Emotional Reserves
Call it your emotional reserves. Imagine an indicator level on your self-esteem, your dignity meter, your egometer, your self worth gauge. Everyone has one. The needle fluctuates through the day. Get an enthusiastic e-mail from someone you respect, and it goes up. Waste fifteen minutes looking for your lost keys, and it goes down. Take a tease to heart, and it goes down. Make 'em laugh, and it goes up. Little things, big things. Over the day, but over the years too, the readings change. You may deny you've got one, you may ignore it, it may be operating completely in your unconscious, but something in you monitors it.
If your reserves get low, there's a visceral warning, a sense that you can't really take another hit to them. In a fight, the unspoken issue may be simply that one or both of you can't, or won't, take any more disappointment with yourself. No way. You can't afford it.
Below the surface of all exchanges, there are potential threats to our dignity, some of which come at very bad times. There are costs to acknowledging that we're all monitoring our dignity meters, but there are benefits to acknowledging this too.
Self-esteem reserves aren't the only ones. There are optimism reserves too. If you've been through a lot, you can't really afford more dashed expectations, more terrible news, more stories with downer endings.
Reserves are overlooked and yet are often decisive in the choices we make and the fights we fight. Why don't we factor them in more? The short answer is that they're very hard to factor in accurately. The long answer is another story.
in Ambigamy
Psychology Today
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