Matthew Hussey explains why women stay with partners who don't value them: low self-worth creates cognitive dissonance that leads to rationalizations. He argues that trusting your gut instincts and raising your self-worth are the only ways to break the cycle of mistreatment.
I want to talk today about why he treats you casually. One simple answer is because you let him. We can't stop people behaving badly, but we can decide how we react when they behave badly or when they treat us as lower value than we really are. In that moment, we get to make a decision about whether to stay or to go, whether to say something or be passive. And if somebody is continuing to treat us badly every day, week in, week out, it's because we are allowing them to do so. Now the question is, why do we allow someone to do that? What is it in us that allows someone to keep doing that behavior over and over? One reason we might give is because we really like someone or love them. When we really love someone, we want to be with them. So we'll try and justify their behavior. We'll make excuses for it so that we can still be with them. But of course, this comes down to a deeper thing too. If our self worth is so low that we don't think we're worth more than what they're giving us, we will find a way to stay. Because leaving is too scary. Finding somebody else is too scary. So what now is created in our mind is what's called cognitive dissonance. The state of having inconsistent thoughts, beliefs or attitudes, especially as relating to behavioral decisions and attitude changes. What does this mean in this context? A guy can be doing to you something that if he was doing it to your friend, you would tell her to leave in a heartbeat. But because it's you, you don't take the same advice. And knowing that you're not taking the same advice you would give somebody else. You need to find a special reason, special unique circumstances why you're staying. We say, well, it's because he's really busy, or it's because he has a really important job and he has to focus on that, or it's because of his upbringing. Or if you're particularly, particularly good at these mental gymnastics, you'll say it's because you're particularly understanding and you have a kindness in you that can forgive the things he's doing. See, we'll find all sorts of ways to justify the situation we're in. Instead of being honest with ourselves and saying, if I valued myself more, I would have gone by now. At the very least, I would have had much more frank and honest conversations with this person so that they know my worth too. Because of course, somebody takes their cue from us. If we don't put a high value on ourselves, they don't put a high value on us either. And of course, in a relationship, when we're not communicating honestly about what we don't like and allowing someone to see the repercussions of them not treating us with enough respect, they don't feel any incentive to change. So they keep doing the same behaviors or the behaviors get worse. They keep pushing the boundaries to see what they can get away with. Now what happens is eventually he does something so bad he lies about something so big, or he cheats, or he does something so deeply disrespectful that your cognitive dissonance won't even allow it anymore. You can't reconcile the idea that you are a mentally stable person and would still allow this behavior to go on. So at that point, you leave, you reach a pain threshold and you leave. The danger is at the point of leaving, if your self worth continues to go down, maybe because you look at how long you were in that relationship and you feel stupid for staying in it so long, or you feel like you've wasted so much time and the self loathing that comes with that, maybe because you're on your own now and you don't even feel the significance of having someone in your life and that leads you with time and distance to start thinking, maybe he wasn't so bad, maybe I can't do better. Maybe I deserve that bad treatment because of how much time I've wasted and because I haven't treated myself well enough. So it creates this feedback loop where all of these things play into your low value. And that then allows you to either go back to him again or find somebody else who treats you equally as bad. And we get into these repetitive cycles of having the same behavior over and over again to put up with. So how do you break this cycle? Well, you break this cycle by paying attention to your instincts early on in the relationship, or if you've been in the relationship for years, paying attention to the instincts you've had all along. And what do I mean by instincts? I mean the moments where you feel like something isn't right. Not talking about nitpicking in a relationship. I'm talking about the moments where fundamentally this person isn't treating you the way that you want. There's a simple test for this. When you think about your ideal partner, the man you want to spend the rest of your life with, and how he treats you, the level of worth, the level of value he places on you, is the person in front of you giving you that, or are they valuing you less than your ideal partner? Would see it's not enough to have instincts. Many of us have these gut feelings that we're in the wrong place, that we're making the wrong decisions, that we shouldn't be with this person, but we don't act on them. We continuously act against our instincts. So when people say trust your gut, they're only talking about half of the puzzle. The other half is actually being able to act on your gut is having the strength and the courage and self worth to do what you know you should do. And the irony is of course, that many of us, when our self worth is low, we begin to trust our instincts less. So even our instincts don't give us clear signs anymore because we haven't got the trust in ourselves to make the right decision. The reason I created my retreat program is to solve this problem, to transform people's sense of self worth once and for all. So that not only did it clarify their instincts, not only did they begin to trust their instincts more, but when they had that gut feeling, they actually had the power to act on it. That's how we level up in life. We do things that are frightening, we do things that are scary because we know they're the right thing to do. We know that they are going to improve our quality of life, even if right now they're difficult. But when our self worth is low, we will never make those decisions. And we can waste years of our lives deliberating, debating, not acting on what we know because we don't feel good enough. Here's the reality. I love speaking to you in my videos every week. It's a joy to have this conversation with you and to be part of this journey with you. But I also know that what I do on that program over five days gets to people at a depth that I cannot do here. Those of you that know on some level my self worth isn't changing on its own and I need to do something to level up my life. I cannot waste years more. I want you to apply for this. All you need to do is click the Link. It's matthewhussey retreat.com Tell us why you think you might be a great fit and we'll tell you whether we think the program's a great fit for you. If it's not, no worries. But if it is, it might be the thing that changes everything.
