Brother Trouble or Troubled Brother?

Like so many teenage boys, my brother can be a real idiot. Although he was much smarter than average, he refused to ever study or do his homework. My brother was always much more interested in drinking, drugs and partying than academics. Jokingly, he used to say that even stoned out of his mind during the SAT he still scored higher than the rest of his friends. In the rare instances when he was challenged enough to fail a test, he would blame the drugs or say he didn’t care enough to try. All in all, my brother seemed like a classic (yet still brilliant) self-handicapper.

Self-handicapping is a term used by social psychologists to describe instances in which people create obstacles to their own success in order to give themselves an excuse for failure (Berglas & Jones, 1978). Common methods of self-handicapping include drinking or doing drugs, making excuses, not studying and procrastination (Ferrari, 1998; Higgins & Harris, 1988; Hirt et al., 1991). Any of us who have experienced the crushing disappointment of failure can sympathize with the desire to avoid failure. Admittedly, chronic self-handicappers take this aversion too far, and in avoiding taking responsibility for failure they also avoid the pleasure that can accompany a hard-won success.

Before any of you readers begin to judge self-handicappers too harshly, let’s take another look at the example of my brother. After my brother was put on probation for drug possession and could no longer self-medicate, he finally went to the doctor. X-rays showed that he had a number of congenital bone defects that had caused his bones to become brittle and break easily. Multiple bones in his feet and ankles had broken and healed wrong, causing him immense pain when he moved. In addition, two discs in his spinal column had herniated, resulting in crippling nerve pain when he would try to be still or move his body in certain directions. My brother had turned to drugs to blunt the pain but even with the drugs, the pain was still so severe that he had trouble concentrating or focusing on new information. He was acutely aware of these shortcomings, and after seeing his intellectual capabilities decline with no available diagnosis to explain why this was happening, he turned to self-handicapping tendencies to protect his ego. What had first seemed like a straightforward case of self-handicapping in fact was a psychological reaction to an undiagnosed handicap!

The moral of this story is that though we can identify self-handicapping behavior, we should not necessarily use this behavior to make generalized statements about that person’s character. The self-handicapper could be suffering from an undiagnosed learning disability, attention deficit disorder, a mental health condition or another serious health condition. We may be able to identify this particular behavior, but we can’t ascertain at a glance why it occurs.

In other words, I can call my brother an idiot but you sure as hell can’t!

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Berglas, S., & Jones, E. E. (1978). Drug choice as a self-handicapping strategy in

response to noncontingent success. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 36, 405–417.

Ferrari, J. R. (1998). Procrastination. In H. S. Friedman (Ed.), Encyclopedia of mental

health (pp. 5.1–5.7). San Diego: Academic Press.

Higgins, R. L., & Harris, R. N. (1988). Strategic “alcohol” use: Drinking to self-

handicap. Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology, 6, 191–202.

Hirt, E. R., Deppe, R. K., & Gordon, L. J. (1991). Self-reported versus behavioral self-

handicapping: Empirical evidence for a theoretical distinction. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 61, 981–991.