A Counseling Center PC

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"Self-esteem is the greatest sickness known to man or woman because it's conditional."--Albert Ellis, Ph.D., one of the most famous and influential psychologist of all time, in Psychology Today, February, 2001, page 72

"When one has an image about oneself one surely is insane, one lives in a world of illusion."--J. Krishnamurti, the most renowned Eastern philosopher of the last millennium, The Flight of the Eagle, page 57

Isn't the thinker just one more thought--one you happen to identify with?

1) Both democracy and Christianity teach equality, but self-esteem teaches being special and superior: terminal uniqueness.

2) Self-esteem teaches respect of persons which is against God's teachings: Romans 2:11, James 2:9.

3) Self-esteem teaches the nonsense that if you quack like a duck then you become a duck. Self-esteem teaches this by teaching that you are your behaviors.

4) With high self-esteem, you think you are superior to others so take advantage of others. For instance, groups that think they are better exploit others: aristocrats, rich, elitists, powerful, privileged, Third Reich.

5) Self-esteem corrupts mental health counseling by focusing on: ego coping, ego strengthening, improving self-esteem, increasing self-righteousness, increasing pride, increasing superiority feelings. For an example of why pride is wrong, see Ecclesiasticus 10:7.

6) Self-esteem is insane because it is not about the self--but is only about behaviors, images, and thought-things (reified thoughts) as if they were the self.

7) Self-esteem leads inexorably to feeling either pride or shame--and not the mental health of self-acceptance and other-acceptance.

8) You cannot be esteem, yet, self-esteem is based on the idiocy of defining you as either positive or negative esteem.

9) Self-esteem claims that you are what you do. But just as the ocean exists independently of (before and after) its changing behaviors of tides, waves, and currents--and therefore can never be its behaviors--so too do you exist independently of (before and after) your changing behaviors and so can never be your behaviors. This makes self-esteem just a mental health delusion.

10) Self-esteem is about becoming self-righteous so is anti-God: Isaiah 64:6, Matthew 9:13, Luke 18:9, Romans 10:3, Philippians 3:9. Self-esteem is based on the delusion that you can make yourself. How soon we forget that only God made us and we cannot make one hair white or black: Matthew 5:36.

11) No self-concept, self-construct, or self-image can be an aggregate of the self. Yet, self-esteem insists that any one of a thousand is your self at any one moment.

12) I am the chooser not the choice. I am the experiencer not the experience. I am the living not the dead: the memory of the done. I am a being not a becoming. I am a being not a seeming. I am a being not a thinking. I am a being not a feeling. I am a being not a doing. I am a being not doings, dones, or bes.