00:00 

Hey there. Welcome to Intentional Living with Tanya Hale. This is episode number 334, "Sense of Self and Marriage." 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. 

00:22 

Alright, hello there, my friends. Welcome to the podcast today. As always, just happy to be here with you. So happy to share with you content and information that has literally changed my life, and I don't use that literally lightly. The life that I am living now with these tools, with these concepts, with the understanding that I have, with the application of them, is nothing that was even available to me before I found all of these tools and all of this information. And I'm so glad that I get to share it with you, because it does make a huge difference. And I just hope that you are taking time to apply these, take time to find someone else who likes this kind of content and discuss it with them and talk with them about it, and your own insights will help this to come more alive for you. This is just good, good stuff. 

01:16 

So as we are talking, my holiday classes have gotten started, and I will be starting some classes around the new year, so you're going to want to make sure that if you are interested in looking at those, that you are signed up for my email, and you can just go to my website, tanyahale.com. There is a pop-up that will happen to ask if you want to be signed up for the "weekend win." That comes out most weekends, and it's something that's meant to be read in two minutes or less. It's a quick read, great, great information. As well as when I have classes going on, you'll be one of the first people to find out about them. 

01:52 

The thing that I love about the classes...there's a couple of things. One, it makes coaching so much more affordable for you if you don't want the expense of one-on-one coaching. One-on-one coaching can be a little bit pricey sometimes for some more than others, obviously, but it's a great price option if you're interested in coaching but don't want the expense of the one-on-one. But on top of that, even more important I think than the price, is the fact that we have discussions and concepts talked about in group coaching that that are just different than what we do on one-on-one coaching. You come to class, you have podcasts to listen to, questions to consider, and then we come to class and we discuss them and you get to hear other people's point of view, how other people are applying this in their lives. Sometimes we talk about people's specific situations if they're comfortable bringing them up and you get to see coaching in real life. You get to see how it's working, and it's a brilliant brilliant opportunity to grow in your understanding of the concepts and what's going on as well. So not only is it a much easier price point for many people, but it also is a really great option. 

03:07 

I have many clients right now who are in my group classes who I have done one-on-one work in the past with, and they love both of them. And they talk about how one-on-one was just incomparable in what it was able to contribute to their lives and help them see and understand. But then they do these group classes and they're like, "oh, and I thought I was doing really great and now I'm seeing things and understanding things and putting pieces together that I didn't before." And so they're both just really, really great options. This is just a way that I'm really trying to expand the accessibility of the content that I share. This podcast is a great, great way to get free content and to understand these concepts. But when you get in groups, when you get on one-on-one coaching, it really is a different world. And a different connection that your brain is going to make. And you're going to see and understand these concepts at deeper and deeper levels that are going to make a big difference in how you can apply them to your lives. 

04:06 

So check those classes out about mid-December. Those will be up on the website and ready to sign up for. You can see what I've got when they're going to be available, and hopefully we can find something that fits for you. And if you have an idea for  a class that you would love, or maybe you have a group of six or eight people and you're like, "we all want to take a class on this," this would be a time for us and we'll fill up a whole class for you. Get in touch with me. I would love to do something like that. If you have a full group of people that want to take a class, that would be super fun and exciting for me. And then you can get together with a bunch of people that you love and adore and we can dig deep into these concepts together. So whatever of that works for you, let's chat. Let's get some work done, shall we? And I promise you, this is work with a capital W because this stuff is challenging and hard to implement. 

05:03 

So all that being said, let's go ahead and jump into today's topic, sense of self and marriage. So we've covered some good stuff so far regarding our sense of self, and today is going to be no exception. So we're diving into how a strong sense of self and a reflected sense of self show up in our marriage relationships. So this is an important concept because a strong sense of self allows us to show up confident, not seeking validation, and allows us to be secure when challenging things come up, as they inevitably do and will. While a reflected sense of self is insecure, it makes things that the other spouse, we make it all about us if we have a reflected sense of self and it looks to the other person to define who they are, what they want, and how to proceed. Like my sense of self is based on how other people see me, how other people perceive me, and treat me. If we are truly to create an equal partnership, which is what we're all going for in our marriages, it's important that we clean up these reflective sense of self behaviors and join with our spouse, confident and secure, able to create a safe space for differences and challenges, which is that secure sense of self. 

06:15 

So let's dig in. I think it is so fascinating that humans, both men and women, are wired for connection. We thrive when we are in safe, connected relationship, and marriage is a situation where the much sought after intimate connection is available to us. And yet so much of our social conditioning actually puts us in an adversarial stance with connection in our marriage relationships. When we can start to understand the social conditioning that leaves us struggling with our sense of self, we can finally start to clean up the mess in our marriages. 

06:52 

So as we've talked about before, as women, our sense of self has been directly and negatively impacted by the social conditioning that we need to play small, that we need to not have wants and needs and not be honest in telling the truth about who and what we are and what we want because nobody wants a woman who speaks her mind, right? Nobody wants a woman who is strong and capable, right? These are the social conditioning ideas that we were given. Men's social conditioning has taught them that needing connection is weak, that being in touch with their emotions and allowing themselves to actually feel them is something that real men don't do because nobody wants a man who cries and has fears. So these are the social conditionings that we have received and they are killing our relationships until women step into themselves by being honest and men step into themselves by feeling and expressing emotions. 

07:56 

Real intimacy and connection that we crave will be left standing out in the cold. Real intimacy in our marriages requires that we one, have the ability to accept and fully love the other person, warts and all, and that two, we are able to engage in the repair process when dysfunction occurs, as it always does and will. And yet both of these things, accepting and loving another, and engaging in repair, cannot happen when a person is struggling with their sense of self. 

08:26 

So we're going to dive into these two concepts a little bit deeper and see how they work around sense of self. So as we've talked about in the last few episodes, having a strong sense of self is the key to engaging in healthy relationships. When we struggle to love ourselves, we will always struggle to love others and even accept love from others. And when we struggle to accept ourselves, fully accepting others is almost impossible. When I have a reflected sense of self, I am dependent upon others to make me feel good, strong, and empowered. And when the other person in the relationship is not available to do that for me, for whatever reason, I will feel weak, insecure, disempowered. And in that space, I don't have the capacity to love and support the other person in their struggles. 

09:19 

In that space, we become too self-centered on our own failings and our own insecurities. So when our spouse puts a problem on the table, we will have a strong tendency to make it all about us, to undercut ourselves and our capacity to be a supportive spouse. Because with an underdeveloped sense of self, if our spouse isn't praising and adoring us, if they're not actively pumping air into our ego balloon, if they present a problem instead of a good couple of pumps, we start to lose air.  We will assume the problem is all our fault, and maybe that our spouse thinks it's all our fault. We will start to degrade and denigrate ourselves for all of that. We feel scared and unimportant. And from this space, we question our worth and our value, and then we can tend to become a little graspy, needing assurance that we are important. 

10:18 

So what does this do to our ability to love and accept the other person and what they're putting on the table? It makes it almost impossible. And what does it do to our ability to move into healthy repair processes? Again, it makes it almost impossible because every problem gets turned inward as a reflection of our self-worth, as a measure of our value as a human. And when we are inwardly scrambling to feel footing in this area, we don't have the capacity to focus on the other person, to support them in their struggle, to give them a safe space. We also don't have the capacity to move into healthy strategies and tools because our fear and insecurity hijacks our system and throws us into emotional deregulation. 

11:14 

So being able to keep our emotional balance very often depends upon our sense of self. When we have a struggling sense of self and when the other person is not available to help regulate us, to make us feel strong and confident, loved and important, we will begin to flounder. We will panic in the feeling of not being enough, of not being valuable, and we become emotionally unavailable to listen to the other person, to create a safe space for them to struggle, to put their own things on the table, and to move into strategies that will create healing and understanding. 

11:50 

And when we start to feel this emotional deregulation, a very common go-to is to start trying to control the other person. This is because trying to regulate the emotions of the people around us is an indirect way of trying to regulate our own emotions. So I've said it this way before. If we can get the other person to change, then we don't have to do the work to change ourselves. Because of course we will want the other person to change. That's so much easier than figuring out our own emotional deregulation and managing our thoughts that are throwing us into a tailspin. 

12:30 

So David Schnarff in his book, oh gosh, what's the book? Intimacy and Desire, he says it this way, "if you can't regulate your own emotional temperature, you'll regulate everyone around you to keep yourself comfortable. Think of a parent who can't control his temper or anxieties. Everyone else in the family has to act accordingly to keep him calm. Your inability to hold on to yourself upsets others' emotional balance. The more your reflected sense of self drives you and the more you look to others, the more others will feel oppressed and controlled. The more you try to regulate yourself through others, the more you trigger their refusal to submit to tyranny, which is all part of human nature." 

13:22 

So if you have a struggling sense of self, chances are you also have some control issues. When we need anyone else to be, to do, to feel, to think, or act a certain way, for us to feel okay, to feel emotionally regulated, it is an attempt to assuage our own emotional state by controlling those around us. And just how is trying to control your spouse working for you, I would ask? Not so well? Okay, shocker, right? Shocker that it's not working well. Because we all push against someone trying to control us by any means available to us. 

14:04 

And we all have different go-to strategies for protecting ourselves from the would-be controller. Think of the fight, flight, freeze and fawn strategies. We might become aggressive with harsh words or even physically aggressive. Flight, we might leave the room or the house, disappearing for hours or maybe even days depending on the situation to avoid the other person. We might even emotionally just shut down, right? Freeze, we might shut down into ourselves, turn off emotionally, not say anything, hiding in our own emotional corner. Or fawning, we might become passive aggressive, saying one thing and doing another, going into people-pleasing mode, all the while seething underneath and building resentment, all very unhealthy coping strategies when other people are trying to control us. 

15:01 

And this is what happens when I try to control someone else because of my own insecurities. These are things that people naturally do to push against us. So marriage is such a fascinating place to explore our sense of self because inherent in the relationship is the means for bringing up our worst insecurities and fears and making us face ourselves in a way we rarely get to outside of this type of relationship. I remember before I got married the first time, I thought that I was just so patient and kind. And I always was. I didn't have anything that pushed me those boundaries on me. And then after I got married, I  realized, "oh, I'm not so patient and kind," right? And of course, at that point, I blamed it all on him because before he came along, I was patient and kind, which is that's not how it really works. Right? He just showed me my my weaknesses and my struggles. 

16:02 

So here's the other thing, too. Very few, if any of us, have a 100% strong sense of self. We all have parts of us that struggle with wanting or needing the acceptance of others, of wanting validation and shoring up. All of us have situations from our past that get triggered in certain circumstances. And there's nothing wrong with that. It's just our brain and our nervous systems responding to stimuli in patterned behavior ways. When we are paying attention, we can slow down enough to watch ourselves and become aware of these patterns. And then we can understand ourselves better and collect the gold nuggets of information that help us develop a stronger sense of self. Nothing has gone wrong when you have a triggered nerve. Everything has gone right in your brain, alerting you to tender areas that need some tender loving care. So be patient and compassionate when they show up. And use the skills I teach here to be self-reflective, rather than attacking, accusing, criticizing, or blaming the other person, or trying to control them. 

17:12 

So another fascinating bit of info about our sense of self: we intuitively seek out people who have a similar level of sense of self as us. So if we could rate "sense of self" on a scale, let's say you have a 5 out of 10 sense of self. You will gravitate toward others with a 5 out of 10, or close to it, right? A 6 out of 10, or a 4 out of 10. And then we can have a tendency to stoke each other's reflective sense of self. Okay, so here's another great quote from David Schnarz. He says, "innumerable iterations of, 'if you love me you will...' and 'if you love me you won't...' enshrine our expectations that our partner should do whatever it takes to make us happy. It inflates your reflected sense of self when she does something for you that she doesn't really want to do, or gives up something that she really wants." In truth, you probably expect her to sacrifice herself to support yourself. This interaction drives poorly differentiated people's relationships. Reciprocity is a beautiful thing, but if your relationship hinges on it, you're in trouble. 

18:25 

Many couples temporarily establish a high level of intimacy through reciprocal validation but invariably they can't maintain this level once borrowed functioning collapses. Relationships built on other validated intimacy crater when one partner won't accept and validate the other or disclose in kind. Your dependence on acceptance, validation, and empathy from your partner and feeling entitled to it cause emotional gridlock. In long-term love relationships, other validated intimacy is inherently time limited. So, my summary of this: a person with a reflected sense of self will often have a lot of expectations that their marriage partner be responsible for their happiness by conforming to a list of dos and don'ts that help them to feel validated, loved, and important. Every time our spouse does what the list says, we feel valued and of worth. And when our spouse doesn't follow the list, we feel unloved and worthless. 

19:30 

But relationships, when they are first beginning, are a great place for a reflected sense of self to thrive because we are often so caught up in the exciting emotions of a new love interest that we go out of our way to do all the things that would be on their list. And yet, that is unsustainable long term. Because as relationships mature, we just can't always be around to pump up our partner's ego balloon. And though validation is important in strong relationships, it is important for the relationship, not for the person's sense of self. Anytime we rely on the relationship to give us our worth and value, we will find ourselves wanting, unhappy, turning to controlling and dysfunctional behaviors, and damaging the relationship because another person cannot increase our sense of self. That is something that can only happen inside of us. 

20:33 

And relationships in this environment cannot survive. They may not get divorced. But all of us know people who are miserably married until the day that they die. Love just cannot survive the constant need to pump up the other person's ego. Eventually frustration and anger over the constant dependency develop and the resentment boils over into all sorts of destructive behaviors and patterns. 

21:02 

And this goes back to the other thing that healthy relationships need, which is the ability to repair when things go awry. And they will; they always will go awry because we are different people with perspectives, personalities, and preferences that will not always align. And if we feel threatened, and even attacked, every time our spouse shows up with a difference of idea or opinion, we will struggle to move into healthy strategies and tools that will help us move toward resolution. 

21:31 

And yet, if we struggle with our sense of self, this emotional gridlock is exactly what we need to develop a stronger sense of self. This is why relationships are such a beautiful breeding ground for a stronger sense of self when we handle it correctly. Because our partner, a person that we love, will show up with a difference of opinion and we get to learn how to love them better, how to accept their differences. When one partner is vulnerable enough to put a dark and bloody part of their heart on the table, the other person gets to choose how to respond. An underdeveloped sense of self will recoil. They will feel insecure and even push the other person away because they feel threatened and scared, or maybe even disgusted, by what their partner puts on the table. And this is a beautiful opportunity for this person to slow down and explore their insecurities, their disgust, and their fears. 

22:37 

This is the work necessary to step into a stronger sense of self. We come to understand the thoughts behind our feelings, and we learn to question these thoughts to be more reflective of them. And when, even in the thick of feeling insecure, we choose to show up with compassion, with curiosity and kindness to those dark, bloody pieces of heart, we develop a stronger capacity for acceptance and love. And with that, our self respect takes a positive bump. We see ourselves in a more empowered positive light, and we step into a stronger sense of self. We begin to realize that we can think and choose to behave in ways that are loving and kind and supportive, even when it's hard and that we are strong enough to do these hard things. 

23:34 

And this elevates our sense of self. David Schnarff's said it like this, "It's easier to tolerate the inevitable tensions, deprivations, and conflicts of a relationship when you stop seeing them as conflicts with your partner. They arise from two different sides of you, your reflected sense of self and your solid sense of self. The tensions within you and between the two of you drive you to develop your solid, flexible self. To have a quiet mind, calm heart, to achieve grounded responding, and to put forth meaningful endurance." 

24:16 

So let's clarify this with an example. Let's say that your spouse shares that they had an emotional affair 10 years ago. So nothing physical happened, they just moved into a territory that felt dangerous to the integrity of y'all's relationship. They ended it and it hasn't happened again, but it took your spouse 10 years to tell you. Now we all have some reflected sense of self in us, and we all have some strong sense of self in us. Very often in a situation like this, our reflected sense of self will jump to the forefront and will be really loud and really strong. Our reflected sense of self will generally gravitate toward three behaviors. One, it will go into a grandiose, one-up space, a better-than place. We will look down on them, we will get self-righteous about how we haven't ever fallen prey to such a situation. Just this, "I'm better than you, I'm more righteous than you" space. Two, the other way we will gravitate toward, we will go into a place of submission or a one-down, less-than space. We will think that there is something wrong with us, that we are not being a good spouse or they wouldn't have done that. We will start to beat ourselves down and blame ourselves for their behavior. Three, two of them, one we go into one up, one we go into one-down, or the third one, we will withdraw either physically or emotionally or both. We disengage, we lean out from the relationship rather than leaning in and we shut down all communication. 

25:55 

So all three of these reactions are detrimental to our relationship and they are common go-to responses when we have a struggling sense of self. In contrast, a strong sense of self will respond more from a place of self awareness, of slowing down a bit and choosing our response rather than just letting our primitive brain react with those three initial go-to. We will consciously step into deciding how we want to show up in response to this new information. The first three reactions move toward the destruction of our relationship. We're moving into a strong sense of self-response and choosing our behaviors works instead to heal and repair and deepen our relationship. 

26:46 

So when our spouse brings a big issue like this to the table and we let our reflective sense of self run rampant, we will behave in harmful ways because they are not pumping up our ego balloon. But instead presenting us with something that seems to be quickly sucking the air out of our balloon instead, we lose our emotional regulation. Now, I am NOT saying that this would ever be an easy situation to navigate. But when we bring a reflective sense of self to the table, it becomes almost impossible to work through. We become unable to work through the presenter problem, which is the emotional affair and the long held secret of it, because the more pressing problem is our panicking, floundering sense of self. It's like we're in free  all, unable to stabilize ourselves. 

27:39 

And this ends up being the huge fire to problem-solve rather than the emotional affair of our spouse. This is when we find ourselves completely off track and never resolving any real issues because they always circle back to our fragile sense of self. When we can instead bring our strong sense of self to the table and show up in healing and helpful ways. And that doesn't mean we immediately forgive and forget or that we don't have tough discussions because a strong sense of self will have the capacity and the desire for a tough discussion. What it does mean is that we are focused on how we want to show up in response to what they've put on the table, what they've put in our circumstance line. Do we show up with freaking out, ranting and raving, accusing, using and blaming, crying, shutting down, storming out? Or do we acknowledge our hurt, not just for the emotional affair, but also the deception about it for so many years, and also choose to respond with kindness and compassion, generally getting curious and creating a safe space for them to share what they have offered? 

28:52 

When we approach this with a strong sense of self, we will be able to acknowledge our pain around it and show up in alignment with who we want to be. We will be able to recognize that our spouse is showing up vulnerable, choosing to show us their dark side, seeking greater connection and intimacy with us. If we are desperate for our partner's validation, this will be a time that it will be very hard to get it. We need to be able to provide our own validation, our own self-worth, and empowerment that we are strong, that we are capable and confident in who we are, knowing that we are not responsible for their behaviors and with the capacity to offer grace and understanding. 

29:40 

This does not mean that things won't come up that won't be deal breakers or non-negotiables, but we will be able to move into those discussions and decisions from a place of choosing rather than a place of reckless reactivity. So much of this can be summed up in the concept of differentiation, something that is incredibly important in the healthiest of marriages. So David Schnarsch in his book, "Intimacy and Desire," describes differentiation as this: "your ability to keep your emotional balance while interacting in important relationships, being able to be closely connected to another human being while also maintaining independent from them emotionally." 

30:29 

So when we put this into the relationship circle model that I teach, each partner has their own circle. Remember, we've got three circles sitting side by side, touching on the edges. So you are in one end circle and your partner is in the other end circle. They are independent of any other person. You are each completely responsible for who you are, how you grow or don't grow, your happiness, your thoughts, your emotions, your responses and your choices. That is the part of Schnarsch's definition that says, "maintaining independent from them emotionally." So the relationship circle that connects the two people is the, here's part of his definition again, be closely connected with another human being part. We have the ability to bring our whole self into the relationship and maintain our whole being. Our likes, our dislikes, our wishes, wants and needs, our preferences and our personality, and also engage in a connected relationship where we also choose to prioritize the us space, the relationship. 

31:37 

But we don't, and can't, prioritize it over our own sense of self. This strong sense of self allows us to move into the relationship circle confidently and knowing when it is safe, wise, and important to make allowances for the sake of the relationship, while also knowing when it wouldn't be safe, wise, and important. The strong sense of self allows for vulnerability and intimacy in our relationships because we don't get lost or enmeshed in the wants and needs of the other person. We can love and serve them and do amazing things for them without losing the value of who we are as a person, without losing the knowledge that our wants and needs get to be placed on the table in that relationship circle as well. 

32:31 

The stronger your sense of self, the stronger you can show up as an equal partner, the more loving and accepting you can be, and the greater your capacity for problem solving and moving into the inevitable repair work that will always need to be done in our most intimate of relationships. The more you can be self-reflected and self-confront, the greater your sense of self, and then the greater your capacity for the deeply intimate, connected relationship that you crave. This is the work that we get to do. This is why a strong sense of self is so vital in our marriages because we cannot have that deep, intimate, connected relationship without a strong sense of self. We will always sabotage what we're going for. 

33:34 

Figuring this out, stepping into this amazing, strong part of us is all part of the work of growing up, and I love growing up, don't you? That is going to do it for me, my friends. If sense of self is something that is just, you feel like you struggle with it and you don't even know where to start, coaching would probably be a really amazing fit for you to help you get that, and I promise you, you do difficult and tough work now. It will pay dividends for decades to come. I don't know how old you are. I don't know what you've got, but if you've got 30, 40, 50 years left of your life, sense of self is going to make those years so much better for you. Let's do some work. 

34:32 

And if one-on-one coaching is going to help push you into that arena faster and with more strength and more conviction, let's do it. You can go to tanyahale.com. You can sign up for a free coaching session consultation. Let's get some coaching done. Let's get you started on your path. And then we'll talk about coaching. See if it's a good fit, okay? If it is a good fit, then we've got one good coaching session under our belt and we can just use that momentum to keep moving. If you decide it's not a good fit, that's great too. You've got a good coaching session to help give you some awareness that you didn't have before. I love doing these free coaching sessions and I love working with my clients so much. 

35:21 

It just is such an honor for me to be part of your journey regardless of how you're interacting with me. Whether even if all you do is listen to my podcasts or listen to my podcasts and get my email or whether you work in my groups or whether you work with me individually, I thank you. Thanks for letting me be part of your journey. This work is so important to me and it's work that I honestly feel called by God to do. So in whatever way I am able to be part of your journey and help you move towards something healthier and happier and help you be stronger and contribute to the world more in the way that you were born to do, that's enough for me. Thanks for being part of my journey as well. Okay, that's going to do it. Have a great, great week and I will see you next time. Bye. 

36:18 

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.