Self-system

In Harry Stack Sullivan's theory, the organization of experience that a person builds up in childhood to avoid the anxiety felt in contact with disapproving caretakers, by keeping attention on what wins approval and away from what provokes disapproval. It governs awareness, so that what does not fit it is overlooked through selective inattention or kept out of awareness altogether by dissociation, and because it resists any experience that would change it, it tends to perpetuate itself. It carries the person's sense of who they are and the security operations by which self-esteem is defended.