3 Signs Of A Woman Who Has Stopped Loving Herself To Preserve Her Relationship
Self-abandonment takes a huge toll.
muse studio via Shutterstock One of my clients came to me in need of some marriage advice. She'd been married 12 years and was dealing with emptiness and resentment that had become so serious she could barely look at him. She wanted to know if her marriage could survive. Of course, I couldn't say whether or not it would, but I did know there was work she could do within herself to start.
First, we needed to determine if she had stopped loving herself in an attempt to save her marriage.
Three signs she's stopped loving herself to save a relationship
1. She feels empty
Her first telling statement was, "I have started to feel so empty and resentful."
I know she believed her emptiness and resentment were about your husband, but they weren't — they were about her self-abandonment. She felt empty and resentful because she wasn't taking good care of herself.
If she left the relationship before finding out how and why she had abandoned herself — which caused those feelings — her dysfunctional relationship patterns would continue, no matter who she was with, as supported by a study in the Journal of Family Issues.
Some ways wives might be abandoning themselves are:
- Ignoring their feelings by focusing on their head rather than their body
- Judging themselves harshly
- Turning to various addictions to numb their feelings
- Making their husband responsible for their feelings of pain and joy
2. She struggles to look her partner in the eye or connect emotionally
fizkes via Shutterstock
Next is, "I can hardly look at my husband in the eye, let alone be loving to him."
Her inability to look her husband in the eye or be loving to him sounds like a projection of not seeing her own essence and not loving herself.
The European Psychologist Journal suggests when we see and value our true self — our soul essence — then we're able to see and value the essence of others.
3. When she looks at her partner, she only sees her own hurt
Right now, she's seeing her husband through the eyes of her wounded self. We cannot see our own or another's essence through the programmed eyes of our wounded selves.
Until she does inner work to learn to see and value her own essence, it is unlikely she will be able to trust in her husband and feel intimate with him again, as shown by a study in Contemporary Family Therapy Journal.
Because she's probably abandoning herself rather than loving herself, which is leading to her inner emptiness, she has no love to share with her husband. When she learns to fill herself with love, then she will have love to share.
Once we fully of love for ourselves, then we can know whether or not there's hope for our relationships.
How to start fixing the problem
Winnie Vinzence via Shutterstock
There's a good possibility that when we love ourselves and make ourselves happy, our relationship will change for the better. But even if it doesn't, at least we won't take our self-abandonment with us into the next relationship.
I suggest letting go of the outcome regarding a relationship and focusing on the process of learning how to love oneself, which means learning and practicing inner bonding. By learning and practicing the Six Steps of Inner Bonding, we gradually stop abandoning ourselves and start loving ourselves.
Our health is determined more by whether or not we love ourselves than by any other factor. Leaving a relationship without learning how to love oneself will not necessarily improve health. There is relief for a while, but self-abandonment takes a huge toll on health, and the problematic patterns of behavior are likely to repeat.
Learning how to love oneself lets us see where our relationship is and be surprised at the outcome.
Dr. Margaret Paul is a relationship expert, noted public speaker, and educator.