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When people speak of a “negative self-concept,” what they usually mean is that someone has a self-concept that is negatively-valued. When someone says, “I’m clumsy,” that is probably negatively-valued, since people seldom value clumsiness. However, even if the person doesn’t value being clumsy, “clumsy” is a name for a set of behaviors that can be represented positively, without any negation. That is, I can make images of what it means to be clumsy—pictures of myself stumbling, or spilling things, breaking things, etc.
Before learning how to transform a negatively-valued aspect of self-concept, I want to explore a very different kind of negative self-concept, in which the representation of self-concept is negated. Fairly often you hear some people say, “I’m not the kind of person who—” or “I’m not—” rather than “I am—” If clumsiness were described as “not graceful,” that would be an example of a self-concept in which the representation is negated.
If you say to yourself, “I’m not graceful,” that usually elicits a very different set of representations than if you say to yourself, “I’m clumsy.” I can imagine some of you saying, “Well, ‘not graceful’ means the same thing as ‘clumsy.’ ”Negation is very difficult to talk about, and we have to make a very careful distinction between the words that people use and the experiences that underlie them. While those two sentences might mean the same thing in ordinary language, the experiences underlying them are often very different, and the consequences of defining the self by using a set of experiences that are negated can be profound and far-reaching.
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