"Having contingent self-esteem can feel like Mr. Toad's wild ride - your mood swinging from elation one moment to devastation the next. Let's say you derive your self-worth from doing well at your marketing job. You'll feel like a king when you're named salesperson of the month but a pauper when your monthly sales figures are merely average. Or maybe you tend to base your self-esteem on being liked by others. You'll get an incredible high when you receive a nice compliment but crash in the dust when someone ignores you - or worse - criticizes you."
- Self-Compassion by Kristin Neff
Living wholeheartedly and in wonder of our complexity - our complete humanness - is not just a concept. It requires that we actively fight the temptation to live off or in retention of positive estimations EVERY. SINGLE. DAY. For many of us with BFRBs, our self-worth becomes largely contingent on our skills and performance. And our society, built on capitalism and ideas of meritocracy, reinforces this. It becomes routine to reduce ourselves to one-dimensional evaluations of "good/bad" or "success/failure" re: skin picking, hair pulling, or nail biting, and all across the board. We get feelings of pride, contentment, and security off of being "special" or "better than" others instead of being able to relax into knowing our specialness is innate to being a finite human with everyone else. To "opt out of the self-esteem game," we have to appreciate the breadth of our experiences, the returns of connection, and the sincerity of our needs. Think of how this preoccupation with performance / overreliance on self-esteem applies to your life. Does it exist broadly, or is it circumscribed to your BFRBs? Does it play into your urges to pick/pull/bite? Does it render your mood variable? Does it affect the activities you choose to undertake? Does it make you more inclined to perceive others as friend or foe? Does it ever lead you to any real or lasting satisfaction...?