00:00

Hey there, welcome to Intentional Living with Tanya Hale. This is episode number 287, "Equality in Your Relationships and Your Self-Worth." Welcome to your place for finding greater happiness through intentional growth, because we don't just fall into the life of our dreams...we choose to create it. This is Tanya Hale, and I'm your host for Intentional Living.

00:20

Hello there, everyone, so glad to have you here. Appreciate you taking the time out of your amazing busy lives to focus on some self-awareness, some self-growth, to focus on creating better relationships. I love the research that they've done that has shown that the quality of our relationships has the biggest impact on the quality of our lives. And so as we learn to step into better relationships, our lives get better. That's the work that we're doing here. How do I show up so that I can have a better relationship with all the people in my life? And though a lot of times we talk about spousal relationships, the same concepts apply to every relationship in our lives. And even if you are divorced and single and in that space, this information is super important to help you figure out and make sense of what was happening. What was so dysfunctional in your previous marriage? And how do you clean stuff up so that you can, if you choose in the future, step into a healthier, better relationship. I promise you these tools work. The relationship that I am able to create with Sione is just mind-boggling to me. I remember hearing stories my whole life about how hard marriage was, marriage is just so difficult. And so when I got married and it was so hard and so difficult I just was like, "well guess this is what I signed up for, this is what it is," not realizing that life is difficult, but a marriage should be there to support and sustain us and help us out, not increase the difficulty. Now it's not to say that there aren't going to be challenging things that come along in our marriages, but it doesn't have to be hurtful and painful and horrible to work through. We can work through these things in loving and respectful ways and showing up in equality is a huge, huge part of that and that is what we are going to be working on today. By the way, the day this comes out, it's Merry Christmas Day. Does that work? It's Christmas Day. Merry Christmas to you. If you're listening to this afterwards, I hope that you had a great Christmas.

02:42

So let's jump in. So much of the work that I do with my clients and with myself has been and is learning how to show up as an equal partner in our relationships. So we're going to talk about what that really means. Most of us, I know that as a female growing up in the 70s and 80s received a lot of social conditioning throughout my life about not showing up equal, but rather showing up less than or more than. For example, many of us were given the ideas that it was our job to keep everyone happy as the woman in the house. And to do that, we were to sacrifice our own wants and needs so that other people didn't have to. It was a subtle way that we learned to attach our self-worth to our ability to make other people happy. We were given ideas that it was our job to keep the peace in our homes, and so we started not bringing up things that bothered us so that might cause someone else to get mad because we didn't want to be starting fights or having disagreements in our home because of us wanting something. We were taught that it was our job to be a peacekeeper in our immediate and extended families.

03:53

And so, many of us set our wants and needs on the back burner and set to work taking care of everyone else. We would work long into the night getting things prepared and ready for the next day. We managed our children's squabbles with timeouts and treats, and we managed our spouse's moods with good food and good sex all the while thinking that by doing all the things we were creating greater self-worth. We were making ourselves more valuable. We often held back from saying what we wanted because we didn't want to seem too needy, too high maintenance, or too un-Christlike because, as was strongly implied when we were younger, a woman with wants and needs, who asked too much, is really just asking for a fight, and she's not very Christlike if she's not in service mode 100% of the time. And if we find ourselves feeling neglected or pushed aside, the best remedy is to forget about everything that we want and need and go do some service. At least that's the way my brain interpreted so much of the societal messaging that I received. My wants and needs would be fulfilled by taking care of everyone else's wants and needs. And again, a subtle message that not having wants and needs makes us more valuable. And so we put ourselves in a one-down position, a place where what we desire really isn't even put on the table. And we jumped in full force on doing all the things that were said would make us happy. But here's what I found in my life. It didn't make me happy.

05:32

Now, did I love my children? Absolutely. I loved being a mom. I loved my years as a stay-at-home mom. I loved helping my children step into their possibility that was so fulfilling and amazing for me. And I worked really hard to show up in my previous marriage with my previous spouse to make his life as easy as possible. He might disagree with that, but we're gonna go with my story here, right? He was military for many years, and that meant that I got to carry the bulk of the family weight for much of the time between deployment assignments and long days and nights where he was working. And I really was okay with doing what was necessary to keep our little family afloat and supporting him in his career. I did see it as my part of the marriage responsibility, what we had agreed to, that I would stay home and take care of the children in the home, and he would work on his career. And yet looking back, I see I was doing much of it because I felt it was my obligation, and I was also doing it at my own expense much of the time. And I was attaching some of my worth as a person to all the things that I was doing. I also see that I was afraid to have wants and needs. I often kept quiet about things I wanted that were in opposition to what my husband wanted because I didn't want it to become a thing we had to figure out, because that never seemed to go well. I got really good at finding out what he wanted first and then just falling in line so there wouldn't be any contention because we weren't good at having conflict, at having different opinions, and it would usually lead to contention. So I put myself in a one-down position, shelving my wants and needs, and guess what? Though there was much about my life that I love, I harbored some pretty good resentment for not feeling seen and heard. A full sense of my self-worth was not available to me when I was putting myself in a less than position.

07:31

And this was all part of the narrative that I understood that women were just a little bit less than men. In church, the boys would go snowmobiling all in the name of scouting, and the girls weren't allowed to travel more than 20 miles so we would stay home, sit in the church, and learn how to crochet bookmarks instead. The boys would go swimming to pass off merit badges and we would stay at the church and put together babysitting bags. The basic idea of all of that said, that was also taught to me, was that I could get a college degree but it was only in the off chance that my husband died. Other than that I wouldn't need it. My value was in staying home and caring for the home and the family. Small messages that said that a man's life was a little bit more important than a woman's life and it was our job to help them feel strong and smart and capable. I remember in high school having conversations with all the girls about never making more money than your spouse because then they wouldn't feel manly or needed and never win at a game you played with them because then they would feel weak and stupid and it was our job in life to shore up the man's weak ego. Crazy, right? But these were conversations we had. There was such a lack of equality in my mindset and yet it just seemed to be the way of things. And if I wanted to have a successful marriage and family, I had to learn my place. And though I always seemed to feel that inner "screech" around these messages, right? That would just make me go, "that's not right, it doesn't feel good." They were so prevalent everywhere for me in small town Idaho, that I figured I was wrong in questioning them. And so I shushed them whenever they came up and I pretended I didn't hear them.

09:29

Bringing this mindset then into my marriage was incredibly detrimental because we cannot have an equal partnership unless we are showing up as equals. Not one-upping or one-downing. And if we're going to have a true partnership and equal intimate relationship, we have to be equals. We have to show up as equals. We have to see and believe ourselves to be equals. And this all gets really tricky because it is so ingrained in our primitive brain to approach relationships from either a one-up or a one-down position is part of our primitive brain survival kit. Once I had thoroughly entrenched myself in the onedown position by my behaviors to feel empowered or maybe to balance out the inequality, I would subconsciously then put myself in a one-up position by thinking how much more of a good person I was being because I was willing to serve and sacrifice so much. All pretty crazy stuff, right? But I got into some pretty entrenched patterns of not showing up as an equal partner. It can be so easy to go into one-upping in many instances and think about how he's acting like a child and talking down to him. Notice even the phrasing, "talk down to him." We do that when we are in a one-up position. All that has got to be cleaned up. And if you want to learn more about one-up and one-down relationships, you need to go to podcast number 216 that is all about these, okay?

11:08

So we're gonna dig a little bit more into how this one-downing and one-upping, this not showing up equally, we have often become entrenched in, how it impacts our self-worth. I'm a firm believer that anytime we show up in either a one-up or a one-down position, that we are undermining our self-worth. And here's why. We are not acting in ways that are in alignment with who we are, with who God knows us to be, and who He created us to be. God has created all of us equally. Every single person who has ever lived or who will ever live on the earth, we are all equal. Now, do we have the same talent, skills, and abilities? No. But we all have the same worth. Not one person is more valuable than another, even though we all have different capacities to contribute to the world in different ways. And when we act out of alignment with this equality truth, our self worth concept suffers. When we talk down to our husbands, when we treat him as though he is less than us, put ourselves in a one-up position, we are out of alignment with a truth. We have moved into a judge-y superior space.

12:23

So what does this look like? Let me just give you a couple of examples. When you think that your husband is acting like a child, this shows up so often in us mocking them or rolling our eyes when they ask questions or they emotionally disengaged. Now, they may be asking a sincere question or they may be feigning ignorance. When we treat them like a child rather than an adult, we are playing into the ruse. Okay? We are collaborating with them in this lie. And when we go one-up intuitively, we know that it is not the kind of person we want to be and it undermines our self-worth. Here's another example. Thinking that we can't trust them to show up like they've said they would. Same thing applies here. Maybe they've shown that they're not trustworthy, but taking a one-up stance here and not responding like an equal adult and rather demeaning them, undermining them, ridiculing them, coming from this one-up position will never feel good. We actually end up undermining ourselves and the person we know that we are capable of being and our self-worth takes a hit.

13:36

On the other side, when we put ourselves in a one-down position, we are also not stepping into our self worth. We might see that our spouse has a lot going on at work and so we don't want to burden them with our seemingly less significant thoughts and struggles. This is one-downing because we are putting our wants and needs below theirs. We see our desires to be seen and heard and to share as less important than theirs. We are, again, not acknowledging our self-worth, our equality. We might consistently defer to our spouse to make the heavy decisions, or most of the decisions thinking that they are smarter than we are. Probably they are smarter than you in some ways, but also acknowledging your own intelligence, your own ability to think through and process ideas and information, even though it may be different or in different areas, is also super important for us. When we defer from a place of not thinking we're smart enough, we are one-downing ourselves and not accepting our own value in intellect and capacity.

14:43

Learning how to be an equal person in any relationship is also a way of acknowledging our self-worth. When we fully embrace our worth as a person, we become empowered to do things that have always seemed out of our reach before. We step into a new level of growth and progress that we weren't even aware that we needed before. One-upping and onedowning are a recipe for "stuck." Stuck in our own progress and stuck in unsatisfying relationships. Relationships that are challenging and unfulfilling and even boring. Relationships where we struggle to connect and really feel intimacy of any sort. Relationships where we're walking on eggshells, always afraid of upsetting the fragile balance of what's going on. Or even relationships that are pretty good, but that lack the depth and growth and intimacy that we desperately desire. Or relationships where our spouses tow the line so as not to upset us. Where they say things like, "you'll do what you want anyway so why do you even ask?" Very often unequal relationships harbor so much resentment for not feeling seen and heard. And that resentment shows up in one-upping, demeaning the other person for their "bad behavior." Their uncaring and dismissive behavior. And when we feel resentment it oozes out of us and shows up in our own "bad behavior" which impacts our strong sense of self-worth. 16:16 If we really want to step into a more expansive view of our worth and value in the world, it is imperative that we learn to start showing up as equals. So how do we do this? What does it look like to show up as an equal partner? That is such a good question because for my past self and so many of my clients, we don't even recognize when we are showing up out of equality. Either one-up or one-down patterns of behavior have become a part of our relationship for so long that we don't even see them as being dysfunctional. We don't even question our behaviors or we really believe our own story that the other person is above or below us in some way. It's so important that we learn to become aware of how we are showing up in these dysfunctional one-up or one-down behaviors. Awareness is always the first step to growth because when we are not aware, we don't see that there is anything wrong with what's going on and I think a lot of us live in this place.

17:19

Years ago, I used to joke that living in a state of oblivion was a pretty good state to live in and I was just trying to be clever and funny, right? But I could see that it allowed me to be happy a lot of the time and not get bogged down in the difficulties of life. I could easily gloss over the feelings and experiences in life that were difficult and yet, In choosing to stay in the state of oblivion, I was also keeping my growth at bay. By not increasing my awareness of the dysfunctional behaviors I was engaging in, I couldn't clean them up. I couldn't actually be more of the person that I thought I was being and that I really wanted to be at my core. Awareness for me started to occur when I was seeking for healing and moving forward after my divorce, when I started to look for answers to what had gone so wrong in my previous marriage. Then I could start to see the dysfunctional patterns.

18:16

So just you being here, listening to this podcast, I know that you are in a place where you want to be more aware, where you are not okay with the status quo of what is your life and relationship and that you want healthier, more intimate relationships in your life. Learning to take this information and see yourself more clearly through these lenses, learning to understand the impact of your own dysfunctional behaviors, that is a huge first step to having greater self-worth and better relationships.

18:52

So here's what showing up as an equal really looks and sounds like: not holding on to back burner issues because you think it will rock the boat or make the other person mad. It might be uncomfortable to bring up your back burner issues and that's okay. When we see ourselves as equals, we understand that each person's point of view matters. Each person's feelings matter, even if they're different than ours. Equal looks like recognizing that the other person is capable of hearing difficult things. Just because they might have a lot of stress at work doesn't mean that your stress doesn't matter. Thinking that it will overload them is a bit of a one-up position. Right? They can't handle the truth. Right? If they are your partner, you showing up in your life. Equal means that you talk about your struggles even if they have struggles going on. They don't have to fix your struggles and you don't have to fix theirs.

19:49

In fact, trying to fix the other person's struggles is getting in their lane. But we have to recognize that one person's struggles are not more important than the other person's. Equality looks like showing up in owning your own energy. We don't go into blaming or accusing or attacking. That is one-up thinking and behavior. Equality is offering the grace for them making human mistakes. It is assuming best intent rather than worst intent. Equal looks like recognizing that their experience and their interpretation of the experience are just as valid as yours, even though you may have very different recollections. We've talked before about how studies show that 60% of our memories are incorrect, which means both of you have a lot of incorrect you ideas going around in your head. Our brains don't need to have perfect recall. They need to make meaning of experiences so they will change many of the details that we remember in order to have it make sense in our brains. When we don't allow the other person's brain to have changed the memory to make meaning of it, we have unrealistic expectations that their story will match ours. Of course, they're going to remember things differently. Of course, there will be inconsistencies. That's what our brains do. That doesn't mean they're lying. It means they have a human brain. Equal thinking gives them space to have had their own experience and their own recollection of it. Equal thinking also requires that we acknowledge that they are adult humans who get to make whatever decision they want.

21:34

They get to have whatever relationship they want with your children. That is their right as a parent. You don't get a say unless they're being abusive. But that's not the arena we're talking about today. Your spouse, this other person, as an adult gets to show up however they want to. If they want to have a strange relationship with one of your children, they get to have that just as you do. This other person gets to be whatever person they choose to be. It's not your job to judge them or try to fix them or correct them. It's just your job to stay in your lane and learn how to love and accept and support them the best you can. That's what equals do. Equal thinking accepts that they will make mistakes and doesn't make their mistake mean anything about you. It's just part of them figuring out life, just like it is for you when you make mistakes. We don't judge their mistakes. We don't expect them to always show up with a perfect response and never have a negative thought or a challenging day. We accept their humanity. We even embrace their humanity.

22:47

And rather than getting freaked out when they bring a new scary idea to us, or tell us about how they showed up a little sketchy in a situation, we get curious and we provide a safe space for them to be vulnerable with us, to talk it out, to figure it out. We let them know that we love and support them in their journey. When I look back at my previous marriage, I did not show up as an equal. It seems I was always vacillating between one-upping and one-downing and very, very rarely stepping into equality. And I know it had so much to do with the demise of my marriage. And as I work with clients, they are often surprised when I point out one-up and one-down behaviors because they've never realized that that's what they were doing. And once they start cleaning up these behaviors and showing up more as an equal, their relationships start to shift in amazing and positive ways. I've had clients on the verge of divorce who when they start showing up as equals have seen their marriage become something very different, a place where they no longer harbor resentment and anger, a place where they want to stay and figure it out rather than cutting ties and walking away.

24:01

And I've had clients who don't want to get divorced but are super unhappy with the state of their marriage. They view their spouse as dismissive, unkind, selfish, and even a jerk. And yet when we discuss their one-up and one-down behaviors and they start to clean them up and start showing up more equally, it is incredibly amazing how many of those spouses suddenly become more kind and selfless and attentive and aware. Shocker when we show up as equals that they feel like they're being treated as an equal and they show up differently as well. Our brains use one-upping and one-downing to protect us from perceived threats and yet so much of what our brains perceive as dangerous just isn't. And listening to that part of our brain, or even more sketchy, not listening but just acting from a place of unawareness, is destroying our relationships one dysfunctional thought at a time. When we can take control of our brains and think on purpose and show up on purpose as equals, things can shift pretty quickly. Or they can become really clear quickly about how your spouse is going to show up or not show up in the relationship.

25:22

But here's the thing, you showing up as an equal is what you have control over and it is an amazing way to step into and acknowledge our self-worth and even embrace our self-worth if that is a struggle for you. This is all part of our brain, of growing up and I love it. I love growing into this space. It just feels so amazing to start being the person that I always thought that I was in my head that I wasn't. And so understanding how to step into this equality has made all the difference and it is making all the difference in my relationship with Sione. It's a completely different relationship than what I had before and also a completely different relationship than what he had before as he's also learned to step into equality in a marriage.

26:19

Okay, that's good stuff, right? Okay, if you are interested in working with me one-on-one, helping me help you see where your dysfunctional patterns are lying. This is what I'm really good at. I am great at helping you do this, great at helping you have better relationships. You can go to tanyahale.com, you can click on the "free consultation" tab and you can set up a time and we will sit down and we will talk about coaching. And I'm going to extend the time to longer. Right now it's at 30 minutes. I'm still working on the time that I feel is necessary, but I also want to just start doing some really good coaching with you when you call for a consult. Really helping you have an experience to get you started on your journey. And then whether you choose to work with me or not, you've got some good tools. If you choose not to work with me, you've got a good tool, a good place to start. If you choose to work with me, then we've already started our process. So go to tanyahale.com and sign up for a free consult. That would be fabulous.

27:24

And again, if you're interested in the intimacy discussion group that I want to start, I'm not sure when I will do that, shoot me an email, you can do that on tanyahale.com as well. Go to the "contact me" button and just let me know. And if I have enough interest in that, then I will move forward on that because that sounds fascinating to me. So that's going to do it. Have a really, really amazing Christmas, a great holiday week and an amazing new year. And I will talk to you next week. See ya. Bye.

28:01

Thank you so much for joining me today. If you would love to receive some weekend motivation, be sure to sign up for my free "weekend win" Friday email, a short and quick message to help you have a better weekend and position yourself for a more productive week. Go to tanyahale.com to sign up and learn more about life coaching and how it can help you get to your best self ever. See ya.