Luke Ford

I just had a friend ask me when I’m going to stop self-flaggellating. Hmm, I thought, I don’t think I beat myself down anymore. I feel like I have been largely free of this for five years. I think I like myself. But maybe I’m missing something.

So I looked up emotional self-flaggellation on Google and found this: “In line with the predictions of self-verification theory, which posits that people generally feel more comfortable with the treatment that is familiar and consistent with their self-views, the researchers found that participants with low self-esteem were less motivated to feel good because feeling good was inconsistent with their negative self-views, and because they didn’t feel they deserved to feel good.”

That rocked me back. I’ve often chosen to stay in abusive relationships. I’ve often had abusive bosses. When I’d tell friends about how I was treated, they’d say they wouldn’t put up with that for five minutes, let alone five years like I had done. I struck some friends as the prototypical abused husband who wouldn’t do anything about it beyond cry, moan and journal.

Self-verification theory strikes me as true. We do seek out situations and groups and people who verify our own sense of ourselves. That’s why it is so hard to change. Some of us get addicted to losing. When you hate yourself, as I have for vast sections of my life, you can’t respect those who like you.

I notice that some people are uncomfortable with joy and happiness and prosperity. They don’t feel they deserve good things.

My experience of 12-step recovery is that my self-hatred lurks under the surface and if I don’t keep up with my spiritual program, my negative self-view returns along with feelings of fear, resentment and loathing. Usually I catch it fairly quickly and return to the recovery basics of admitting my powerlessness, believing that there is a power out there who can restore me to sanity, and make a choice to turn my life over to the care of this Higher Power.

From a 2017 academic paper:

* Self-verification theory is based on the premise that people have a powerful desire to confirm and thus stabilize their firmly held self-views. This idea was first articulated by Prescott Lecky (1945) who proposed that chronic self-views give people a strong sense of coherence. For this reason, people are motivated to maintain their self-views. Self-verification theory (Swann 1983) developed Lecky’s idea that stable selfviews organize people’s efforts to maximize coherence. This emphasis on the crucial role of chronic self-views in organizing efforts to attain coherence distinguishes self-verification theory from consistency theories such as cognitive dissonance.

Self-verification involves efforts to bring actual or perceived social reality into harmony with longstanding beliefs about the self rather than maximizing the logical or psychological consistency of relevant cognitions present in the immediate situation.

This desire for stable self-views can be understood by considering how and why people develop self-views in the first place. Theorists have long assumed that people form their selfviews by observing how others treat them (e.g., Mead 1934). People become increasingly certain of these views as they acquire more and more evidence to support them. Once firmly held, selfviews enable people to make predictions about their worlds and guide their behavior, while they maintain a sense of continuity, place, and coherence. In this way, stable self-views not only serve a pragmatic function of stabilizing social relations but also serve an epistemic function of affirming people’s sense that things are as they should be. Indeed, firmly held self-views serve as the centerpiece of an individual’s knowledge system. As such, when people strive for self-verification, the viability of that system hangs in the balance. It is thus unsurprising that by mid-childhood, children begin to display a preference for evaluations that confirm and stabilize their self-views (e.g., Cassidy et al. 2003). Indeed, when adults provide inflated praise to children with low self-esteem, it can backfire by lowering these children’s selfworth in the face of setbacks (Brummelman et al. 2016).

If stable self-views are essential to human functioning, those who are deprived of them should be seriously impaired. Evidence supports this proposition. Consider a case study reported by the neurologist Oliver Sacks (1985). Due to chronic alcohol abuse, patient William Thompson suffered from memory loss so profound that he forgot who he was. Thompson desperately attempted to recover his previous identity. For instance, he sometimes developed hypotheses about who he was and then tested these hypotheses on those who happened to be present. Thompson was doomed to enact such tests repeatedly for the remainder of his life. His case not only shows that stable self-views are essential to psychological well-being, but also that self-views are essential to guiding action. Plagued by a sense of self that kept disappearing, Thompson did not know how to act toward people. In a very real sense, his inability to obtain self-verification deprived him of his capacity to have meaningful interactions with the people around him. No wonder, then, that people enact numerous strategies designed to elicit support for their self-views.

People may use three distinct processes to create self-verifying social worlds. First, people may construct self-verifying “opportunity structures,” i.e., social environments that satisfy their needs. They may, for example, seek and enter relationships in which they are apt to experience confirmation of their self-views (e.g., Swann et al. 1989) and leave relationships in which they fail to receive self-verification (Swann et al. 1994). A second self-verification strategy involves the systematic communication of self-views to others. For example, people may display “identity cues” – highly visible signs and symbols of who they are. Physical appearances are a particularly important type of identity cue. The clothes one wears, for instance, can advertise numerous selfviews, including one’s political leanings, income level, religious convictions, and so on (e.g., Gosling 2008).

People may also communicate their identities to others though their actions. Depressed college students, for example, were more likely to solicit unfavorable feedback from their roommates than were non-depressed students (Swann et al. 1992a). Doing so, moreover, actually elicited negative evaluations. That is, the more unfavorable feedback they solicited in the middle of the semester, the more their roommates derogated them and convinced them to make plans to find another roommate at the end of the semester. And what if people’s efforts to obtain selfverifying evaluations fail? Even then, people may still cling to their self-views through yet another strategy of self-verification – “seeing” nonexistent evidence. Self-views may guide at least three stages of information processing: attention, recall, and interpretation. For example, an investigation of selective attention revealed that participants with positive self-views spent longer examining evaluations they expected to be positive, and people with negative self-views spent longer scrutinizing evaluations they expected to
be negative.