How does an experience of religiously motivated microaggression affect self-esteem?
Self-esteem refers to one's overall sense of personal worth, value, and competence. It is influenced by various factors including internal thoughts, feelings, beliefs, and external experiences such as social interactions and contextual cues. Religiously motivated microaggressions are subtle, often unintentional forms of discrimination based on someone's religion that can harm self-esteem in multiple ways. When an individual experiences these aggressions, they may feel invalidated, dehumanized, dismissed, attacked, isolated, excluded, and marginalized. These experiences can lead to negative emotions like anger, anxiety, sadness, guilt, shame, confusion, and fear. This negatively impacts their self-confidence, self-efficacy, and self-respect and creates a negative feedback loop where individuals question their identity and belonging. Self-doubt, low self-worth, and lack of self-acceptance can result from these experiences, leading to poor mental health outcomes. In addition, religiously motivated microaggressions erode trust within relationships, creating barriers and disconnection between people. Thus, this study explores how experiences of religiously motivated microaggressions impact self-esteem and relational trust.
What is religiously motivated microaggression?
Religiously motivated microaggressions refer to subtle or hidden insults and messages about a person's religion. They include comments, actions, gestures, jokes, and behaviors that convey hostile, derogatory, or offensive attitudes towards another's religion. Microaggressions occur due to prejudice, stereotypes, bias, ignorance, and misunderstandings of other cultures, beliefs, or identities. They are often unintentional but still hurtful and can cause emotional distress, stress, and trauma for the victim. While religious microaggressions are not always easy to identify, they can take many forms such as stereotyping, generalizing, tokenization, discrimination, exclusion, and objectification. They may be based on misconceptions about one's faith, cultural practices, religious symbols, clothing, food, language, or appearance. Religious microaggressions can negatively affect an individual's sense of safety, security, acceptance, belonging, and identity development.
How does it affect identity development?
Identity development involves understanding oneself in relation to others and society. It includes personal beliefs, values, attitudes, ideologies, worldviews, social roles, relationships, and identities. An experience of religiously motivated microaggression can undermine this process by challenging one's identity, belonging, and self-perception. It may create confusion, doubt, and anxiety about who they are and what they believe. The victim may question their place in the world, feel alienated from society, lose faith in their religion, or disconnect from their community. This impacts their self-esteem and can lead to a loss of confidence and self-worth. In addition, experiences of microaggressions can reinforce negative stereotypes and prejudices that further erode trust within interpersonal relationships. Thus, identity development is vital to self-esteem and relational trust.
How do experiences of religiously motivated microaggressions affect self-esteem, identity development, and relational trust?
Research has shown that individuals who experience religiously motivated microaggressions often report negative effects on their self-esteem, identity development, and relational trust (e. g. , Lerner et al. , 2019). Religiously motivated microaggressions can lead to feelings of marginalization, exclusion, and devaluation, which can negatively impact an individual's sense of self-worth and belonging within their social group.