Your Self Worth After That Relationship...

You've come out of that relationship and you know there's an issue, but you're not sure what to call it and because you can't put your finger on it, you don't know where to look for answers. You've already been through the trenches where you examined the relationship and you examined your ex-partner; their attachment style, their relational issues, what they went through in childhood, you've been through it all. And now, you're looking at yourself. In plain sight, trying to work out where to go next.

If your relationship was one where your partner was continually pulling away from you, repeatedly trying to take space and distance from you and I don't mean in a healthy way but rather in the kind of way that felt unsafe and put them completely out of reach, in a relationship like that, your nervous system will have been thrown up in the air and spun around until you can' t feel the ground beneath you. 

Your ex-partner may have been someone who set out intentionally to play games with you, to use a push-pull dynamic to purposefully shake your certainty. They may have intermittently walked out and created long and heavy periods of silence as a way of unnerving you and making you anxious. Alternatively, they may have had an avoidant attachment style and rather than using distance to intentionally hurt you, they created this in order to soothe and regulate their own nervous system and emotional state.

Wherever they fell on this spectrum, if this was the nature of your relationship with them, you're going to now feel like you've been repeatedly, metaphorically slapped in the face. And perhaps without even realising it, your self worth has been taking hits like boxer in the ring with a bloody mouth and a dazed look on their face.

If you're reading this thinking - well that's not me, I don't have an anxious attachment style and I held it together when my partner would withdraw- I want you to think again. Because most of the clients I work with are strong women, women who have been holding it together, getting on with it, pushing through. And if you relate to this, I'd like you to think about the message you've been internalising about yourself each time they 'went silent' or 'needed space'. what did these episodes tell you about yourself, what was the meaning you were making, without even realising it was happening? 

A client yesterday was telling that because she knew, and was sure that her ex-partner did, deep down, love her, that she subsequently found a way to cope with his emotional withdrawals. She rationalised these episodes knowing that once the emotional storm had passed, he would come back again and some kind of order would be restored. She coped, for years. But what she hadn't realised was the beliefs about herself that she had internalised during that time, beliefs about her own worth and her own value. Beliefs around her own right and legitimacy to speak up and to be heard. This was her sense of self-worth being chipped away at, in the background and it only became apparent to her when she moved into another relationship.

Years of working with clients in these positions has shown me that there is a lack of understanding around self-worth - what it is and how we experience it. We're presented with ideas of self-worth as a spiritual concept, something we should be able to access through the recognition that we're a child of the universe and have value accordingly. But, as you will know, this is not the scaffold that holds you up, especially in the face of a partner who will test or manipulate you.

I use a tried and tested system for breaking down the various aspects of self-worth and then moving these layers with clients so that one builds on the other until a genuine and embodied experience of self-worth is reached. Your self worth may have been impacted by that relationship, but now that you see it, you get to work on it, and it can be worked on, once you know where to look and how to approach it.