Category: Self worth

What is self- worth?
The dictionary defines self-worth as “the sense of one’s own value or worth as a person.”

Self-worth is the most critical component of our ability to truly believe in ourselves and live our life aligned with our best qualities. Without a healthy sense of self- worth, doubts and fears can overwhelm our true potential, greatly impacting the quality of our life experience, as well as sabotaging our life’s dreams, vision and purpose.

Although some of us may not be consciously aware that what is keeping us up at night is a sense of self-worth that needs improvement, I am here to tell you that if you and I can focus on one issue with the highest return on your investment, it is self-worth.

The story of how we develop or do not develop self- worth can be a long and painful one.

Join me as I make every effort to organize where your story of self-worth begins, and how we can make the ending the happiest one possible!

What is a healthy relationship?

Love has been the nucleus and heart of human experience throughout the history of mankind. Wars and battles have unraveled under its spell!

Love has touched the souls of many artists, poets, and geniuses, as well as all of us mere folk, who today have established that having a “healthy love relationship” is the number one goal of existence, beyond financial and professional success!

In fact, George Vaillant, the director of the longest longitudinal study of human development, which was designed to uncover the parameters that allow people to live happy and healthy lives, summarized the conclusion of the seventy-five year study with three simple words: “Happiness is love.” (Vaillant, George E. Triumphs of Experience: The Men of the Harvard Grant Study. Cambridge, Mass: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2012.)

Love appears to be so important, yet only a small percentage of us have succeeded in cultivating long-lasting, healthy relationships.

Why are we having such a hard time arriving at successful outcomes in love relationships? What are the real obstacles in the way of grasping the powerful force of healthy relationships? What does a healthy relationship look like?

Here is what I learned from reviewing the most substantiated, evidence-based research and from my own humble experience when it comes to what healthy love is all about.

  1. A healthy relationship involves seeing things for what they really are.

We seem to have this conditioned notion that someday someone will come along that will be our perfect “match.” This person will know just what to say and how to say it with the magical ability to speak our “love language.” This someone will never disappoint us or let us down. This unreasonable expectation can be a real culprit to a healthy relationship, because when we meet really wonderful people that have a lot to offer, they cannot possibly fulfill this unrealistic standard. Then we tend to blame them for our needs not being met.

The end result is rupture of the relationship and an endless search for the phantom “perfect one.” If we look at the definition of the word relate in the dictionary, we will find that “to relate” actually means “to make a connection between two different things.” A healthy relationship involves committing to the practice of becoming better and better at making a connection between our differences with another. If we want a healthy relationship, it’s time we let go of the search for the phantom “perfect one” and turn toward the real people who are here and now willing to hold our hand through the everyday challenges of life.

  1. A healthy relationship requires honoring and embracing how powerful a love connection truly is.

In the aftermath of every failed relationship, we have the tendency to blame love (along with the actual failed relationship or the person) and minimize the importance of love in our life, coming to the conclusion that we are better off without it!

The latest findings in biology and neuroscience clearly confirm that we are hard- wired for connection and that our interactions with loved ones act as regulators in the brain priming our emotions. The more strongly connected we are with someone, the stronger the mutual force. Healthy, positive relationships seem to have a tremendous impact on our nervous system. They contribute to a well- documented diminished-threat-related activation in our brain in the face of a situation that is perceived as stressful, which is linked to powerful benefits in cardiovascular and overall health. In order to be able to cultivate a healthy relationship, we must embrace the power of a secure attachment, recognizing it as the primary drive it truly is and the role it plays in our happiness and health.

  1. A healthy relationship is willingness and commitment to growth. There is no better mirror to our beauty and our unresolved baggage than a love relationship. It is easy to go through life alone, maintaining the facade we have built of who we want the world to think we are. When we choose to be seen for who we really are it can be unnerving and scary.

The opportunity for growth can be found in truly understanding that we are reflexive beings driven by memory. This means that anytime a life situation that is perceived through our five senses awakens negative memories from the past and triggers the emotion of fear, events will start happening without our permission in such a way that we ourselves sabotage a positive outcome of the situation.

A love relationship where the stakes are so high is a potent trigger to past experiences that did not turn out well and resulted in pain. When parts of unresolved trauma are activated, what’s called implicit memory generates negative emotions. Because emotions are so powerfully contagious, if someone talks to you in the way that a parent used to talk to you, it can trigger a reaction in you as though what happened back then is actually happening now.

An example can be shared using capable, intelligent, educated adults that were victims of abuse in childhood. It is well-documented in literature that adult victims of childhood abuse that have not made a coherent story of what happened to them, when depending on another, will have a difficult time regulating their negative emotions and without much cognitive awareness will employ deactivating strategies to take away the felt internal turmoil. That means that even if we are lucky enough to meet a person who has proven their loyalty to us and has done enough to earn our trust, debilitating fears from the past can drive our behavior in the present, in order to sabotage our relationship with them. If we want a healthy relationship, we must be ready to face and understand how our past still keeps us hostage and acts as an insidious culprit to our ability to relate to another in a healthy way.

  1. If we want to have a healthy relationship with another, we must first choose to have a healthy relationship with ourselves.

We all want to profess how healthy we are, and we have a hard time recognizing any parts of us that are actually unhealthy. We want to avoid feeling pain, and it is understandable that we have developed certain patterns of behavior to maintain a sense of internal safety, including being in denial about the things we do that are unhealthy.

But when we are finally motivated to make positive change based on the unhappy results we are getting from our current behavior, we can clearly see what it is that we do that is a true obstacle to all we ever want in life and love.

One great area of fertile ground is our own incongruences—when our words and behavior conflict. This can show up in subtle ways, like when we declare one person is the most important one in our microcosm and then we choose to not connect with them when the opportunity shows up. But it can also show up in more direct ways, for example, in the form of actual, conflicting messages we give to the people we love and who love us, like telling them how important the relationship is to us and that they are our ideal partner, but when they are willing to commit to us, we bolt!

Our own contradictions that stand out like bad weeds cause a lot of unnecessary suffering for us and the few people that truly love us. FMRI scans of people that are promised something sweet and instead get something sour reflect a tremendous energy drain in the person’s brain who is burdened with having to close the gap of the palpable contradictions presented to them. Not to mention that these contradictions are an incredible obstacle to what it is that we truly want.

A healthy relationship is not something that happens organically to a select, lucky few. It is a principled way of being that we agree to cultivate with another that is based on goodwill, sensitivity, and trust, as the ultimate way to reinforce our sense of safety and weather the ups and downs of life. It is a commitment we make that provides a safety net that keeps our nervous system calm and gives us access to the executive functioning part of our brain, allowing us to focus on both our everyday and our higher purpose in life.

There are well-substantiated, evidenced-based methods to realizing the noble and powerful universal goal of healthy love, which is hardwired into our DNA. I have two that are my personal favorites.

  • The Gottman Institute’s simple seven step formula on how to make relationships work is backed up with three decades of research and can predict divorce with over 90% accuracy. The art and science of love workshops the Gottman institute offers, is a powerful weekend workshop to practice the seven steps in real life.
  • Sue Johnson’s model of emotionally-focused therapy (EFT), which defines a secure attachment as simply when each partner is accessible, responsive, and

emotionally attentive, is also backed up with substantial research. Completing the seven steps of EFT (with a certified EFT clinician), has been proven to yield a staggering 75% positive result in overcoming past injuries in relationships and 95% improvement rates.

So, yes, we can take practical approaches to fill the emotional bank of the person we love by turning toward them with acts of caring and goodwill in every opportunity we have, or we can even commit and complete powerful, Emotionally-Focused Therapy couples sessions to repair past indiscretions in our current relationship.

But in all fairness, nothing will ever truly reverse the trajectory of our relational health until we win the battle with the most inconspicuous culprit of all—ourselves.

We are all capable of mastery in every area of our lives, including love relationships. The most significant decision we will ever make in our lives is to choose to invest in work on ourselves that allows our own mastery and our best self to resurface.

At that point, and only at that point, will we be able to truly understand how to support a healthy relationship and how we can accomplish the noble outcome of a healthy love relationship which is within our control.

What is emotional intelligence?

What on earth is emotional intelligence?

Daniel Goldman, psychologist and best-selling author of the masterpiece Emotional Intelligence, defines emotional intelligence as the ability to read our own and others’ emotions and use this to our advantage. 

The statistics on the importance of cultivating emotional intelligence are compelling: studies show that emotional intelligence far surpasses the importance of IQ and experience and has been proven to be 85% responsible for financial success.

But do we know, in a practical sense, how to harness its power?

I know I did not!

The environment I grew up in (albeit my norm) was often fueled with contradictions, alternating highs and lows, and frequent “emotional hi-jacks.” Sometimes it was others that would lose their ability to act in an emotionally-intelligent way and, often, it was me. In the old country Greek household that I grew up in, little was known about consciousness, or healthy expression of emotions and needs. My beautiful, charismatic, “salt of the earth” parents grew up in the aftermath of the Second World War, and concepts like self-awareness and emotional intelligence were foreign concepts not aligned with their survival needs.

Hence, I too, adopted their approach. Whenever negative feelings would surface, I would handle them with a dose of confrontation, an ounce of criticism, two pounds of defensiveness, and several door slams and silent treatments.

Emotional intelligence, although part of popular culture today, remains a foreign concept to many of us. However, I finally recognized the impact of not being able to make intelligent use of my own emotions. When I became a mother, I invested quite a bit of time in understanding emotional intelligence and how I could cultivate it, in order to improve my relationships and, hence, my life.

Here are the biggest ideas I dissected from the experts on the topic and from my humble personal experience.

  1. What drives our emotions is often hidden deep in the unconscious part of ourselves, until we choose to bring to the surface experiences we have swept under the rug into the light. Until then, we will act on impulse, without quite knowing why we sometimes “put our foot in our mouth!”
  2. When an experience in the present moment touches a “raw spot” from a past experience (although often outside of the realm of our awareness) it will trigger a cascade of events, wherein our nervous system will work with several other body systems to protect us from the perceived threat. This is our fight or flight response at work, known as “an emotional hi-jack.”
  3. When our fight or flight response gets triggered, the executive-functioning part of our brain switches off, and we operate from a temporary cognitive and perceptual impairment.
  4. Our behavior is driven by our emotions. It does not matter how high our IQ is, how many degrees we have, how well we have done in life, or how successful we are. Our behavior will not be effective unless we figure out what we feel, why we feel the way we do, and then actively use our resources to intercept the cataclysmic impact of negative feelings. The great thing is that we have the power to do this!

The next time you find yourself in a situation when you feel that your emotions are getting the best of you, you can ask yourself my favorite step-by-step list of questions to ensure you are making intelligent use of your emotions:

  1. Ask yourself, “What am I feeling?”

The key here is to make sure you use feelings only. When we are emotionally charged because a situation has triggered a negative experience from our implicit memory, we tend to attach the words “I feel” to what is really a story. For example, “I feel that my spouse is lying,” or “I feel that I do not deserve this.” Stories keep us and our nervous system hostage and use our valuable resources for defense and not for healthy growth and restoration. There are four basic emotions: happiness, sadness, anger, and fear. Understanding which descriptive feelings are triggered in us is extremely valuable in our ability to choose our own state and, therefore, our chosen behavior, like our ability to make a connection with another in spite of our differences.

  1. Then ask yourself, “What about this situation makes me feel this way?”

I find that in order to answer this question, I need data that only the executive part of my brain, (the pre-frontal cortex,) has access to.

When we get emotionally hi-jacked, our metabolic energy gets redirected from our thinking brain to the large muscle groups which shut down essential functions. Therefore, by asking this question, we are able to turn our executive brain back on, redirecting our metabolic energy to where we really need it to be.

Whatever negative data our brain has dug up relating to the experience we are having in the present moment, this negative experience is not in the here and now.

But it is important to honor and bring to light whatever past experiences are still showing up for us in our present as a positive step towards letting them go.

  1. The next question is: “How much of this is the truth and how much of it is a story?”

Most of the time, our pain and suffering come from the narrative we lend to life situations and not the situations themselves. Has a friend or significant other ever stood you up? In such instances, most of the time there is a legitimate reason why someone was not able to keep their commitment to us. What gets us upset and unable to process the event in a way that keeps us in the state we need to be in to make good decisions is when we translate an event such as this into the idea that “we are obviously not important to that person.” Deciphering truths from stories is a powerful technique to regain control of our emotions so we can make an intelligent decision on how we want to handle the situation.

  1. The next question is: “What is within my control to do about this situation?”

Instead of waiting for the other shoe to drop when someone does something that rubs us the wrong way, we have the option of focusing on where our power can be found, which is in what is within our control.

Knowing what we feel, why, and what we need from the other person and explaining that in a calm and factual manner allows us to move in a positive trajectory in any important relationship in our life.

  1. Finally, we need to ask ourselves, “What have I learned about myself because of this situation and what will I do differently in the future?”

For energy conservation, most of our responses to life situations are automatic. Negative emotions are just part of life. Pausing, assessing the reason why we got triggered in the first place, and choosing the pearls of wisdom any challenging experience gave us, actually helps us cut out weeds from experiences of the past and cultivate new flowers in the garden we call our life experience.

A fellow Greek by the name of Plato said it best: “The first and greatest victory is to conquer yourself.”

We have no control over how and where we were raised, what tools we garnered from our early years, or how our brain was sculpted by our experiences up until this moment.

The greatest part about emotional intelligence is that cultivating it is 100% within our control.

All it takes is a commitment to the diligent practice of seeing our emotions for what they are and taking the powerful stance of befriending them as a potent antidote to the toxic impact of fear and pain that is the biggest obstacle to the complete well-being of our species.

How to effectively respond to a “jerk”!

Once upon a time, I met a very special person. He was so intelligent, loving and kind. He would show up time after time, expressed his fondness and admiration often and much, went out of his way to be supportive in good times and bad, was accountable for his own actions and made promises he would be here for me in this life and the next.

Except, when he experienced negative emotions: The story would suddenly change, as did his behavior!

One of the most destructive relational patterns of behavior involves behaving in an incongruent manner, changing our stance towards another from one moment to the next.

The psychology dictionary, defines incongruence as an inconsistent state of behavior, described as inconsistency between the goals, values, and attitudes projected and the actual behavior observed.

We tend to define someone who behaves in an inconsistent manner as a “jerk”!

Have you considered that anyone who employs unhealthy relational patterns just does not know how to regulate their emotions and simply has been accustomed to blaming (or punishing) others for their very own negative feelings?

A person who contradicts themselves, by their words and actions probably has significant attachment injuries. They most likely have a hard time letting go of the past and do not have experiences that involve the beauty of healthy relational patterns, or know how to soothe themselves in a healthy way when fears show up internally.

If you too have someone in your life that tells you one moment that you are the most important person in their life and then (when they are upset about something) they exclaim that your relationship has no value to them, do not despair!

Although the obvious stance against unhealthy behaviors is to walk away, there are circumstances where you may not have a choice.

Here are the most effective ways I have been able to effectively address another’s inability to relate to me in a healthy way, when they are incongruent with me:

  1. Ask powerful questions

Point out the inconsistency head on. If someone tells you how much they value you and then you find out you were excluded from an important event in their life, simply point out the contradiction and ask them to tell you more about it. Don’t allow your self to get emotionally involved or take the contradiction personally. New insights from neuroscience, reveal that people that were raised by parents that were not attuned to them, (or even worst, were raised by parents with mental illness or substance abuse), have significant issues with nervous system regulation and deficits in parts of their brain that are associated with relational abilities.

Therefore when our fellow human beings bearing attachment injuries feel the sweetness of connection and intimacy, often times without cognitive awareness they will employ “deactivating strategies” to rupture connection.

Asking questions, without being emotionally charged, breaks the spell of a deactivating strategy and may be the only way to awaken someone from a state, that quite frankly although has become automated, causes them a lot of trouble.

  1. Seek first to understand and then to be understood

Power is the ability to do something effectively.

As describe in Stephen Coveys “7 habits of highly effective people”, seeking to understand and be understood is a fail proof strategy, even if you are dealing with someone that has not yet learned how to be effective.

Explaining with love and kindness the tremendous energy drain that any nervous system uses up to reconcile differences in reality, may be a perspective that they have not come across before. Let’s face it, if someone frequently employs contradictory behaviors as a way of relating to others, not many will stay by their side, let alone invest any energy to understand a behavior that hurts. If anything can provide compelling evidence of the power we all have for positive change, this is it!

  1. Role model emotional intelligence.

It’s very easy to simply get mad at someone who makes the most wonderful promises and when we challenge them for not delivering, they say: “I don’t know what you a re talking about”. Speaking emotional language with someone and the impact their actions have on us, can often times trigger feelings of empathy even in people with reported structural deficits in the anterior insula region of their brain. (Brain region involved in healthy development of empathy.)

After all, emotional intelligence is nothing other than making intelligence use of our emotions.

By role modeling emotional intelligence, we have a much better chance of getting through to someone, but even if we don’t succeed, at least we maintain our internal balance and prevent our selves from getting out of our zen!

  1. Set and enforce healthy boundaries.

We can be kind and loving to all life, but first and foremost we have to be kind and loving toward our self!

Brene Brown, Ph.D., best selling author of a number of books on the power of vulnerability, defines betrayal as “choosing not to connect to someone when the opportunity is there”.

We have to face our fears and practice being assertive, speaking clearly of what we are willing to tolerate and what we will not.

We can work with our internal resources to maintain our inner balance in the face of someone who does not have the ability to relate to us in a healthy way. We can even have empathy for their condition and understand that their behavior reveals that they have established intimacy and vulnerability as a threatening situation and that it’s nothing personal.

But at the end of the day, if we employ all the skillful and effective techniques and we are still not able to see accountability from the person that confuses us with contradictions, we may not have many options left.

The healthiest and most effective approach may be to love them and leave them.