Overcoming low self-esteem motivates us to increase our self-love and overall receptivity to love. Of a truth, you will not be able to accept love from others until you love yourself first. As self-esteem soars, tension lessens in the relationship. Plus, the interpersonal atmosphere ripens to accommodate a more intense experience of being loved. All these advantages will be yours if you journey along with me to discover how to overcome low self-esteem in a relationship.
Low Self-Esteem Traits
Most people with low self-esteem are unhappy with themselves. Frequently, they denigrate themselves as ugly, stupid big mouth, gross, screwed up, idiot, a big mess, and so many other damaging labels.
Again, they believe that they are so flawed and imperfect that they are unworthy of love. As a result, they have great difficulties in establishing and maintaining healthy relationships. Their irrational beliefs about themselves prevent them from allowing the Love of others to penetrate their inner selves. Just as, they see their flaws and mistakes as evidence of their worthlessness and unlovability.
Additionally, an inability to accept compliments hallmarks them. This inability to accept a compliment also betrays the fact that they will have trouble taking in love. Rejecting a compliment means rejecting another person’s generosity and an opportunity to feel valued and appreciated.
To go further, The bent to feign busyness at work, that permits no time for social life often marks people with low self-esteem. They hide under their busyness the fear that another may discover their uncomplimentary view of themselves and how they believe they are.
In line, a veneer of smugness and superiority frequently masks low self-esteem.
Together with, They see the whole world as being critical of them because of the self-denigrating mental chatter they constantly run in their minds.
Roots Of Low Self-Esteem
Next, when we question where our ideas about ourselves come from, we discover that we developed our basic sense of who we are and who we should be in childhood. This idea of our perceived self and ideal self sprang primarily from how our parents treated us, what they told us about ourselves and how we saw them behave. Since children lack the intellectual skills to question their parent’s judgement, they often internalise their parent’s labels as truth. Such labels rear up as ugly, stupid, smart, pretty, dumb. Also, a child that was frequently hit or screamed at, often internalises the idea that he or she is bad. Typically, we are in the habit of comparing our ideal self with our perceived self. Our self-esteem frequently plummets when we sense that our perceived self falls far short.
Along with, children who received a great deal of criticism and little praise, grow up with a sense of being unlovable. Such children were harried to unrealistic standards of behaviour and performance.
To proceed further, when children are denied unconditional love, they grow up feeling unlovable. Raising your children to have high self-esteem means not withholding your love when the child misbehaves or fails to live up to your expectations. So, wisdom calls you to disapprove of an unacceptable behaviour, not to treat the child as an irredeemably bad person.
Close upon, a home rife with shame, where children were inculcated with the sense that there is something inherently, irrevocably wrong with them, often boasts of children who grow up with low self-esteem. As they grow up, such children equate closeness with criticism, intimacy with humiliation, and being loved with being used as a scapegoat for someone else’s problems.
Ways Of Overcoming Low Self-Esteem
How to overcome low self-esteem in a relationship approaches the ideas stated hereunder.
1. Draw Out Your Irrational Beliefs And Feelings And Question Them
When you acknowledge your beliefs and feelings, you put yourself in a position to question them. In line, when you subject under scrutiny a belief like “I am a stupid, ugly big-mouth who messes everything up,” it’s irrationality and inaccuracy will jump at you. The fallacy in this belief makes it easier for you to discard it and install more accurate, new beliefs. Such a new belief features as one that separates your person from failure, that sees failure or mistake as an event that happened in time, not an idea that is entwined with your person. In a sense, how to overcome low self-esteem in a relationship entails revising your idea of yourself and reality.
2. Become Conscious Of Your Self-Talk
To become fully conscious of what you say in your head to run yourself down features as an important component of how to overcome low self-esteem in a relationship. As you become more aware of your disempowering negative mental chatter, you should endeavour to tell yourself, “Stop!” and silently repeat a self-esteem mantra instead. A typical mantra comes as “My worthiness is eternal, not material-based. Therefore, my mistakes or flaws do not define my self-worth. Also, it headlines as “I’m good, kind and decent. I deserve to be treated well.
3. Start Accepting Yourself As You Are
When you train your focus on yourself, you will discover that there is plenty to love and value about yourself. Drawing up a list of your positive aspects helps you to tune up your self-loving. As you become more self-loving, you open up yourself more to others’ love. You will also become more pleasant to be around. To clarify further, how to overcome low self-esteem in a relationship also leans on the idea of self acceptance.
4. Encourage Others To Become More Self-Loving
As a self-loving person, your life can only be enriched as others around you become more self-loving.
5. Stop Taking The Blame For All The Problems In Your Relationship
Encourage your partner to take responsibility for his or her own contributions to the problem and also deal with them. The problems could rear up as emotional withdrawal, moodiness and a tendency to be hypercritical. To come to the point, how to overcome low self-esteem in a relationship tolerates the exploration of the contribution system to a problem in a relationship.
6. Acknowledge A Painful Experience That Happened To You In The Past
Oftentimes, because of the magnitude of shame, guilt, degradation, connected to past painful experiences, we find it difficult to talk about them. However, it becomes easier to talk about the experience when you stop being in denial and admit that the event happened to you. As you talk about it, you gradually let out the pent-up rage and tears that you have been carrying around for years. Frequently, self-love arises from the process of letting go of your shame, degradation or guilt.
7. Spend Time In Calming, Nourishing Natural Settings
Nature does not criticise. Instead, it nourishes and calms. Communing with “Mother Nature” parallels the experience of positive mothering. So, it is rewarding to visit natural settings where you feel more connected. Feeling calmed, refreshed and revitalised, often star as the benefits of such an excursion. For real, nature throws in its own quota to the idea of how to overcome low self-esteem in a relationship.
The idea of how to overcome low self-esteem in a relationship, motivates us to revise our view of ourselves, others and the world. Coupled with, it galvanizes us to grow our self-acceptance, self-love and confidence. As our self-love increases, our self-preoccupation decreases. Consequently, we release more time to invest in our relationships and other constructive ventures. To add to, self-love opens us to a rewarding experience of love in our relationships. Again, it frees us to reveal our inadequacies and offer a vulnerability that facilitates intimacy.
Great post. I’ve always suffered from low self esteem in almost every area of life! These are great tips 🙂