world is in turmoil, life is in turmoil and we are challenged to find solutions not just from what we read of see/hear in the media but from the events in our own lives.

So not all responses to psychological attack are indications of self-importance IMO. However, to minimize the tendency to compensate, we must focus on increasing self-worth. Self-worth, to me means how much we value ourselves, which correlates to how much we sustain values in our lives that reflect who we are.

In a world permeated by destructive and counter-creative dynamics, we must find meaning for ourselves and ways to express that meaning. We must learn to define our sense of values independently of how conditioned society tries to define them for us. Thus self-worth is self-generated, and when it is self-generated it is free of the need for compensation as nobody can prove you worthless no matter what they do. You have proven your worth to yourself on your own terms.

This includes claiming as much of your life for yourself as you can, and treating that part as sacred. The rest is the profane aspect of life, which needs to change, but where solutions are not evident for the time being. Working to know yourself and increase your sense of self-worth through that knowledge can activate your inner and outer senses to stay open to opportunities that may assist in changing the outer forms of life.

First, however, the inner forms must change, and this includes response mechanisms that are based on deep conditioned associations. For example, a boss acts out his/her self-importance on you, and you get "infected" and try to compensate. This is not just a conditioned response, because there can also be a psychic energy transfer. Someone slams another, then that person must slam a third, the third goes home and slams a fourth and so on to pass the buck.

The cycle must break at its most conscious link, which is the person making the choice to break it. When there is true self worth, the energy of infection from another person or stimulus event can be allowed to flow in the body, observed and even amplified until it transmutes itself into pure energy without a context of interpretation upon it.

Repressing or pushing aside the energy is not the way to go, IMO, because it just gets embedded in the psyche as more conditioning and held in resentment. One must learn to transmute it, and the first step is to feel deeply into it, to own it and let the body circulate it and the mind divorce from it.

In short one must learn to deal with petty tyrants and petty tyrant oriented events. One actually increases self-worth in doing so. The works of Castaneda have pointers in this direction worth examining, and one can listen to one's own instinctual nature, the intelligence in the body to be guided as to how to channel the energy creatively.

It takes time to get used to this, but if you can, then you are actually empowered more every day and as self worth increases so does the capacity to change life conditions, geared to fuel self-importance.
 
EsoQuest-I am not an expert in psychology or an expert in anything (except perhaps in carrying around an excess of self importance?) lol

But seriously-you need to be on TV-or open your own pratice. You could blow Dr. Phil out of the water! Sure you aren't channeling Gurdjief or some guru?

Your insight is amazing. Lucky we have you posting.
 
Yes, I found your post very useful, as always, EQ, and I appreciate the clarity with which you communicate. This is a skill which I think you have in common with Laura, and of course it stems from the same desire.

I particularly liked you way you expressed:

EsoQuest said:
The cycle must break at its most conscious link, which is the person making the choice to break it.
Click to expand...
 
Hi EsoQuest
appreciate the comments "IMO self worth is a psychological reality reflecting inner health, and self-importance is a compensation mechanism for lack of self-worth." I had not seen it from this perspective, more gtrist for the mill as I keep processing this.

Many thanks
 
Cyre2067 said:
havent heard of those concepts... which book did they project out of?
Click to expand...
The issue of self-importance is brought up a lot in the works of Carlos Castaneda, mainly by his teacher Don Juan. I'll post a few excerpts from The Fire from Within(link)below:

Self-importance is our greatest enemy. Think about it--what weakens us is feeling offended by the deeds and misdeeds of our fellow men. Our self-importance requires that we spend most of our lives offended by someone.

Every effort should be made to eradicate self-importance from the lives of warriors. Without self-importance we are invulnerable.

Self-importance can't be fought with niceties.

Seers are divided into two categories. Those who are willing to exercise self-restraint and can channel their activities toward pragmatic goals, which would benefit other seers and man in general, and those who don't care about self-restraint or about any pragmatic goals. The latter have failed to resolve the problem of self-importance.

Self-importance is not something simple and naive. On the one hand, it is the core of everything that is good in us, and on the other hand, the core of everything that is rotten. To get rid of the self-importance that is rotten requires a masterpiece of strategy.

In order to follow the path of knowledge one has to be very imaginative. In the path of knowledge nothing is as clear as we'd like it to be. Warriors fight self-importance as a matter of strategy, not principle.

Impeccability is nothing else but the proper use of energy. My statements have no inkling of morality. I've saved energy and that makes me impeccable. To understand this, you have to save enough energy yourself.

Warriors take strategic inventories. They list everything they do. Then they decide which of those things can be changed in order to allow themselves a respite, in terms of expending their energy.

The strategic inventory covers only behavioral patterns that are not essential to our survival and well-being.

In the strategic inventories of warriors, self-importance figures as the activity that consumes the greatest amount of energy, hence, their effort to eradicate it.

One of the first concerns of warriors is to free that energy in order to face the unknown with it. The action of rechanneling that energy is impeccability.
...

Warriors prepare themselves to be aware, and full awareness comes to them only when there is no more self-importance left in them. Only when they are nothing do they become everything.

Self-importance is the motivating force for every attack of melancholy. Warriors are entitled to have profound states of sadness, but that sadness is there only to make them laugh.
Click to expand...
This last part reminded me of the C's reminding Laura and others to "sit back and enjoy the show". In my opinion, feeling the need to project our ideas onto others translates to self-importance. Not that one shouldn't say anything, but it's one thing to say what you feel and let that stand, and another to expect others to agree with you.

For a long time I dealt with that righteous attitude. I felt like I knew the right way and anyone not accepting that as truth was wrong and deserved my condemnation. But that attitude achieves very little in results. I learned that thinking people needed to change was more or less judging them as being in the wrong place right now.

And eventually I realized, through the C's, that we all are on different paths and lessons in life. Self-importance can cloud that seemingly obvious truism


Also Cyre, here is the entry in the Cass Glossary for Self-importance: http://glossary.cassiopaea.com/glossary.php?id=669&lsel=S
 
while i agree with your excellent post, EsoQuest, i think that self-importance doesn't necessarily imply the absence of self-worth, it can also be the result of an inflated sense of self-worth! in which case, it is important to remember just how far there still is to go. there's a fine line between confidence and arrogance - that line is humility
 
Jo, EsoQuest is no more. At least here.. If you are interested why and how check this thread:

http://www.cassiopaea.org/forum/index.php?topic=2343

This guy caused one of the biggest shocks and disappointments here on our forum.
 
wow that is a shocker! fortunately i haven't been here long enough to have been roped in or particularly impressed by him, but its a wake up call nonetheless. too easy is it to take all wise words spoken here as truth - a very valuable lesson in vigilance and critical thinking!
 
I like that short description Jo. Of course, self-importance does go a lot deeper than that. But that is on the right track. :)
 
There are some very interesting and I believe pertinent points about self importance expressed in Alice Miller's Drama Of The Gifted Child (DOTGC). She does not use the term self-importance but grandiosity - but I think the essence is the same. Also I think we need to keep in mind that what Miller says is applicable to normal narcissistically wounded people and not the pathological types like psychopaths. What she says agrees quite well with Don Juan's view of self-importance: that it takes a tremendous amount of energy to prop up this false self and how it is the motivating force for attacks of melancholy.

[quote author=DOTGC]
I have witnessed various mixtures and nuances of so-called narcissistic disturbances. For the sake of clarity, I shall describe two extreme forms, of which I consider one to be the reverse of the other - grandiosity and depression. Behind manifest grandiosity there constantly lurks depression, and behind a depressive mood there often hides an unconscious (or conscious but split off ) sense of tragic history.
In fact grandiosity is the defense against depression , and depression is the defense against the deep pain over the loss of the self that results from denial.
[/quote]

Self importance is closely related to seeking admiration from others for one's qualities and achievements.
[quote author=DOTGC]
The person who is grandiose is admired everywhere and needs his admiration; indeed he cannot live without it.
....................
The grandiose person is never really free; first, because he is excessively dependent on admiration from others, and second, because his self-respect is dependent on qualities, functions, and achievements that can suddenly fail.
.....................
.... admiration is not the same thing as love. It is only a substitute gratification of the primary needs for respect, understanding, and being taken seriously - needs that have remained unconscious since early childhood. Often a whole life is devoted to this substitute. As long as the true need is not felt and understood, the struggle for the symbol of love will continue.
[/quote]

Once grandiosity is broken down due withdrawal of external validation, depression makes an entry on the stage. They are described as the two sides of the false personality. But this depression can lead one to heal his wounds as it brings a person closer to the real issue.
Miller suggests that one has to go through a period of mourning in a threapeutic setting in order to heal.
[quote author=DOTGC]
Because grandiosity is the counterpart of depression within the narcissistic disturbance, the achievement of freedom from both forms of disturbance is hardly possible without deeply felt mourning about the situation of the former child.
.......................
Both the depressive and grandiose person completely deny their childhood reality by living as though the availability of parents [who would love them unconditionally for who they are] could still be salvaged: the grandiose person through the illusion of achievement, and the depressive through his constant fear of losing love. Neither can accept the truth that this loss or absence of love has already happened in the past and that no effort whatsoever can change this fact.
........................

This ability to grieve - that is to give up the illusion of his "happy" childhood, to feel and recognize the full extent of the hurt he has endured - can restore the depressive's vitality and creativity and free the grandiose person from the exertions of and dependence on his Sisyphean task.
................................

[/quote]

These dynamics of looking for redressing the past loss of love through surrogate means is visible in the forum as well. The network in general and Laura in particular become the surrogate parent on whom one unconsciously projects the subjective impressions and expectations. I know I have done that - after writing a post I would come back and check how people have responded to it and a positive response would make me feel downright sanctified. On the other hand when a post does not meet the "expected" response, then it would first cause a depressive mood which would sometimes change into an attitude of grandiose defiance and questioning of the competence of the network. I know I have mentally played out this dynamic in the other aspects of life as well. I could recognize this as self-importance and struggled with it and kept it from coming out in the open - at least as far as the forum is concerned - osit. I have also seen this dynamic played out by some other forum members - many of whom left for good. But I did not understand the sequence of this typical pattern till I read Miller. It is really bizarre when one sees it - but such is the nature of the predator's mind I guess.
 
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