Not being taken for granted sounds good, of course, but there are downsides for the partners of self-loathers (alongside others I’ve written about before). If self-loathers demonstrate their appreciation too strongly or frequently (while failing to acknowledge their partners’ mistakes), they can easily come off as excessively needy. It’s not surprising that the person who feels inadequate would be needy, of course, but this is often tempered by their strong resistance to acting on it (because they don’t believe anyone else is obligated to fulfill their needs). Self-loathers may be repulsed at finding out they seem needy, and could serve to reinforce their feelings of shame, clearly affecting them and their partners.
In the worse case, self-loathers may go too far in their doubts about being worthy of love and fail altogether to appreciate love when they receive it. This would obviously have the opposite effect, leaving their partners feeling unappreciated and making them unlikely to remain in the relationship for long. Furthermore, when the love is lost, self-loathers may interpret this as not having been loved at all, a product of the negative thinking they share with depressives, and make them less likely to seek out and enter in relationships in the future.
In the end, it all comes back to this: self-loathers have to trust the feelings of those who love them (or could potentially do so). The self-loathing crave love, affection, and appreciation as much as anybody, but do not feel they deserve it, and as a result are skeptical when they receive them. If they can bring themselves to acknowledge the love of others, they will often reciprocate strongly and demonstrably, which can be enormously gratifying—but can also be fleeting, especially if the self-loather takes it too far.
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For a select list of my previous Psychology Today posts on self-loathing, relationships, and other topics, see here.
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Tags:
anxiety, attitude, current partners, disagreement, failure, faults, fear, feelings of inadequacy, humility, loathers, mistake, partner, people relationships, precipice, reconciliation, relationship, self loathing, shortcomings, surface one, unconditional love
