Presenting Uncommon Sense with Mel Schwartz 006, in which the marriage counselor, psychotherapist, and author breaks down why the “strongest” people have the weakest relationships, what happens when you finally drop the armor, and the first step to building real self-worth instead of the fake version most of us are chasing.

You’ve been told your whole life to be strong, act tough, never show weakness. But that could be the exact reason your relationship is struggling. Let’s get into the reasons why in this episode of Uncommon Sense with Mel Schwartz!

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We’ve all struggled in our committed relationships in one form or another, but when we do, we typically look at the fault line as being our partner’s fault.

That may not be sufficiently self-reflective. In fact, it isn’t.

We look at our relationship issues, the external relationship, our relationship with one another, but we typically pay little attention or no attention to our own inner relationship with our own self. That’s the nucleus of the relationship.

In the 30 years of couples counseling that I have experienced, I can tell you with confidence that your relationship can only thrive if both of you have an inner relationship with your own selves that is healthy.

Let me repeat that.

You have to have two people who have a healthy relationship with each other to have a relationship that’s going to succeed between the two of you. And what often gets in the way of that relationship success is low self-esteem.

We never talk about low self-esteem. In fact, in the DSM, the Bible of Diagnosis, there is no diagnosis for low self-esteem. This is the proverbial elephant in a room. Low self-worth is corrosive, but this can be improved upon and you can overcome low self-worth.

What we call our relationship is a complex tapestry of each person’s own personal history and their own inner relationship. I’m going to show you how low self-esteem has a destructive ripple effect on both people in a relationship and how you can successfully overcome it, improving your individual self-worth and your relationship success.

I’m Mel Schwartz and this is Uncommon Sense.

What’s the most important relationship that you have or will ever have? That most important relationship is with your own self. That’s a relationship with your own thoughts, your own beliefs and feelings that will impact everything you experience in your life. Everything you see and engage with other people comes through the filter of your relationship with yourself. This is the ultimate source of what becomes your external relationship.

So why do I make this point?

It’s because we are not objective analytical robots. We are subjective, feeling human beings and our personal history and experience informs how we perceive, how we think and relate to each other.

For example, let’s look at what happens when you take a drop of ink and drop the ink into a beaker of water. For a while you can follow the stream of ink, but after a while you can no longer discern where the ink started, where it’s going to. It migrates throughout.

The same thing happens in our relationships with each other. We are the drop of ink in the water and the water becomes the relationship. My experience is that the greatest influence on our relationships is our own self-worth. This is the filter through which we see each other and ourselves. This constructs the relationship.

I’m going to explain that more in detail but first let’s define the terribly misunderstood term self-esteem.

This term self-esteem, I believe, is an absolute misnomer. Most people, in trying to derive self-esteem, are looking outside of themselves. Like if you’re a star athlete in school, you create a lot of self-worth for yourself, but it’s coming from your excellence on the ball field. If you’re getting straight A’s and you’re a valedictorian, that’s a wonderful thing. But what happens if you’re not successful academically? What happens if you’re not a star athlete? What happens if you have average looks and average intelligence and there’s nothing exceptional about you? Shouldn’t you still have good self-worth?

Self-worth is about my relationship with me, but as a culture we are trained to develop what I call other esteem. For instance, if your parents ever said to you when you were a kid, think before you speak. Let’s take a look at what that means.

What does that suggest? It means you need to be really thoughtful and concerned about what other people will think of what you said as opposed to developing your own authentic self-empowerment about what you want to express. Think before you speak means you are subjugated to the impressions that other people will have of you.

When I’m working with people and they’ll sometimes share with me, I didn’t say this or I didn’t say that because I was concerned about what someone would think about me. So think about this juxtaposition. I have my relationship with me, but I’m going to set other people up as my judge. How is that going to work out?

You know, I’m fond of saying no one can judge me unless I happen to be a defendant in a trial and in the courtroom the judge or the jury get to be my judge. Other people are just people who have opinions. If I elevate someone’s opinion to become my judgment, what I’m doing is I’m judging me. And when I judge me, then I’m subordinating me and setting you up.

And by the way, as an aside, when people say they’re worried about what other people think of them, that’s not accurate. What they should be saying is I’m worried about what I think they think of me.

You see the irony? And they’re probably doing the same thing.

So low self-worth is absolutely rampant in our culture. It’s part of the problem we have, and this absolutely decimates authentic relationship with my own self and then my relationship with you.

I’m going to tell you a story to underscore this point I’m making. Whenever I do tell you narratives about my clients, understand I’m always changing their name to protect confidentiality.

Many years ago, I was working with a couple who came to me around this issue. He said he loved his wife very much. She insisted that he didn’t. As I explored further, I came to understand that she didn’t believe she was lovable. By the way, when I’m working with couples, I usually see them individually as well. Why? Because understanding an individual’s issues or challenges or self-esteem issues will inform me as to what’s going on in their relationship.

So with Jill, I started to ask some questions. Like, have you always felt unlovable? She said yes. How come? Do you know why? What happened in your life to give you this belief that you aren’t worthy of love?

The question really triggered her absolute core wound. She told me that when she was about seven years old, her mother shared with her that her pregnancy with Jill was an accident. She hadn’t planned to get pregnant. So Jill came to her own self-damaging conclusion that if I were an accident, I wasn’t wanted, I’m not loved, and I’m not lovable. She carried this core belief with her her whole life. Now, her low self-esteem, I’m not lovable, how did that impact her marriage?

Profoundly.

Our self-esteem, our values, our perceptions, our relationship with ourself, our childhood experiences are part and parcel of our external relationship. We need to slow down and look at, in this case, where the low self-worth came from and create an accountability as to her feeling I’m not lovable versus the objective statement, you don’t love me.

Now, how does our culture make this worse? Well, that’s easy.

Social media, likes, follows, chasing approval, looking for popularity, this is all derived for other esteem. We need to ask ourselves questions around our self-esteem about how did I come to this belief, this feeling about myself? Did it come from my childhood? Again, if my parents told me, think before you speak, we understand that. What did that actually teach me?Again, what if I’m an average student and not a gifted athlete, or I’m not particularly good looking? You see, our pursuit of other esteem is a fool’s mission because we can never attain it or succeed. It’s temporary. It has to be replaced moment by the moment.

How did all of this cause me to start masking my own personality? When I say masking, I mean we all wear these personality masks, parts of ourselves that we aren’t quite authentic, but we feel some insecurity, we feel a lack of something, and we create a personality mask. Like if somebody says to me, I’m a private person, here’s my takeaway. They’re a private person because they don’t feel safe in being seen. If you’re seen, then they’re fear of other people’s judgment of them. So it’s not that they’re a private person, it’s that they don’t want to be seen.

How’s that going to affect a relationship with others?

Our authentic self, our genuine self, acknowledges our vulnerability, our insecurity, and doesn’t try to hide it. We’re not presenting our pretend self. What we’re trying to do is reach the place where nobody is going to be my judge. Again, this retreat to feeling judged sets up an impediment in our relationships for hearing each other and valuing each other. Low self-esteem on one person’s part or both people’s part decimates the authenticity of a relationship.

How can I be authentic if I’m pursuing other’s esteem? I can’t.

Authentic self has to be grounded in a healthy self-esteem. So in many cases, in the majority of cases, we’re all struggling with an authentic self. Now, if two people are not grounded in their authentic self, what do you think their relationship with each other is going to look like? A constant battle over dominance and right and wrong and insecurity and insecurity.

It’s like being on a seesaw. Out of this lack of authenticity, people believe they need to act strong and show no weakness. Now, this is a theme that you hear me bringing up in many episodes. How does that actually make me weaker?

Acting strong is like wearing a suit of armor, preparing for battle. Do you want to clank around through life wearing a suit of armor, acting strong?

By the way, acting strong is acting. Acting is weak.

What happens to whatever I’m feeling insecure about if I keep hiding it? It hardens. It becomes rigid, that insecurity. I can’t reveal it. I can’t move past it. It becomes fixed and you cannot release it. And so you stagnate. And when an individual stagnates, the relationship stagnates.

Healthy relationships require two evolving, authentic people to thrive. But if one or two people are stagnating because they don’t want to reveal vulnerability, everything freezes. It gets stuck.

What happens, though, if I do the opposite and actually share what I’m feeling vulnerable about? What changes? Everything. Vulnerability is lovable. Our culture teaches us to show no weakness and act strong, which is paradoxically profoundly insecure. I’m hiding myself from my partner. How is my relationship going to work out if I am being inauthentic and hiding something I’m afraid of my partner seeing? Or what if my partner is doing the same thing and it’s a double hit?

Vulnerability is lovable. Falling in love is vulnerable. If we defend against our vulnerability, protect our insecurities, our insecurities only become more profound and more extreme.

Open up. Share what you feel vulnerable about. The other person is likely listening. Bring your fears into the light. Bring your shame into the light. And those fears and shame retreat when you bring them into the light. Bringing it into the light kind of anesthetizes the problem. It eradicates the problem. You’re not hiding from it anymore.

This also dovetails with another issue in relationships. When I’m working with a couple, on occasion he or she may say, Well, he has a problem. This is his problem. It’s his problem, not my problem.

Nope, doesn’t work that way. You see, her problem or my problem are no longer separate because they impact me. So her problem, my problem actually become our problem. Remember, relationship is a complex tapestry. It’s a tapestry where we’re two individuals coming from different families with different values, different beliefs, different experiences of vast, beautiful, complex tapestry. When we reduce that tapestry to, It’s his issue. It’s my issue. The way we should put it is, I have an issue with this and this. It affects me. And of course, it affects my relationship. How could it not?

How can my relationship thrive if both of us are wearing masks, blacking our authenticity and our vulnerability? Other esteem has us avoid vulnerability because our fear of what they may think of me. Vulnerability is a love language and it’s a feeling language. Hiding from vulnerability imprisons you. It cuts you off from the possibilities of growth and well-being.

This prevailing life philosophy trains us to avoid vulnerability at all costs. And it denies us this core quality of what it means to be human.

It’s rooted in fear. If your feelings and insecurities are hidden from other people, you’re selling yourself out. This game plan cannot possibly work. And it destroys and incapacitates love.

The paradox is that by embracing vulnerability, you become strong and fearless. It’s an investment in your relationship with yourself and your partner. That is authenticity.

Acting strong is impervious and it doesn’t allow other people to see you, to love you, and to value you for who you really are. It’s your being stuck in other’s esteem. If you want to be loved, reveal your vulnerability.

Now let’s look at this word vulnerability. What does the dictionary actually say about vulnerable? There are two definitions. I find them really interesting. Two definitions for vulnerability go like this.

The first says that by being vulnerable, you’re open to attack or criticism. Unless you’re living in a cave, you know there are going to be times when you’re going to be verbally or emotionally criticized as part of life. Not allowing yourself to be faulted or criticized means you’re wearing that suit of armor, protecting yourself. You become inaccessible to your partner. That is the essence of fear and it’s ruinous to relationships. It’s the opposite of love.

The second definition is that vulnerability is about allowing your weakness and emotions to be seen by others. Wow, that’s just what I’m getting at. Our societal and cultural common sense message is show no vulnerability. Where do you go with that? Act strong, armor up. So the message really is that you should cover up and protect yourself from criticism. And if you are criticized, show no feelings and be impervious. So you argue instead of surrendering.

We need to do just the opposite. So if you want to be loved and you want to be valued, you need to reveal your vulnerability. What’s my choice here? Cover up, act strong, defend myself, or be open and vulnerable.

If I open to my vulnerability, my self-esteem, my authentic self-esteem will grow. You might say to yourself, but I’ve been this way my whole life. Can I actually change?

The answer is yes. I’ll take this moment to pitch my book, The Possibility Principle, which explains how you can entirely reshape and reformat your identity through the process of growth. Think about what your thoughts are telling you. Notice how they’re sending other people up as your judge. Pause and rethink this.

This belief that I need to act strong, perhaps lifelong belief, ask yourself, how is that serving you? Are you growing in confidence? Do you have reduced anxiety and stress? Is it working out for you?

Think about acting as opposed to just being.

So, here’s your uncommon sense. You can continue to follow the destructive societal dictates that destroy your self-worth, have you hide behind other’s esteem and armor up and protect your vulnerability, or you can move toward authentic self-worth by embracing vulnerability, which makes you actually stronger and more lovable.

If this feels counterintuitive to you, lean into that. Counterintuitive is where new thinking and insights come from. If it’s feeling normal, you’re stuck in the rigidity of who you’ve always been, and so is your relationship.

So embrace that counterintuitive feeling and realize that is where uncommon sense is bringing you to.

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