Superiority And Shame

Hi, welcome to Sex Love Power. I'm your host, Michelle Lizenberry Christensen. I'm a relationship and sex coach who for 24 years has worked with executives and business founders, and by popular demand, I've focused on their intimate relationships for the past dozen or so years as they sought my coaching to push the envelope on how good they could have it in life and in love and in sex. My extraordinary high performance clients have blessed me with a wealth of knowledge about how to create relationships that aren't just successful, but are truly great. This podcast is where I convene the conversations about love and sex that help every listener create those same world class results in your relationships. If you find yourself frustrated by a sense that you have to handle everything in your relationship, that your partner is less an adult than you are, or that they're incompetent or just not trying in certain areas, or if you feel like your partner treats you like an inferior, like you're broken or bad or wrong, this episode is for you. You're not alone. These experiences live in more relationships than you probably realize. Very few couples escape experiencing some of these patterns at some point, and in today's episode, I'm going to give you perspectives and tools that are going to help when these patterns pop up, either for you or for those you care about. I'm going to break down what's really happening when we feel superior to our partner or we behave in ways that are condescending, what's really happening when we feel like we have to win our partner's approval or their satisfaction in order for our relationship to be okay, and how to get on a more even footing when one of you has shifted into an inferior or superior stance. By the time we're done, I want you to have a clear sense of how we can relate to one another on an egalitarian footing, even when we're angry, even when we're asking for something, even when we're apologizing, even when we're working to change a pattern in ourselves for the good of the relationship. I want to liberate every relationship from blame and rejection, from criticism and defensiveness. This episode is one piece of that vision, so let's dive in. First, I invite you to imagine a page with a line drawn on it that goes from top to bottom, and there's a dot in the middle of that line. Think of this as the esteem spectrum. This spectrum describes how you hold your partner in your mind relative to how you hold yourself. Now, if both of you are legitimate, your needs make sense. You're both worthy of respect and care. You're both wonderful and flawed. You both have a right to your own preferences and desires and priorities. You're both making an effort and you're both making mistakes. If all of those are really living true for you in your heart, then your relationship esteem will be on that dot in the middle. This is where your one to one your equals your eye to eye. Nobody's up, nobody's down. Now below the dot, you're in a place where you're dipping into shame. You're holding yourself as less than in relation to your partner. You're looking up to them and talking yourself down. You're going inferior. In this place, you numb yourself to your own worth and dignity, to your rights, to your humanity and your worthiness. You think of yourself as maybe broken or more flawed than your partner. Now above the dot, you're arrogant. You're floating up into grandiosity. You're holding yourself as better than your partner or above them. Here we look down on our partner and hold ourselves as superior. When you go into this place, you numb yourself to your partner's worth and dignity. You numb yourself to their humanity and their worthiness. So let's imagine a time, see if you can recall a time when you were above the dot on this spectrum. When you felt like you were above your partner or you treated them as if their needs or their feelings or their preferences didn't matter, or as if they'd forfeited a right to have a say because of something they'd done. You were in that one up place. What was going on there. While in the moment, it often feels like we're perfectly justified in talking to our partner the way that we are, in thinking of them the way that they are. I mean, they really did screw up. They really did treat us poorly. They really haven't done what we wanted them to do. We really are over functioning. But what's actually happening underneath the surface when we're looking down on our partner, what's really going on is that we are taking a contemptuous stance. We have decided that our own self regard is above our regard for our partner. We are better than them. So we're intrinsically not in connection. We're intrinsically not in love in that place. Now we come by this honestly, I, I know I do. Growing up, I heard a lot of contempt coming from one person to another. And the ways of talking to other people that were modeled sometimes were one up, one down. And you've probably heard a lot in Our culture, a lot of men talking down to women, A lot of women trash talking men, sometimes to their faces, but sometimes just behind their backs. There is a lot of nastiness, a lot of disconnected communication that we all hear modeled. So you may feel really justified in it, like it's just normal. And if what you want is a mediocre relationship, then that may be your normal. But my clients and I are not people who want to have pretty good relationships or want to stand here with our arms crossed waiting for our partners, or who want to stand here with our arms crossed waiting for our partners to do better before we treat them better. We know that doesn't work. We know that we have to come into our hearts, into our bodies, and be able to look our partners eye to eye and come from a place of connection if we want any good to come from our communication. So next time you're in that place, I invite you to imagine that you've floated up above your body and bring yourself down into your body so that rather than looking down on your partner and how awful they are or how much they need to change or how badly they screwed up, and just see them with a softer gaze, eye to eye, you in your body, soft belly, shoulders down, just breathe, open your heart, connect to them. And then if you need to ask them to do something differently or you need to tell them how angry you feel, do that. I'm not saying be a doormat. I'm not saying everything they do is hunky dory. If you're going to be eye to eye. What I'm saying is you're not superior. You are holding yourself in warm regard and you're holding them in warm regard. So what's really going on when you feel like you have to win your partner's approval or win their satisfaction for your relationship to be okay, what's happening when you're one down? So remember on that vertical line, you're below the dot in this situation here, the contempt is not for your partner, it's for yourself. It's thinking they've got something up on you, thinking they're better than you in some way. You've screwed up so badly that you have to earn back your right to humanity, your right to see eye to eye. Maybe you have done something awful. This often happens if people have been unfaithful or if people recognize that they have been ignoring their partners and being workaholic. If you've been engaging in addictive behaviors, there's reason for remorse, there's reason for amends making. But there's not cause for shame. And I say that because shame never does anybody any good. Shame is kind of a hand job for your partner. Hey, I know I did all that stuff, but I'm going to beat myself up about it now. How about that? Well, it doesn't do your partner any good really. You beating you up actually makes you less resourceful, less able to be there for them. So in those situations where you're feeling one down, you're the one putting yourself in a one down position. Imagine pulling yourself up into your body out of the dregs of self abuse that you're in and looking your partner right in the eye with the dignity of someone who may be flawed, may have made mistakes, may feel badly about some of the things that you've done or some of the skills you've been lacking. But who has basic worth and dignity, who's worth loving and worth being loved by? When you come from that place, you're in a much better position to do things differently, to show up the way you want to. The last thing I want to talk about with regard to self esteem and how we're holding ourselves when we go one up or one down. We've talked a little bit about what you can do if you notice you've pulled up above the dot and you're looking down on your partner. We've talked about what you can do if you're below the dot and you've been looking up at your partner and beating yourself down. But how do you set the footing right if your partner's going one down or your partner's going one up and you feel like you're kind of in the dot trying to hold yourself in that healthy esteem way, but they're being either condescending or self flagellating. Well, listening to this episode with them might be helpful. Introduce them to this notion of healthy self regard and partner regardless and let them know that it's really hard to relate person to person. When one of you has gone into either the shame of being below the dot or the grandiosity of being above the dot that we need to be able to see eye to eye in order to truly connect heart to heart. So invite them to come onto even footing with you. You can say, hey, that was pretty condescending. Can we pause? And I want to really honor what you're feeling and what you're needing, but can you say it again in a way that doesn't put me down? Or if they're beating themselves up, you can say Hey, I hear that you're trying to take responsibility, but can you kind of pull up a little bit? Not beat yourself up so much, but standing on your own two feet, the healthy regard for yourself, can you look at what a more resourceful response would be and how you'd like to be now without the beat up? So those are a couple of examples. And this is something that I help my clients with a lot because it's very tempting to go into grandiosity, to go into shame, to waffle back and forth between the two. You know, I might be in both places inside of 10 minutes myself. And it's a skill set to learn, to recognize, oh, whoops, I've gone grandiose, oops, I've gone shamy, and to be able to point it out to your partner in a way that isn't in itself shaming and condescending and patronizing. So my intent, by sharing with you what's really going on when you go one up or one down in your relationship and what to do about it, is that you're going to have the tools to be able to come into an equal footing, a place that's respectful, a place that begins to dismantle some of the pain that you might have experienced in this relationship, in past relationships and in your relationships from your original family. There's so many ways that we relate that are painful and pain inducing. And when we come to see the respect and the disrespect, the shame and the grandiosity, we can start to correct for those. It's tremendously healing. And I really believe that it heals back in the generations and forward in the generations when we have the inner strength and the presence of mind, the kind of discipline and, and the love to be able to do this sort of rewiring. It's made a huge difference in my own relationship to myself and in my marriage. And I love helping other couples do it because there's nothing that rewrites our painful interactions like finding this eye to eye place. So go try these tools out and I can't wait to hear how it goes. So we can talk lots more about this over in the Conscious Couples Circle, which is my free community on Mighty Networks where we talk about each podcast episode after it happens and go deeper. Based on your shares, your observations and your questions, please come on over there and join us. It's@society.lizenberry.com and you can find that link in the show Notes. Now, if you've enjoyed this episode or other episodes you've heard. What would help me and the podcast immensely is if you would leave a review, particularly in Apple Podcasts, because reviews are a huge help in finding new listeners and growing the positive impact that these conversations can have. So please go leave a review right now with just a couple words about what the show gives you. I would so, so appreciate it. And hey, have you subscribed to the podcast? You're going to want to so that you never miss an episode. Please go to Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen, hit that subscribe button, and that way you're going to always get notifications of the new episodes I put out each week. Thank you so much for listening. I'm Michelle Lisenberry Christensen. This has been Sex, Love Power. I'll be back here next week with the next episode, and until then, may the light within you illuminate the world around you.