Self-Esteem Research, Theory, and Practice Toward a Positive ...

174 SELF-ESTEEM RESEARCH, THEORY, AND PRACTICEAs mentioned in Chapter 1, I investigated the phenomenon of problematicself-esteem themes using 20 subjects who represent a fairly stratifiedsample of American adults (Mruk, 1983). Let me briefly elaborateon that work to help us understand the importance of these naturallyoccurring moments for self-esteem in adulthood. The participants wereasked to describe two experiences in detail: a time when they werepleased with themselves in a biographically crucial way, and a time whenthey were displeased with themselves in this fashion. The experiencesspontaneously chosen by all the subjects can be described as breakingthrough a personal difficulty or limitation (which resulted in beingpleased) and failing to do so (which resulted in being displeased). Threeof the subjects were then extensively interviewed about their descriptions,a procedure that resulted in six research protocols (three instancesof both types). The transcripts were subjected to a phenomenologicalanalysis based on Giorgi’s (1975) version of the method described inChapter 2 for two reasons: This technique is probably the most representativeor standard format in American phenomenological psychologyand it is a step-by-step process, which means that independent researcherscan use the method to verify or disprove the findings. The complete set ofdata, which is called extended narratives, was then examined in terms ofmeaning units (meaningful transitions in the narrative data) depicted inthe subjects’ stories of their experiences. These units, in turn, were analyzedfor similarities across the subjects, and the resulting empirical regularitieswere then used to identify essential components of thephenomenon or its “constitutive” elements. Such findings became thebuilding blocks for developing the underlying general structures of eachtype of experience and eventually led to my first articulation of the fundamentalstructure of self-esteem (Mruk, 1983).Examples of the men and women dealing with certain selfesteem–relatedproblems in their lives were presented in Chapter 1. Theseexamples showed how certain situations challenge an individual’s currentconfiguration of competence and worthiness, or self-esteem, in a waythat reopens the individual’s history concerning one or more unresolvedbiographic self-esteem themes. Another example, not mentioned earlier,concerns a person who is desperately afraid of leaving the safety of thefirst floor in a building and will not go to higher floors under any circumstances.One day this individual’s best friend suddenly comes downwith a particularly life-threatening illness and is being treated on the 38thfloor of a large medical facility. The person describes driving around thehospital for hours before making a decision about whether to “do theright thing.”The problem is a challenge because making the visit also requiredfacing traumatic childhood experiences associated with sudden deaths,