RELATIONSHIPS AND SELF-ESTEEM

I would like to suggest that there is an inverse relationship between self-esteem and our relationships. Consequently, as we grow in self-esteem, our relationships suffer. This idea might be hard for you to swallow, because you have met many who feel so badly about themselves that they shy away from relationships or whither before them.

However, I am not talking about how you feel about yourself but how you think about yourself. Have you learned to trust in yourself – your goodness, superiority, entitlement – by elevating the way you regard yourself? Have you learned that by elevating your self-esteem you can feel better about yourself and present yourself with more confidence? If so, I’d like to suggest that your marriage is in greater jeopardy than the marriage of the person who doesn’t have an elevated belief in who they are.

Just to give you one small indication of this counter-intuitive proposal – I live in NYC, just across the East River from Manhattan, where high self-esteem is booming but where relationships might be most problematic. A quick glance at the internet revealed:

·       New York County (better known as Manhattan) was at the top of the list, with a per-capita divorce rate of 8.15, or more than twice the [New York] statewide average of 2.99. No. 2 was Jefferson County, with a per-capita rate of 5.16.

https://www.bizjournals.com/albany/news/2014/02/13/comparing-divorce-rates-across-ny.html

For the most part, those who live in Manhattan have to be financially successful. Why? Living in Manhattan is costly. Besides, I have gone to many discussion groups in Manhattan, generally attended by people who are highly articulate, successful, and have a high enough opinion of themselves and their conversational gifting to brave these competitive waters. However, over the years I’ve attended, I can remember only encountering one couple.

Why? For one thing, Manhattan attracts upwardly mobile singles, who are far more likely to shack-up in this progressive town than to marry. Nevertheless, divorce is booming.

Here’s my theory. I used to feel very bad about myself. To compensate, I would build up my self-esteem with positive affirmations, and, in the short-run, it worked. However, as with any lethal addiction, my false high required increasingly high doses of positive self-trust messages. However, these alienated me further from myself – my feelings from my manufactured non-reality-based thinking. As a result, I was living a schizoid life, in which truth became an endangered species.

In retrospect, I found that my wearing a mask, along with my inability to dispense with my mask, constituted a death-sentence to all my relationships. After my many self-affirmation fixes, I couldn’t figure out who-the-heck I was; nor could anyone else.

Building self-esteem and self-trust is antithetical to transparency, humility, inner-peace, and relationships, and they come with a heavy price-tag. For one thing, if we are alienated from ourselves, we are also alienated from others. If we cannot feel comfortable within ourselves without massive infusions of positive self-talk, we will not be able to feel comfortable with others. If we cannot understand ourselves, we will not be able to understand others and will fail to relate in a relational manner. Instead, we relate to them through veils of our own self-deceptions.

Perhaps most importantly, if we cannot accept ourselves the way we are with our many weaknesses and failures, we will not be able to accept others. In my thinking, I had made myself a king. As long as I saw my wife as a queen, I could accept her. However, once she had fallen, my glowing feelings about her began to change, and I could no longer accept her.

However, in the process, my self-esteem began to drop along with my positive self-talk. As this happened, my wife began to look better, and, in my humbled condition, I became grateful to have her.

However, being humbled is very painful, and we avoid it at all costs. Even if this process enables us to see ourselves as we really are, how are we able to endure it? Certainly not through psychotherapy, aimed at providing a marketable product, which will hook the client into a nurturing “relationship” that will bring them back to the office again. It tends to address client needs by trying to patch them back up with more of the same – self-trust through “positive” interactions and affirmations.

But perhaps we are not designed to trust and to believe in ourselves but in Another, who can truly take care of our needs without the monumental costs of self-delusion. I have found that if Jesus loves and accepts me, I can begin to accept myself and even others with all of their flaws. I have also found these words to be exactly what I had always sought:

·       If God is for us, who can be against us? He who did not spare his own Son but gave him up for us all, how will he not also with him graciously give us all things? (Romans 8:31-32)

As a result, God has empowered me to face the truth about myself and to even laugh about it. I no longer have to exalt myself, because I have found my Savior to be all that I need.