Free Self-Esteem by Preston David Bailey Page B

know what to say. “I guess I forgot.”
    Peters pointed to the sky and told Crawford to look at it. Crawford looked, but could only see the haze of light. “Many of the great philosophers have said that you look up at the stars and you realize what trivial little problems we humans are down here.”
    “You mean have ,” Crawford said.
    “Yeah, sure. Whatever.” Either Peters had lost his momentum or he was being rude. “The stars always tell us something, don’t they?”
    “The problem is,” Crawford said, “you can’t see the stars here. See?” he said, pointing to the sky.
    “Maybe that’s it.” Peters said, shelving the subject. “By the way, you might not want to teach, but how about being on a board of advisors I’m putting together for the fall semester? Might look good on your resume.”
    “What would I have to do?”
    “Almost nothing. Give your opinion.”
    “Oh, I get paid big bucks for that, you know,” Crawford said as he looked up at the sky.
    “Uh huh,” Peters grunted with an almost cynical grin that Crawford didn’t notice. “Think about it.”
    They sat in silence just looking at the sky.
    “Sorry, think about what?” Crawford said.
    On the way home, Crawford avoided conversation, feeling afraid he might say something to Dorothy he would regret. Thoughts of Jenny were creeping into his mind. His one-word answers to Dorothy’s questions were not anger this time but self-loathing. The revived affair had been going on for several weeks, and even though he felt the urge, Crawford could only maintain what little order he had in his life if he put off a confession to Dorothy another day. One day at a time.
    As they were pulling into the driveway, Dorothy tried to get a complete sentence out of her husband. “So what did you and Phil talk about?”
    “Not much. You know Phil, nonchalant as always.”
    Peters was an anchor that brought back Crawford’s respect for psychology’s highest goals. Whenever he was around Peters, he realized there was in fact much to learn about human behavior from serious study, and that perhaps this study could improve people’s lives. Peters brought to mind Freud, Jung, Skinner, Maslow, Eysenck and Szasz — all of whom still meant something to Crawford. They were the originators, the men with the ideas, the framers of the Constitution of the mind. But Crawford hadn’t come up with a unique concept since completing his master’s thesis. After that, it was one rehash after another. Even the quotations cited in his books — from Plato to Shakespeare to Dickens to Mark Twain to Bob Dylan — were all straight out of Bartlett’s Quotations , nearly all of them sprinkled in without much understanding of the original context of the quote, or for that matter, the significance of the quote to his own work. It didn’t matter. His followers loved it, and for a short time he felt like an originator himself.
    But wait! Crawford had come up with one concept since that terrible thesis paper, one that he presented in his first book, Self-Confidence . It even caused some discussion — not much, but some — in the halls of psychology. It was his Child-Adult-Self Theory .
    There had been the Inner Child Concept (or ICC), the contemporary version accredited to the likes of John Crenshaw, “America’s foremost personality development expert” (as he proclaimed himself). Crenshaw’s theory states that the key to discovering “the true self” is to discover the “inner child” of which you must become your own parent.
    Become your own parent?

    Crenshaw and others like him declared that only by confronting the indignity of one’s upbringing could an individual finally purge the cruel and authoritarian system of parenting that damages the child and creates a repressed adult, destroying the “true” self, which never had a chance to exist.
    Huh?

    Simply put, people need to get in touch with themselves as children — love that child, nurture it — so they