Are you a proud person? Know the three types of pride

Hello friends!

A psychology technique that is widely used in the office is to name feelings. For example, it is common for the patient to arrive telling a certain situation and not knowing exactly how he feels and the first step to find out more is to name, even if it is approximate, the feeling or emotion that that episode evokes.

Pride is a curious feeling because it presents contradictory, almost opposite facets. It’s been a while since I received a request to write about the subject and with this text, I hope to contribute with an answer about people who are called proud or moments when people behave with pride as a cause. Are you a proud person too?

The most positive aspect of pride is pride as an admiration. When someone says: “I’m very proud of you for doing this” the meaning of the word pride is linked to admiration for the feat, for the conquest, for the ability to accomplish. We can say that it is positive, in the sense that this type of feeling helps in social relationships and can also make people strive to reach their full potential.

Parents and children, coaches and their pupils, teachers and students can thus establish a form of pride-based reinforcement. For example, a student may study harder, much harder, and do super well on a test because he expects to live up to his teacher’s assessment of him as exceptional. Thus, he gives more of himself to receive praise, to do the other good, to be admired.

What can be not so good in this type of situation is the confusion between the one who admires and the admired, that is, we have to know how to recognize that both the responsibilities and the achievements or mistakes fall on the individual. The risk of this type of pride being harmful, however, is small and would consist in the situation in which the person who is proud mixes himself with the other’s deeds, as if he himself were the other. As I said, the risk is small, but it can happen that – if you fail – the feeling of pride turns into whining, irritation, destructive criticism, sadness.

Pride as Prejudice

There is a very well known book (and movie) called “Pride and Prejudice”. It is a classic of literature and expresses pride as social prejudice. In summary, someone who has excellent financial conditions feels proud of their social position and does not want to approach other classes, considered inferior or worse, as if their own body ran blue blood and the body of others not so noble blood.

This kind of feeling really runs through many people who consider themselves noble and unattainable for having assets or bank accounts with many digits. This appears even more in people who are heirs and, as in the poem by Fernando Pessoa, “they did nothing and are rich…” of the first kind of pride, for having come out of nowhere and wondering why they got so far.

Obviously, this type of pride is nonsense and creates, psychologically, in the unconscious, the polarity between a feeling of superiority and a feeling of inferiority, very well described by Alfred Adler, the first psychoanalyst to openly disagree with Freud. This is because this type of pride is based on the feeling of being superior to others. However, the feeling of being inferior to others others don’t.

Above I gave the example of people who have this pride as a prejudice just because they have money (the reason can be another, like being white or being American or being of a certain religion), and we can analyze that the person will feel inferior when he finds or think of people who would be above your financial level. Thus, a millionaire person may feel the most when comparing himself to a person earning the minimum wage, but he will feel inferior when comparing himself to a billionaire person.

Pride as a grudge

Well, this is probably the most negative kind of pride of all, as it sounds like the kind of situation where a guy takes a big toll on his shoulders and continues to carry the big weight on his back for almost no reason, just to keep carrying the weight. on accounts, as they say, out of pride.

For example, and this is a phenomenon that always appears in the office, the person has a boyfriend or girlfriend. The couple quarrel and break up. In order not to give in, to not admit that he was wrong or to not have to get rid of his pose of always being right, the person cannot apologize, or ask for forgiveness, or even go back to having a reasonable conversation to get back into the relationship.

This sounds like those childhood fights, where one gets angry with the other and time passes but neither of them gives in because they want to show that they are better for not giving in.

The amazing thing is that, saying it this way, it seems simple to solve (and it really is), however, for the proud person it is very complicated. The person says to himself, “How am I going to go back to talking or apologizing? I can’t, because that would mean that I’m weak or it would mean that the other person is right”. The effect of all this is that resentment is maintained, due to fighting or misunderstanding, there is continuity of the unwanted situation (separation or distance) and in any case things continue as they should, since the person cannot lower his crest, for he has to stand in his pride.

Conclusion

Here on the site we already have texts about several other feelings. We could evaluate this type of analysis as applied psychology or as “office experiences” since we talk less about theories and more about what happens in practice. Naming what feelings is a first step in the awareness process. Second, we can assess whether the feeling is useful or useless, whether it is good or bad, and why and when it appears. In these two steps, we begin to change, by knowing our internal mechanisms.

The third and final step is to find a way to change how we feel, and a very simple and effective way is to find different feelings. In the case of pride, we can think of humility, love, compassion.

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