Breaking Promises to Ourselves: The Psychological Damage

When most people think about breaking promises, what comes first to mind is not following through with something they have promised to someone else. Disappointing another person...letting them down. The consequence is, often, that the continuing relationship between the promiser and promisee is compromised and forever changed.

There is another type of promise that can be unfulfilled. These would be promises a person makes not to another but to themselves and then fails to perform on. There are consequences parallel to the promises we break with others. We come to trust ourselves less, to have less faith in ourselves - In fact, to be diminished as credible beings in our own eyes.

When we fail ourselves by not fulfilling our promises that we have made, inevitably, our sense of our own value is diminished. In the language of the trade, that means lowered self-esteem. Lowered self-esteem leads to increasing poor judgment and not uncommonly to depression. All things worth avoiding and all things that can be reduced by being 'promise keepers' to ourselves.

As the New Year gets under way, there is a lot of talk about "New Year's Resolutions." This tradition of making promises to ourselves, usually about things that we have not done that we feel we need to or about things that we are doing that we feel we need to alter or stop, has been around for a long time. It will not surprise many people to find out that most such 'resolutions' go unfilled.

Promises we make to ourselves go on all the time, not just at New Years. We tell ourselves that we will do something different. We make ourselves a promise. We fully intend to fulfill it when we make it, but change is always easier to accomplish than it is to talk or write about.

Change is hard work and, depending on what the goal of the change is, can put people in the position of committing 'unnatural acts' in order to achieve success. Doing what does not come naturally is exceedingly hard for most of us, yet achieving change is ordinarily reliant on our ability to do exactly that. Change cannot happen without doing something differently.

Making and breaking promises to other people is not an uncommon phenomenon and is discussed a lot more than is the more introspected experience of violating some commitment we have made to ourselves. In the first case, we are most apt to disappoint others who may be less likely to trust our word in the future. In the second instance, we are actually less apt to trust ourselves as we continue our journey through life.

Losing the trust and confidence of others certainly has an impact. Relationships are altered and when we lose the trust and confidence of a friend, we have lost something quite special and precious. What happens when we lose trust in ourselves ... When our promises to ourselves turn out to be, like the treaties and promises made by the United States Government with the tribes of Indigenous Peoples who once populated what we have come to call "America" worth no more "that the paper they were written on?" What happens to our self identity and self esteem when we realize that we can't trust ourselves?

There are many possible answers, and none of them are good. Here are just a few of the concomitants of not keeping our promises to ourselves:

1) If we do not find ourselves to be trustworthy, it is unlikely that we will be able to present ourselves to others as being so, ergo

2) We have become untrustworthy people... The kind our parents cautioned us to have nothing to do with. What becomes of the self-concept of a person who has come to believe that they are, in fact, the person their parents warned them to not trust?

3) Over time, we tend to stop making promises to ourselves because our experience is that we are not going to keep them anyway. In day-to-day life, promises to the self are commonly equated with 'goals.' So, we become people without goals, without aspirations or direction. We become fixed as we are.

4) If we are parents, we usually want our children to grow up to be good people. To be both trusted and trustworthy. What happens when they get old enough to see that we are not? Children will model the behavior they are shown before they will consider doing what they are told. Where the actions of the parent conflict with their words, the words are essentially wasted.

It is important to learn how to trust ourselves for those and for many other reasons. The dilemma becomes, especially if we have failed ourselves in the past, how to do so. "Reclamation" of self-trust is possible but takes some deliberate work and thought.

First, we must set goals (make promises) that are realistic and attainable. A person who weighs 400 pounds who promises themselves to lose 250 of them in the next three months is, in all likelihood, setting themselves up for failure. A goal which will wind up doing more good than harm must be achievable. Maybe 25 pounds in three months - and even that might be a stretch for many folks.

Secondly, we must remember that our faithfulness to the promises we make for ourselves is directly and inseparably linked to our ability to make and keep promises to others - including, of course, those we care most about. We can never completely be two different people - one who others can depend on and trust and another who we can have no faith in ourselves. This breeds a kind of hypocrisy that, when exposed (as it inevitably is) leaves a bad taste in everybody's mouth. (Rev. Jim Baker, President Richard Nixon, Senator Richards, Senator John Edwards, etc. The list could go on and on.)

Thirdly, and perhaps of the most continuing importance, we lose the ability to believe in ourselves, our own abilities and motives. That's right - We grow to distrust ourselves. Once that happens, what is left is a 'self' that's like a suit of clothes that really doesn't fit us. We become pretense and that is a process once begun, that tends to roll downhill pretty quickly.

Of course, for those of religious faith, there is always God's forgiveness and the promise of redemption. But even so, God may forgive us but are we really ever able to fully forgive ourselves?

Whatever we do that diminishes ourselves in our own eyes cannot help but diminish us in those of others. Promise keeping is at the heart of real self esteem and promise keeping always begins with us. A promise is a contract - even (and perhaps especially) when it is with ourselves.