This week, in a move that might look like a natural flow from last week’s question about the inner critic but is more of a happy accident that might mask my general lack of forethought and planning, I’m addressing a question that can be related to the low self-worth often perpetuated by destructive self-talk.
If you’re someone who has a tendency to make excuses for the bad treatment meted out to you by others, regardless of whether it’s in the context of an intimate relationship or not, this one might be for you.
Question: My partner keeps cheating on me but I keep forgiving him, why?
The reason that your mind is so intent on forgiving seemingly constant hurtful behaviour has something to do with the way that you see yourself and has less to do with your partner.
You write that your partner is a ‘kind person respectful person’ but he has been neither consistently kind nor respectful towards you. It isn't kind or respectful to cheat on your partner at all, let alone do it again and again.
When we are willing to tolerate bad treatment from our partners, or anyone else, it is because, consciously or unconsciously, we either doubt or don't believe that we deserve better.
You excuse his cheating more easily because you are able to see the very best in him but apparently struggle to find sufficient value in yourself to realise you deserve better.
It's striking that in all that you have written there is a lot about who your partner is,
You say he is, ‘kind’, ‘respectful’, ‘a cheerleader’, ‘his intent is always right’, ‘he has had a tough year’, ‘confident’, ‘optimistic’, yet there is virtually nothing about who you are? It is almost as if you are invisible, a ghost of sorts, and perhaps your willingness to tolerate serial disrespect can be seen as a reflection of your invisibility to both him and yourself.
I'd like you to think about the answer to this question.
How and where did you learn that you are valuable?
Is the answer immediately obvious or more elusive? Perhaps you never did learn that you are.
Sometimes, we are drawn toward people who treat us badly.
When we grow up questioning our value it is often because we were missing something in terms of emotional sustenance during our developmental years. This can happen for many reasons. Here are some examples,
You had parents who were not demonstrative in their affection.
You were not told that you were valuable other than in relation to your achievements.
You had boundaries that were too strict.
You were taught nothing about boundaries.
You suffered an early destabilising loss (a significant death or divorce of parents, for example)
I could go on but there is no point because your own story will be unique. Suffice to say that an emotional gap makes us familiar with the absence of demonstrative love and being treated in a way that implies we don't matter as much as we'd like.
As we grow up we become drawn to partners and other people who will replicate the experiences of our childhood because they are so familiar to us, compelling in itself, and offering the opportunity, or so we believe, to ‘right the wrongs’ of the past.
‘If I can just make this emotionally unavailable person love me, I’ll know that I am not the problem’, goes the justification we offer ourselves.
We often feel volcanic chemistry for people who will not be there for us, will let us down, and leave us feeling that we are not good enough, because they are familiar streets and we are lured back to walk them miserably again.
We work hard to change this dynamic thinking that if we could just earn the stable love of these people we might, at last, see ourselves as worthy of the love we crave, but we are so good at selecting people who will let us down that we succeed only in reinforcing our own worst fears about ourselves.
Every time we are hurt, we find it easy to assume it must be us, we must have done something wrong, and we excuse the awful behaviour of those who have been drawn toward us largely because they sense their needs will be met without much expectation of anything required in return.
The only way out of this loop is to address the lack of worth we feel for ourselves and to learn that we don't doubt it because we are actually less valuable than others but because of the misguided dysfunctional lessons we took from earlier unhelpful and often painful experience.
Through challenging our limiting beliefs we have the chance to consider other explanations for our emotional needs going unmet aside from the assumption that we were not deserving of better.
Then, perhaps, with a fair wind, we come to see ourselves more clearly and truly, recognising, acknowledging and believing our value and , in so doing, we might avoid so easily falling into relationships with people who treat us badly, stop making excuses for them, and raise our expectations of love.
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