Women develop inner security

One of the things we know about self-esteem is that we’re not born with it. An infant coming into the world has no past, no experiences in handling himself, no scale on which to judge his own worth. A child must depend on the experiences he has with people around him and the messages those people give him about his worth as a person.

Early on, these messages are usually from important people in his family. As a child grows older and his world becomes larger, those important messages about self-worth also come from friends, peers, teachers, neighbors, etc. Eventually, however, at least in healthy development, a young adult’s self-esteem becomes less dependent upon the messages he receives about himself from other people. He gradually develops more respect for his own convictions and he begins to evaluate his self-worth by his own values and standards. His self-esteem and sense of worth become relatively independent of relationships with others.

For women, the development of self-esteem gets sidetracked before they reach the point of self-worth independent of relationships with others. Research is finding that women often go from depending upon messages about who they are as a person from family, friends, teachers, and others to depending upon those same kinds of messages from their boyfriends or husbands. Still later, many women seek affirmation about who they are from messages from their children. They often continue to depend a great deal on others to make them feel complete. Because of that, they often fear being alone or struggle with feelings of being incomplete when they are alone.

This is not to say relationships aren’t important, or that a woman’s sensitivity and caring for the needs of her family and friends aren’t parts of good emotions functioning. They are. But what sometimes gets lost in the process is a woman coming to grips with who she is as a person – separate form her role as wife, mother, daughter, friend – and how she feels about the person she is.

Women have learned they don’t’ need to rely on anyone outside themselves to feel complete, confident, beautiful, happy, competent and worthwhile. It’s what one author calls developing your own “inner core of security.” With the discovery of their own self-worth, women are finding their lives more fulfilling and more fun than they had imagined.

The social awareness of changes for women is reflected in the fact that women’s complex new lives have inspired fuller, more diverse roles for them, roles that have not weakened the family unit, but have given it a new dimension. Legal gains for women have taken place in areas such as equal pay for equal work, overcoming pregnancy discrimination and credit.

Women need to realize they have the right to discover themselves and to balance the requirements of their family relationships with the inner feelings that tell them who they are.

Harold H. LeCrone, Jr., Ph.D. Copyright 1988