How Shame-Bound Needs Deteriorate Our Relationships & Self-Esteem (And How To Break The Cycle)

hey guys I'm Heidi PRI welcome back to my Channel or welcome if you're new here this month on this channel we've been talking about self-esteem and today I want to get really into the nitty-gritty details of how believing that your needs are unimportant or destructive inside of intimate relationships can erode both our sense of self-esteem and our relationships themselves so for a lot of this month we've been talking about self-esteem in a very individ ual istic way so what we can do and what we can work with inside of our own self-concepts and our own

set of beliefs about our s and the world that help us gain a sense of integrity and self-respect but all of us are social beings who exist inside of relationships and who grow through relationships So today we're going to get into a particular wound that I think holds a lot of people back from developing a sense of self-esteem around their ability to be a healthy partner in Intimate connections and that belief is the belief that our needs or our wants particularly when they are in conflict with someone else's are inherently bad or wrong and this

is a belief that I believe is quite common for people who have either complex PTSD so early relational trauma fearful avoidant attachment Styles who've played the role of the family scapegoat or a number of other early developmental mental wounds that have essentially caused you to start thinking of needs and desires inside of relationships as a Zer sum game so when we are thinking of something as a zero sum game essentially what we're doing is believing that one person's gain is necessarily the other person's loss so if I have a need inside of a relationship I

might have this inherent idea that if it conflicts with a need my partner has we have to figure out who need is going to Prevail or if I have a desire that conflicts with my partner's desire I might think that it's only possible for one of us to end up satisfied and the reason why we might develop a belief like this is because it may have been true for us in our early environments so we may have found ourselves consistently in situations where we were let's say shamed for having specific needs or wants or where

we were consistently told we were selfish for asserting what we need or want rather than having an explanation given to us about why that need or want couldn't be satisfied so what I want to do today is first get really clear on how this belief we may have developed that having needs or wants that conflict with the needs and wants of people close to us makes us a bad person is absolutely a self-fulfilling prophecy that only leads to further deterioration in our idea of ourselves as capable and competent Partners whether that means partners in an

intimate relationship a romantic relationship or even a close friendship or a work relationship but essentially any scenario where two or more people are heavily relying on each other so we're essentially talking about what happens when our needs themselves and our desires become shame bound if you don't know what I mean when I say the term shame bound I will link a couple of videos in the description of this one that go over the concept of toxic shame and shame bound emotion but what we're working with here is essentially the idea that there is something wrong

bad or flawed with you for having needs and after we talk about how this plays out we are going to get into how to do it a different way so how to approach your needs getting met in a relationship through a more secure framework where each person's needs are not in competition with each other and where it is a positive sum game so where win-win Solutions can easily be found so without further Ado we're going to get into a very clear overview of why the belief that having needs in a relationship makes you a bad

person becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy that can be broken so we're going to start with this belief itself so you enter into a relationship of any sort with this idea that is almost always unconscious if I have a want or need that is in conflict with my partners it means I'm a bad person and then what inevitably happens at some some point in the relationship a want or a need you have that is in conflict with what your partner wants or needs arises and when that need arises one of several things might happen the first thing

that might happen is that need makes it into your conscious awareness and this is not always going to be the case particularly when we're dealing with things like avoidant attachment strategies or complex BTSD and triggers those needs can be heavily repressed and we're going to talk about that after the fact but in the situation where the need does make it into our conscious awareness and we believe that it makes us a bad person to want something that is different from what this person who we are committed to or in relationship with wants the first option

we have is to punish ourselves internally for being aware of that want or need so to kind of double down on that belief that I am such a selfish and bad person whose wants are not as valid as other people's or whose needs are selfish relative to other people's and then we can double down on people pleasing so giving our partners more and more of what they want while hiding and obscuring what we want so that our partners don't see that we are bad people which is what we believe about ourselves the problem is that

this often turns into resentment in the long term because the more that we are pushing down our own wants and needs and satisfying our partners the more frustrated we internally become because of course what we want to need is not getting seen or acknowledged the other option is that we could unconsciously or consciously villainize the competitive need so if we see our partner as having a need that is in competition with ours if we can convince ourselves that our partner's need is bad or wrong it means we are allowed to have our need and so

this can breed a sense of unconscious competition between partners for getting their needs met which often leads to a sense of guilt or betrayal depending upon whether or not we win or lose that fight so we might get our way and then feel guilty about it or we might fight for our need and lose which might lead us to feeling betrayed by our partner so neither of these are ideal outcomes another thing that might happen when we have a want that's in competition with someone else's arise is that we might partially but not entirely repress

it so what that means is that we may have some inkling inside of our relationship that ooh I'm not really comfortable with the direction that this is going in or maybe with the pace that the relationship is moving at or with certain compromises that my partner wants me to make but I have this core belief and again this is happening unconsciously that to be in relationship means to suppress my own wants and needs and to cater to my partners so there might be this unconscious contract that at one point in your life you made inside

of your own mind and body that goes to be in close connection or to be in an intimate relationship means I have to suppress my needs and I have to cater to my partners the problem is that your partner might not have the same contract so they might be consistently expressing their needs and wants and assuming that if you're not expressing yours it's simply because you are genuinely aligned with theirs and you might start to see their expression of their own needs and wants as a violation of this intrinsic contract that you have inside your

own mind that goes to be in relationship you have to suppress your authentic wants and needs and you might start to feel like this is so unfair why do they get to say what they want and what they need why do they get to call all the shots when I can't say what I want or need not realizing that that's actually a condition you have placed on yourself and that your partner might not have any idea you're operating within so this can once again lead to a sense of resentment if you perceive your partner to

be breaking that rule that you yourself are so diligently adhering to inside of your own mind the other thing that might happen as a result of this implicit contract is that you might start to feel as though you deserve some form of reward for repressing all your wants and needs when again the other person might have no idea that you are doing that so to kind of highlight what this might look like I always have this memory come up of someone I once knew who invested in this business and started really working themselves to the

bone on this particular project that their business partners were really interested in but the longer longer they went on with this project and the more work that they did on the project the more miserable they became and a big part of that was because this project was not something that this person actually wanted to do they felt that they were repressing a lot of their natural energy and interest in order to do this project and so over time they started burning out the longer they worked on it but they also started to develop more and

more resentment towards their co-workers even when their co-workers were doing way more of the work and eventually this person came to the conclusion that the reason they were feeling so resentful was not because they were doing more work than other people but because they were suppressing more of themselves in order to do the work and there was a part of them that was just desperate for recognition for recognition of how hard they were working to keep their authentic self and their authentic Tendencies and the ways that they liked to approach work at Bay but none

of their co-workers had any idea that this was the case for them because they hadn't said so they hadn't started out the business relationship by being clear on how they liked to do business and how they liked to take on projects and what types of work were exciting for them versus what weren't they had gone in with this implicit idea that to be in a close connection and in this case it's a professional connection meant to suppress the things that you like or want or are interested in and to do things other people's way but

then once again there is that expectation that they would be rewarded for that in some way when in reality in a business setting we get rewarded for the value of what we produce and because this person was stifling all of their natural energy they weren't producing things of Great Value so it became this self-defeating Loop where the more victimized they felt the less they were able to produce and the less they were able to produce the less reward they had and the less reward they had the more Vic VI imized they felt and this is

in many ways the exact same type of loop we can get stuck in in close relationships so I am suppressing so much of me to be with you but you don't know that but the more I suppress the more dead inside I become and the more dead inside I become the less my partner probably likes me or feels like engaging with me because my energy is now very stifled and weird and maybe I'm getting a bit depressed but the more that I'm stifling the more kind of unconsciously entitled I de to some sort of compensation

for how hard I am working to hold myself back and to hold back my own needs and wants and this can once again lead to a deep sense of resentment and we might have no idea how we ended up with that deep sense of resentment because all of this is happening on a largely unconscious level if this is a product of attachment wounding or trauma we might not have any idea of the fact that it's even possible to feel alive live and engaged inside of our relationships we might think that it is a necessary tradeoff

to abandon ourselves in order to be close to people and the people who end up paying the price for that are both us and the people we're close to who we might be subtly punishing or acting passive aggressive towards because they're not appreciating us for how much of ourselves we are holding back when in reality that was never the agreement that they wanted to enter into they may have actually wanted to hear more of our descent inside of the relationship to see more of our authentic wants and needs and experiences and for us to bring

more of the core of who we are into the relationship even if it causes conflict because conflict can be a really powerful tool for bringing people closer so there's a very deep irony here around what gets lost when we suppress our needs to stay in close connection with people of course there are relationships where both people make this contract and they somewhat miserably live together forever but for those who air more secure bringing yourself and your wants and your desires and your needs and your conflicts into the relationship are all tools for building more intimacy

which is what we're going to talk about in the latter half of this video but the last thing we're going to go over quickly is what happens if you have a need or a want arise that's in conflict with your partners but you have more or less fully repressed that nether one so this is often what we see with people who have more avoidant patterning there's this thing that happens early on where they kind of decide without realizing that they've decided this inside of their minds that relationships can't really provide them with the emotional feedback

that they need to feel whole so there's this sense of disconnecting energetically from the idea of close relationships as a place where one's needs or wants could be realized in the first place so they might have conscious ideas about what they want out of a relationship maybe they want companionship want to partner they want to do what's kind of socially sanctioned which is settle down and start a family but they think of their needs as entirely their own to fulfill and it doesn't even occur to them that they could have interpersonal needs that could be

satisfied through a relationship and so of course this also becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy when we enter into relationships without an awareness of what our relational needs are or what we want to take from the relationship what ends up happening is we hold ourselves responsible for complete and total self-regulation so taking care of everything on our side of the fence but then we start to realize that our partner has needs that they might be perfectly comfortable expressing and that can go a number of different ways one it can lead to an intense sense of pressure so

this feeling of relationships are a burden when I'm in relationship I have to tend to all of my own problems and regulate all of my own emotions and now I also have to do do this for another person and this other person's needs can also serve as a threat to the things that are keeping me self-regulated so maybe they want more of my time and maybe I don't want to be very flexible with my schedule because the way that I've built up my life keeps me heavily regulated and this person imposing their needs into my

life is now starting to threaten what I do to keep myself feeling okay so keeping up with the demands of self-regulation and regulating another person can start to feel like an incredible sense of crushing pressure and that pressure if it reaches a boiling point can lead to the need to disconnect from the relationship which consciously is just going to register as the need for space the need to pull back the need to do something to relieve oneself from the overwhelm of tending to two people's needs without taking any significant form of co-regulation out of the

relationship because what secure people know is that when you enter into relationship what you're doing is figuring out how and where you can co-regulate with each other so you no longer need to do 100% of the things that you are doing to keep yourself regulated prior to being in the relationship you're still going to want to have a lot of that online and that's important but making room for a relationship means being willing to have some of your needs met interpersonally and in exchange meeting another person's needs interpersonally but if you have no idea that

that's possible because you've never done that or felt that or been able to take significant and meaningful things out of a close relationship that's not even going to be on your radar so you might kind of work to meet multiple sets of needs until you get overwhelmed notice a need for space and that might lead to a temporary or permanent abandonment of the relationship because you aren't aware that there's another way to go about it the other thing that might happen if you've repressed your interpersonal needs is that you might have a lot of contempt

for most people who you try to date because you might see anybody doing anything other than perfectly meeting 100% of their own needs as someone who is needy and incompetent when in reality you might just be working with someone who has healthy relating skills and who understands that relationships are about finding someone whose needs you like meeting in some ways and vice versa and joining forces together because it's something that's mutually beneficial for both of you because that's a more enjoyable way to spend your life than being on your own and meeting all of your

own needs but again if this is the opposite of the worldview that you've internalized you might see even very secure people as very clingy and needy which might lead to a lot of contempt as the relationship goes on and contempt is absolutely a killer of intimacy because as soon as we have contempt for someone we're no longer seeing them as on our level and as someone who we could have a healthy given take with we're looking at them as someone who needs to be taken care of which is once again not a all a recipe

for healthy intimacy and ultimately all of this leads to a power imbalance inside of relationships because if one person believes that they're completely responsible for themselves and the other person's needs now they're kind of holding all of the cards in the relationship they're not taking anything out of it in a significant energetic way and so the other person probably doesn't feel particularly valued or respected which once again is pretty important for having healthy relationships so all of these things if we look at the Endo of all of these patterns of belief that all stem from

that same idea I am a bad person if my wants and needs are in conflict with my partners well this belief is actually intended to help us check ourselves so we probably formed it early on in life because we were raised in an environment where in some way needs were a zero some game this belief that we think is keeping us in Integrity is accidentally and totally unconsciously leading us to all of these results at the bottom of the chart here abandonment contempt power imbalances resentment self-punishment villainizing our partners for having normal wants and needs

and all of this ends up deteriorating our relationships over time and when our relationships consistently deteriorate over time and we don't understand why often it brings us right back to that core belief that I am inherently bad or wrong something about me is just flawed or broken in a way that causes other people distress if they get close to me and it might feel like the most counterintuitive thing in the world to believe that actually the problem is we're not bringing enough of ourselves into relationship that we're not putting enough of our needs wants and

authentic desires on the table but what we're going to do now is look at what happens when we do start doing that so when we start shifting that internal belief seeing our own needs and wants as valuable and actually vital to maintaining the health of a relationship and start acting based on that belief so this is where we start shifting from thinking of relationships as a zero sum game to thinking of them as a positive sum game so starting to believe that in relationship the whole is greater than the sum of the parts so when

you stop pitting yourself unconsciously against your partner and trying to figure out whose needs are going to get met you can actually start working together to find Creative Solutions for meeting both of your needs in a way that is more powerful than what you may have individually arrived at if either one of you had won that needs competition game so we're going to switch out this core belief that it's bad and shameful and wrong to have needs or wants that conflict with your partners to a much more neutral one which is that it is normal

to have needs and wants that conflict with your partners or with other peoples not good not bad just normal just a thing that happens that's just part of being alive it happens to every couple to every group of people to every family unit there are inevitably many many times where people's wants and needs conflict with each other and that doesn't make anybody involved inherently selfish bad or wrong it's just a fact of being alive and existing in Social environments so when we take the shame out of this and when we just look at it as

a neutral fact of life what happens is now when a want or a need arises for us that's in conflict with the wants or needs of the people around us we can relax and we can accept that something perfectly normal is happening so we settle into that I'm okay worldview and what we can actually do here is start looking at that need or that want or that perspective that we have that's in conflict with someone else's as just a piece of a greater puzzle well holding the reality that our partners or our family members or

whoever it is that we're in conflict with has a different piece of the puzzle and if we want anything really generative to come out of this we're going to have to be willing to put all of them on the table without framing it as a competition so when our wants and needs are not shame bound what we're able to do is just go to the people we're close with and let them know in a calm and neutral way hey there's somewhere where we're not aligning here here's my perspective can I also hear yours can you

let me know more about what your wants and needs and values are in this area and this is the internalization of that your okay worldview right so to be securely attached means to have a positive representation of both self and other internalized so just as much as you believe my wants and needs do not make me wrong or bad or shameful you also understand that other people's wants and needs even when they're in conflict with yours don't make them wrong or bad or shameful it just presents a problem that the two of you can work

on solving together and so once you have both perspectives really fleshed out and on the table you can enter into discussion and negotiation which are skills that you probably did not learn if you grew up in a dysfunctional family dynamic where needs were competitive instead of looking at and spending time with all of the individual wants and needs you may have gone immediately into attacking each other and trying to figure out who could dominate the other whereas in a secure Dynamic it's more about figuring out what Creative Solutions you can come up with by putting

all of that information out there so I think I've told this story in videos before but I'll never forget the first more secur leaning person I ever dated when I was still deeply in my fearful avoidant patterning who looked at me one day and said hey I've noticed that you seem to always think you have to have the answer in an argument but to me it feels like if we just both talk about what we want we might be able to find some third solution that neither of us was originally thinking of and that kind

of blew my mind because it was a fundamental change in the way that I approached conversations about needs in my mind every conversation about needs was a competitive conversation it never occurred Ur to me that we could align look at both of our needs and wants and kind of put our heads together to find a solution that neither of us was able to see independently but in Secure Dynamics this is exactly what happens through the process of exploring each other's needs we develop empathy for each other and inside of that empathy we're able to arrive

at more embodied relational decisions that truly work for both people because neither is devaluing the other's needs so there's a sense of equality which can only come out of Dynamics where we feel as though we are truly being valued and valuing the other in relatively equal measure and through that equality comes a sense of appreciation for yourself and the other and when we have that deep empathy and appreciation for each other we want to find those win-win Solutions we're not looking at the other as the enemy we're looking at the other as a person who

we care about and love and want to find a way to work with and there is a sort of deep irony to the fact that the way we arrive at this place of empathy is through first empathizing with our own needs and seeing them as inherently valuable and okay and it's only once we've given ourselves deep permission to have needs to have desires to have things that we want regardless of whether they are in alignment with what other people want that we're able to hold that same empathy for other people's desires values and needs needs

and when we have that Mutual sense of appreciation and reverence for each other's perspectives then we're able to arrive at much better and in some cases almost magical seeming solutions that we didn't see before and this is where we really start to grow through intimacy and through our relationships because until we are actually energetically open to another person and to their perspectives and experiences that differ from ours we aren't really able to allow ourselves to be changed through relationship it's something that we just aren't particularly open to if we are spending all of our time

defended and when we start to see the beauty of being changed through relationship and what can happen when we put our authentic selves on the table and are met by another person who's able to do the same is we start to see how beautiful it is to not be so fixed in our own identities and to be open to other people's inflence influence and the more that we open ourselves up to that the more our self-esteem ironically begins to grow because we see that we are not the only ones holding all the cards that we

don't have to be responsible for every decision in our lives and for making sure that we get everything right and when we can relax into that sense of interdependence it makes us feel safer more relaxed and more okay in the world and it also reminds us that we are capable of compromise and of giving deeply to relationships which is a wonderful thing for our self-esteem and a wonderful thing for our growth in general so this process is one that needs to be learned and practiced over and over and over again it starts with becoming aware

of when you have a repressed need inside of a relationship so you might notice it when you start feeling resentful that might be the time to step back and go which kind of implicit contracts have I projected onto this relationship that are not getting fulfilled and that I'm feeling resentful over it might mean checking yourself when you're feeling really defensive or like you're in competition with your partner and asking yourself what would it mean if it were just okay that they have one need and I have a different need and what if this was not

a zero sum game what if one of us didn't have to win this competition but what if we just allowed all the facts to be what they are and gave ourselves the gift of putting all of our needs and wants on the table and seeing what happens when we spend time exploring each other's without any attachment to outcome it might mean noticing when we see Power imbalances in our relationship or when we're starting to feel contempt towards our partner what am I believing I can't possibly get out of this relationship that I think I do

need to give and it might mean undoing a lot of the really deep core beliefs we have about what it means to be in relationship in the first place so like everything the more we work through our attachment wounds our developmental challenges our trauma triggers the easier all of this work becomes but for today I just want to draw our attention to the fact that this very belief that we think is keeping us so safe and that is protecting our integrity this belief that our needs make us bad might actually be deteriorating it and this

might be the starting place for changing the way that we are showing up in relationships ironically believing that our needs and wants and desires and authenticity matters is often the kindest thing we can do for ourselves and other people in the long run all right I'm going to leave this at that for today as always let me know in the comments what's coming up for you as you go through this video I love you guys I hope you're taking care of yourselves and each other and I will see you back here again really soon [Music]