Okay, last time I wrote about thought stopping as a simple practice to increase self-esteem. You stop being so mean to yourself, and voila! Your self-esteem gets a lot better.
​If you missed it, you can read it here.​
Now I want to write about three reasons positive self-esteem matters for a happy relationship.Let me tell you a story. It's a personal one this time, no longer tender, but still hard to write about.
Back in the day, my self-esteem was pretty shit. In my first marriage, the person I was in relationship with was okay 90% of the time, but when triggered, he got mean, really mean.
I had started to explore feeling like a sexual being inside myself, and I bought a pair of Fluevog boots. They were sexy-sleek, wayyy outside of my comfort zone. But I wanted to be the person who could wear those boots, and so I had to wear those boots.
The first time I was set to wear them, my plan was to go to a matinee movie by myself. It was a very rare treat, as the parent of a baby and a toddler. Any personal time was sacred, and I was going to take myself on a date.
He came home in the midst of me getting ready, saw me in the boots. Instead of appreciating, he told me I looked like a slut, and he didn't mean it in a good way.
My heart felt crushed. I still wore the boots. I still went to the movie, but the joy was gone.
Then, my self-esteem wasn't good enough to stand up for myself, to hand him back the shame he directed at me. I didn't know how to set boundaries, how to not absorb someone else's yuck. It hurt, but it was years until I realized how inappropriate that comment and the energy behind it were.
Now, I hold myself in warm positive regard.
No one gets to project their negativity on me, what I wear, or my choices and stay in my life. I deserve better than that, and I am the one who makes sure I get it. The rise in my self-esteem means that I am in cherishing relationships, full stop.
Your self-esteem impacts your relationships in major ways.

1. It sets your baseline for what you'll accept.​
   People with solid self-esteem expect to be treated well, so they naturally hold higher standards for respect, honesty, and effort from a partner. Low self-esteem often makes poor treatment feel familiar or even deserved, which weakens relational health.
2. It reduces reactivity and defensiveness.​
   When you feel secure in your own worth, a partner's criticism, bad mood, or need for space doesn't automatically read as a threat to your identity. (Read more about the crucial relationship principle I call 'Allowability of Feeling' here). You can hear feedback, disagree, or give them room to have their own experience without collapsing into anxiety or lashing out. When you are steady like that, intimacy is possible. It means you can stay more grounded during normal relational conflict and not turn your partner into your enemy.
3. It frees you from needing your partner to complete you.​
   Self-esteem means your sense of value isn't outsourced to someone else's approval. That takes a huge amount of pressure off the relationship, since your partner isn't responsible for managing your emotional state or constantly reassuring you. Two people who each feel whole on their own tend to choose each other from desire rather than desperation or crippling need. It becomes a delight to share life rather than an obligation.

Happy, healthy relationships depend on two people who value themselves, who esteem their own worth, and who have boundaries for what comes in.
If any part of this story sounded familiar, I'd love to talk with you. Book a clarity call and let's figure out what's next for you and your relationship.
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Lak is in my office giving feedback to his partner, Noran. 

"I'm really mad at you. When we went to my parents house last week, you were just on your phone and didn't engage at all. I had to explain to my folks that you weren't upset with them." 

Noran fires back, "Well, you are always annoyed with me for something, so nothing new here." 

Instead of listening and receiving the feedback, Noran got defensive and deflected responsibility. Lan gave him a chance to be awesome,  and he blew it. 

So what would awesome look like in this case? 

Noran allowing Lak to be angry. 

It might sound like, "I hear you are mad at me." 

In my work with couples, I am frequently teaching them to allow the other to feel what they feel. "Allowability of Feeling" is the name of the skill. 

It's an important relational concept; just allowing someone to feel what they feel.

This may seem obvious, but notice what happens the next time someone (friend, partner, co-worker) brings you a feeling they are having, about you!

When someone tells you that they are frustrated with your behavior, how do you handle it? Do you make them wrong for feeling the way they feel, even if it's only in your head?

In working with hundreds of couples, I noticed how hard it is to let each other feel what we feel about the other.

We wish that the person did not feel the way they feel: frustrated, angry, disappointed, betrayed.

We immediately jump to justify our own behavior, or defend our intentions.

Ironically, the quickest way for feelings to move through is for them to receive acknowledgment.

Next time your partner or friend comes to you to let you know how pissed off they are at you for doing XYZ, instead of reacting, try this.

Look at them, take a breath, and say, "You are pissed off at me for doing XYZ," and then notice what happens.

You have just allowed them to feel the way they are feeling.

This is a pattern interrupt for most of us.

Instead of getting pushback when we share our feeling, we get met with validation and acknowledgment. It's a game-changer. It is so healing when someone gives us permission to feel what we feel, without trying to manage, control, shame, or change it!

You can curate an open-heartedness when you are listening. You are just trying to receive the other person and all their complexity. You are trying not to take whatever they're sharing personally. You are not thinking about how you will respond. You are taking in what they are saying, so that you can reflect and summarize what you hear them saying.

You don't have to expect your brain to get it all.

Somebody shares something that's important to them. You reply with, "Okay, cool. This is what I hear you saying. Am I getting it? What am I missing?"

In asking that question, you are allowing the person to feel exactly what they are feeling without challenge.

You are also getting the chance to understand more, and to allow your own empathy to come online.

Allowability of Feeling goes for you too.

Allowing yourself to feel what you feel is a counter-intuitive, yet deeply effective way to be with impact.
​
You are telling yourself, "I feel this way right now," and you trust that that will not always be true.

That these feelings will shift and change. Your first reaction is not your final answer.

Because feelings aren't facts.

They are just an experience in the body, one you can learn to make space for, and be with in both loving and curious ways.

You don't need to justify how you feel, and neither does your partner. You also don't have to agree with them. 

Feelings point to what needs your attention.

Allowing yourself and others to simply feel feelings, without fixing, taking on, or pushing back, is a radical act of relationality.

​I was in session with a couple this morning, and the topic of self-esteem came up. One of them wondered what would happen if their self-esteem was better, more loving towards themself. Would it make a difference in their relationship?

My answer is an unequivocal yes.

Now, we all know we are "supposed to" love ourselves, and do self-care. But rarely does that extend to how we treat ourselves in our heads.

In the session today, I asked each of them to tell me the recurrent mean things they say to themselves.

I wrote down exactly what I heard: "You're lazy. You're a bad parent. You have no value at work."

They both told me that the strategy is to bully themselves into doing better.

But when I read back their lists, and asked what they would do if someone said those things to their kid, they quickly rose to the defense. "I'd put a stop to it immediately, and kick that person out of my house."

But in our internal house, we let the bully rampage on, thinking it is some kind of "motivation." Masochism, more like!

Like most of us, being mean to myself used to feel normal.

Early in my healing journey, I realized I didn't want to be complicit any longer with the external messages I'd internalized about my goodness as a human.

I didn't want to pile on with the haters. I didn't want to abuse myself from the inside out anymore.

So I decided to stop. But, of course, it is never that easy.

In my case, I did a practice, using a CBT technique called "thought stopping."

Here's exactly what I did to increase my self-esteem, step by step.

First, I noticed was being internally mean.

Second, I set a boundary from my wise adult: "No, I'm not talking to myself like that."

Third, I offered a positive affirmation or redirect. "I am trying to love myself," or simply, "I love you."

I used a physical anchor point, a green jade heart I wore around my neck and never removed. Whenever I noticed negative self-talk, I'd grab the heart, and run through the process.

When I started, I had no idea how long it would take.

If I tell you I did this multiple times a day for 18 months, that might sound long!

But you know what?

After a lifetime of being harsh with myself, it's done.

I almost never say anything mean to myself now.

And if I do, I immediately catch it, and inquire more deeply into what that mean part might be needing.

Over the course of the practice, the negative self-talk lessened, and lessened more.

Truly, this is the practice (out of all the thousands I've done) that changed my entire life so positively.

It took a while, yes, because I'd been practicing the mean voice for 40 years.

Here's what I learned:
Developing a loving relationship with yourself doesn't come from spa days and long baths.

It comes from doing the hard healing work of confronting your inner bully with love and firm boundaries.

You do NOT need to be complicit in abuse, and your wise adult is never mean.

Also, the 'motivation' piece is total crap. It's a lie.

I get way more done when I honor and appreciate myself, and tend to my needs, than when I beat myself up.

By the end of the session, both of my clients had practiced thought stopping by interrupting the negative message. They each had a new positive message they created.

How about you? 

How are you talking to yourself in your head?

Give thought stopping a try right now.

Think of a common mean thing you tell yourself, for the sake of being 'better.'
Interrupt it, set a boundary, and offer a positive message.

Now comment below and tell me what happened.

How do you tell your partner what you are really feeling, when you know it's probably going to hurt them, and maybe create conflict?

This comes up for me all the time in my own partnership, and it comes up for my clients too. Honesty in relationships is one of the trickiest skills to build, and most of us were never taught how.

Here's an example. Let's say you feel really frustrated whenever your partner teases you in front of other people. And they have social anxiety, so you have compassion for why they act differently in company, because of their own internal experience.

You're stuck between honesty and protecting them. So what do you do?

Three Ways People Try to Handle Relationship Honesty (And Why They Backfire)

1. Say what's true, and let the chips fall where they may.
This looks like telling your partner you feel hurt when they tease you, even though you know it's probably going to trigger their "getting it wrong" feeling. Then you have to deal with their reaction to your feelings, on top of your own.

2. Soften the blow with watered-down language.
This might sound like, "I love it when you give me compliments around other people, it's so nice." But you haven't said the true thing. Next time company is around, the same thing happens again, and you're more resentful than before.

3. Stuff your feelings so you don't impact your partner right now, and let it come out later, during conflict, at 10x volume.
You say nothing in the moment. Then, the next time you're fighting about something else entirely, it comes out anyway: "And you always hurt my feelings whenever we're around other people!"

Why Navigating Feelings in a Relationship Is So Hard

Learning to navigate feelings in relationship is one of the hardest parts of partnership, and it comes down to three skills most of us never learned:

• How to respect your own experience
• How to share skillfully, without derailing the conversation
• How to receive your partner's feelings about your actions, without collapsing or defending

I don't have a miracle cure for this. But I am deeply committed to relationships built on radical honesty, and it's what I teach, and what I practice, in my own partnership and in my couples work.

What Happens When You Don't Say the True Thing

If you aren't saying what's true for you, if you're watering it down or stuffing it, it isn't sustainable long-term. The translation is almost always the same: resentment, unhappiness, or eventually, breaking up.

This is avoidable. But it takes real work: skills learning, personal exploration, and healing the parts of you that learned honesty was dangerous in the first place.

A Small Practice to Start With

So here's my question to you: how can you be 2% more honest with your partner this week?

FAQ: Honesty in Relationships

Why is it so hard to be honest with my partner?
Most people were never taught how to share difficult feelings skillfully. Without that skill, honesty tends to swing between two extremes: blunt honesty that creates conflict, or softened honesty that breeds resentment.

What happens if I keep avoiding hard conversations with my partner?
Feelings that get stuffed instead of shared don't disappear. They tend to resurface later, often during an unrelated conflict, at a much higher intensity than the original feeling ever was.
​
Is radical honesty the same as saying whatever you feel?
No. Radical honesty means telling the truth while also learning to share it skillfully, so the conversation doesn't derail, and both people can stay in it together.

Ready to be 2% more honest this week, and every week after? Start here.

Tal and Eliza are dear clients (names are changed.)

When we worked together initially several years ago, we completed a focused six-month container that ended in triumph: one of them got sober, and they decided to have a baby!

I'd kept up with them over the years through monthly maintenance sessions, and the work had stuck. However, I'd begun to notice a lackluster heaviness creeping back in when we spoke.

Under-resourced, exhausted, the grind of early parenting had erased their feeling of being a team. They were back in some unhealthy patterns, and both of them were miserable.

It didn't exacly look like they were in crisis, but they kinda were. They were far away from each other, and I was worried what the distance meant for the family they were building.

So I told them the truth: weekly sessions were too slow for what they needed. What would help was uninterrupted time to go deep. They needed quick and effective intervention, so I offered a three-day couple's intensive.

They got childcare (easier for three days than weekly sessions) and booked a cabin in the woods.

On day one of the intensive, they both expressed fear and despair. They loved each other, but was it too late to turn their marriage around?

I had high hopes things could get better.

During those three days, we did a lot of heavy lifting.

We named the troublesome patterns with honesty. We did early trauma work from their childhoods. They learned to set boundaries with each other in ways that felt joyful after so much heaviness.

There was a hard, unflinching conversation about what addiction had done to their family system, even after sobriety. There were a lots of tears that day. We acknowledged how each of their inner adaptive children were running (and destroying) their marriage without either of them fully realizing it. There was a grief and forgiveness ritual toward the end, laying some of the oldest ghosts to rest.

By the close of the third day, things felt lighter.

I don't mean that the work was finished, because in a relationship, it never fully is. But Eliza and Tal had found their way back to the same team, with clarity about the path ahead.

They're are commited to breaking ancestral inheritances, and changing their lineages patterns of addiction, for their child's sake and for their own. That's the kind of thing weekly sessions build toward slowly.

An intensive can get you there in a weekend.

No two intensives look alike. What Tal and Eliza needed was trauma work, grief ritual and honesty about addiction's long tail. Another couple might need something else entirely.

I draw on Relational Life Therapy and somatic practice to build each container, but the shape of it comes from you, not a template.

I have two intensive slots open this summer, based on the West Coast.

If you're local, or willing to travel, we can do the full three days here. If distance or logistics make that hard, I also offer intensives online, structured to hold the same depth even without the cabin in the woods.

An intensive is built for couples who've plateaued in ongoing work and need concentrated time to move through it, couples in real crisis who need more than a weekly session can hold, and couples facing a transition, a birth, a move, a diagnosis, who want to enter it from solid ground instead of scrambling to find it along the way.

It's not cheap, and it's not easy. But an intensive can be a pivot point for your relationship, for the rest of your life.

I told Tal and Eliza that years from now, I want them to reflect on our time and say, "That's the moment everything shifted."

You can read more about how the three days are structured here: pavinimoray.com/couples-intensive​​