Lesson 4: Self-Esteem

Lesson 4 - Self-Esteem

Follow Up

In the last lesson, we focused on intimacy and how communication plays a huge role in your intimate relationship.  How did you do on your weekly challenge last week?  You were to ask your partner if they needed advice or just someone to listen to you, and then you were to write in a notebook or a journal about how things went and if you felt closer and happier.  Did anything change in your relationship?

This Week

This week we will talk about self-esteem and how important it is to be successful in your own life, as well as in your relationship.  “Research has well-established the link between good self-esteem and relationship satisfaction. Self-esteem not only affects how we think about ourselves, but also how much love we’re able to receive and how we treat others, especially in intimate relationships” (Lancer, 2016). 

Working On Our Own Self-Esteem

        “Whether your self-esteem is momentarily lagging or you’ve been feeling bad about yourself for a long time, the key to rebuilding your confidence is changing your negative thoughts,” says Heidi Riggio, PhD, a social psychologist and assistant professor of psychology at California State University in Los Angeles. “A good place to start is by noticing your negative self-talk and reversing it. Self-talk is that inner script that plays in an endless loop in your brain, she explains. If everything you’re saying to yourself is negative, that’s going to impact how you feel about yourself” (Doheny, 2016).

Below is a video clip that Nancy Foote made with a little self-esteem assignment for the next two weeks.  I know this may be hard for some of you, but if you do it, you will notice changes in how you feel about yourself.  “Research confirms that the improved self-esteem of one partner increases relationship satisfaction for both” (Lancer, 2016). 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eZiGKhGmi7I

“Positive self-esteem is not only seen as a basic feature of mental health, but also as a protective factor that contributes to better health and positive social behavior through its role as a buffer against the impact of negative influences. It is seen to actively promote healthy functioning as reflected in life aspects such as achievements, success, satisfaction, and the ability to cope with diseases like cancer and heart disease” (Mann, 2004).  So, the better our self-esteem, the more successful and satisfied we will be in many different aspects of our lives.

How To Help Our Spouse Or Significant Other Have Better Self-Esteem

Our first job should be to make sure we have high self-esteem, and then we can move on to helping our spouse have great self-esteem also.  In order to start building your spouse up, give them compliments and focus primarily on their strengths–not their weaknesses. Begin helping them by identifying areas where they’re most insecure, and giving them positive messages to rewrite the negative stories they tell themselves.  Below is a video clip with some great advice for couples and dealing with self-esteem.

https://www.symbis.com/blog/boost-spouses-self-esteem/

Try to incorporate these suggestions into your relationship and make your partner feel important and needed, especially in social situations that they may be uncomfortable with.  Building each other up and focusing on their strengths and interests can have amazing results with how you each feel about each other.

Issues With Low Self-Esteem

“Low self-esteem makes you hide your truth so as not to “make waves,” which compromises real intimacy” (Lancer, 2016). When we have low self-esteem, we are likely to avoid sharing things with our partner that we believe may cause them to think less of us. Low self-esteem affects our ability to communicate. Lancer (2016) says that communication skills “involve speaking clearly, honestly, concisely, and assertively, and the ability to listen”. Our more intimate relationships require even more polished communication skills.

“It takes courage to communicate assertively in an intimate relationship — courage that comes with self-acceptance, which enables you to value and honor your feelings and needs and risk criticism or rejection in voicing them. This also means you feel deserving of love and are comfortable receiving it” (Lancer, 2016). 

Self-Esteem and Conflict

Studies have shown that having low self-esteem can lead to an increase in conflict in romantic relationships. When one or both partners have low self-esteem, they tend to find conflict in places where there may not have been any to begin with. Likewise, conflict can lead to one or both partners having less self-esteem (Richter & Finn, 2021). This lowering of self-esteem may come from a fear or shame from perceived rejection in conflict situations. “Low self-esteem can distort your perception of your partner, according to research in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology” (Doheny et. al, 2016).

So, what do we do in this situation? How do we keep our self-esteem from going from low to lower? The easiest answer is to increase our self-esteem before conflict inevitably arises. We know from previous lessons, and personal experiences, that conflict in a relationship is a given. However, we can control how we view ourselves, so that when faced with conflict we can keep a level head because we know who we are, and we love ourselves.

Activity

            We know that increasing self-esteem is easier said than done. Some of us have been wrestling with low self-esteem for a long time. We do not pretend to be licensed therapists or to be qualified to treat depression or anxiety which may contribute to low self-esteem. However, we do know that part of increasing self-esteem is changing the way we talk to and about ourselves. With this in mind, our activity and challenge for this week is to keep a self-esteem journal. The purpose of this journal is to help you get used to noticing positive things that happen to and around you throughout the day.

At the end of this lesson is the worksheet that you will use for this activity. Before starting, you are going to write a little paragraph about how you feel about yourself. Then, each day you will use the sentence starters on the worksheet to log positive things that happened during the day. You can add more if you would like. At the end of the week, you will write another paragraph about how you feel after having done the assignment.

To recap….

You have two assignments to work on this week! One is Nancy’s challenge, to repeat the 10 things you love most about yourself every day. The second is your self-esteem journal! We will check in with you on both of those next week.

Next Lesson:

            The next and final lesson in our program will be on “Communication Strategies”.  We are 

excited and anxious to see how far you have come over the last several weeks and see how the 

activities went from last time.

 

 

References

Doheny, K., Swan, S. H., Levine, B., Sullivan, K., Upham, B., Migala, J., Colino, S., Pearson, C., & Brockway, L. S. (n.d.). How Low Self-Esteem Affects Your Relationships: Everyday Health. EverydayHealth.com. https://www.everydayhealth.com/sexual-health/how-low-self-esteem-affects-your-relationships/.

Lancer, D. (2016). Your Self-Esteem Might Be Ruining Your Relationship. Psychology Today. https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/toxic-relationships/202105/your-self-esteem-might-be-ruining-your-relationship.

Mann, M. (2004). Self-esteem in a broad-spectrum approach for mental health promotion. Health Education Research, 19(4), 357–372. https://doi.org/10.1093/her/cyg041

Richter, J., & Finn, C. (2021). Transactions between self-esteem and perceived conflict in romantic relationships: A 5-year longitudinal study. PLoS ONE, 16(4), e0248620. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0248620