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hey guys I'm Heidi PRI welcome back to my Channel or welcome if this is your first time here today on this channel we're going to be talking about low self-esteem and how it can manifest in close relationships in a way that might
Heidi Priebe explains three blind spots people with low self-esteem have in relationships, including how they unintentionally hurt others and project judgment, and offers ways to build awareness.
Key Takeaways
- Low self-esteem often causes unintentional harm through a lack of awareness of one's own impact.
- Withholding support out of a belief that you have little to offer can be experienced by partners as rejection.
- Projecting self-judgment onto others leads to self-fulfilling rejection; challenge these assumptions by checking the evidence.
- Healthy relationships rely on mutual giving and receiving, which requires valuing your own needs and contributions.
- Developing awareness and discernment about your impact and about others' intentions is the path toward more responsible, secure relationships.
What the video covers
- Low self-esteem can cause people to underestimate their impact on others, believing their words and actions matter less than they do.
- The 'too small' metaphor: believing you're 3 feet tall when you're 6 feet, so you deny responsibility for the damage you cause.
- First blind spot: being indifferent or checked out when loved ones need proactive support, because one assumes their help isn't valuable.
- Missed opportunities to help can be read by partners as rejection or lack of care, causing relationship rupture.
- Insecure dynamics, like one avoidant partner and one overly giving partner, can be comfortable but not mutually fulfilling long term.
- Secure relationships feature a natural flow of giving and receiving, where both people feel valued in offering and accepting help.
- Second blind spot: believing you cannot deeply hurt someone, often rooted in avoidant caregiving where hurt feelings were not expressed or acknowledged.
- Projection of the 'I am not okay' worldview: assuming others constantly judge you, which leads to defensive or uncharitable responses that create rejection.
- Third blind spot: difficulty recognizing and asking for your own needs, which leads others to misread you as distant or pull back.
- Remedies include checking stories about people and groups, developing discernment, and practicing presence without needing constant approval.
Chapters
- 00:00Introduction: Low Self-Esteem and Relationship Blind Spots
- 01:56The 3-Foot-Tall Metaphor and Lack of Impact Awareness
- 03:43Blind Spot 1: Withholding Help and Support
- 05:26Insecure Dynamics and the Secure Ideal
- 07:06Blind Spot 2: Not Realizing You Can Hurt Others
- 09:06Projecting Judgment onto Others
- 10:46Blind Spot 3: Difficulty Asking for Your Own Needs
- 17:00Strategies: Checking Stories and Building Discernment
Full Transcript — Download SRT & Markdown
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actually be sabotaging the relationship without you noticing it at all so essentially we are talking about blind spots today specifically the blind spots that are most inherent to people who have low self-esteem or ideas about themselves that they are not as valuable as worthy
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of care and connection as other people and how this can actually become a self-fulfilling prophecy Without You meaning for it too so I'm just going to Dive Right In Here the biggest blind spot for people with low self-esteem
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when it comes to how they're showing up interpersonally tends to be that there is a lack of awareness around how you are impacting other people and this is not at all intentional so often when we grow up in
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environments where we are not particularly valued where maybe our point of view is not considered very heavily by the people around us to have much worth to it or where maybe we are bullied or picked on or otherwise
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reflected back to ourselves as someone whose experience of being alive is of less value than others we tend to come to believe that that is the truth and that the things that we say and do in the world have less impact
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on other people than the things that people around us say and do the problem is that this is not true it's kind of like the experience of believing that you are 3T tall when you're actually 6 feet tall and then going around bumping
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into a bunch of stuff looking behind you and going oh that's broken but there's no way I broke it because I'm only 3T tall if we believe that we are only emotionally or energetically 3T tall anytime we hurt somebody or impact a
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situation negatively and we look back and see the chaos and destruction we're likely to go couldn't have been me I'm only 3T tall and so today we're going to break down in more concrete terms what this actually looks like and where those
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blind spots tend to show up as well as how we can start making ourselves aware of all of the space that we might be occupying inside of our relationships and inside of other people's minds without realizing it and the reason
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we're going to go over all of this is because it's going to eventually help us develop a better more robust view of ourselves and the ways that we're showing up in the world that will end up allowing us to approach our
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relationships in more responsible ways so we're going to go over three manifestations of this the first one we're going to talk about is that if you have low self-esteem or low self-worth you might be accidentally hurting the people in your life by being indifferent
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or kind of checked out in the areas where they would actually appreciate some proactive help or support from you now once again when we have that idea of ourselves as not having much to offer what we don't instinctively do is go out
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looking for the areas where other people could benefit from our help or support so if someone we love is going through a challenging time we might genuinely believe that it's more compassionate for us to back off and give them space than
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it is for us to show up and try to offer care or support to them because we might have this idea that any care or support we could offer is not going to be very good or it's not going to be very
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fulfilling and it's probably just going to feel like an annoying thing that they feel the need to pretend is helpful when in reality we might be missing really big opportunities to care about and show our support for the people
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around us and because they might not see us as 3et tall the same way we see ourselves they may actually be feeling hurt and a little bit rejected like why is this person not showing up when I'm in need is it because they don't care
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about me is it because they're just a fair weather friend or a fair weather partner or whatever it is so there can be this total missed opportunity where we might actually care about someone and want to help them and they might
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actually want our help but because we haven't developed that skill of understanding and responding to other people's emotional needs because we have the belief that we are not capable of doing that this can actually cause a lot of rupture in our close relationships
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unless and until we become aware of it now I want to point out that this Dynamic can actually work in insecurely attached Dynamics but that's not to say that it's healthy so you might have one partner usually the one who airs more
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avoidant in a mutually insecure relationship who is very uncomfortable receiving help and who does want to be seen at all times as perfectly capable of taking care of themselves and then you might have another partner who is in
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some ways very open to giving help but who in large part doesn't really feel comfortable seeing their partner as anything other than invulnerable and so that Dynamic can be very comfortable but not necessarily mutually beneficial on a deep level long term
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because both partners are not fully actualizing themselves and they're just kind of covering for each other's weak points unconsciously now in a secure Dynamic there's a very natural flow between giving and taking both people feel as though their help is Meaningful
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and they want to offer it and they also feel as though their partner's help is Meaningful and and they want to receive it and so that's the place we ultimately want to get to and we will talk near the
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end of this video about how we can start flipping these Dynamics around but for now we're going to move on to the second biggest blind spot of people who have low self-esteem which is the idea that you cannot possibly hurt someone in a deep
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way because there's no way that you would matter enough to that person to do that there is no way that the words you say or the ACT you take could ever hit someone hard enough to actually hurt them and this is one that I see
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frequently developing around people who are raised in a more avoidant caregiving Dynamic so if in your family of origin people didn't really show when their feelings were hurt and you didn't really get feedback about how you were impacting other people on an emotional
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level you might think that anything you say when you're frustrated is just kind of falling on deaf ears people are writing you off as irrational when in fact you might be hurting other people really deeply without realizing this and
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to add a layer of complexity to this there is this specific blind spot that tends to arise when we have the I am not okay negative view of self worldview the danger of this worldview is that we have
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a tendency to project it onto other people so instead of just being very aware that we are not thinking particularly positively about ourselves we're going to tell ourselves the story that other people are constantly and chronically judging us the same way we
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are constantly and chronically judging ourselves so when we walk around the world with this belief that other people are thinking ill of us that they're judging us that they're seeing all the things we hate about ourselves and they
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are hating us for them what this gives us is a not particularly charitable view of other people and if if we are responding to People based on that story instead of the actual feedback they give us we're actually going to be creating a
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real Dynamic where we are getting rejected so sometimes I see this come online for people around certain types of people or let's say certain genders so let's say you have this idea that all men are judging you all of the time and
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being very critical in their heads all of the time or all women whatever it is now every time you walk into into a room full of men you're walking into what you are imagining to be a very hostile
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environment so you're coming into that environment on the defense you're probably coming in with some closed off defensive kind of hostile energy yourself and so now the responses that you get from people when you go interact with them are probably not going to be
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particularly warm and engaging because they're responding to your energy and that's it's just going to give you confirmation when you're not getting those warm engaging responses from people that they are judgmental critical and must be thinking ill of you when in
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reality they might be responding to the energy that you're coming in with so this can become this self-fulfilling prophecy that until we become aware of it can really get in the way of us having honest interactions with other
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people and then to follow this example we might see these people who were projecting these negative traits onto interacting differently with other people so let's say now another woman walks into this room and I perceive her as being a lot cooler than me and she
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walks up to people and she has this open engaged energy so people are warm and engaged with her in response but instead of checking myself for how I'm coming off I'm probably going to go see I knew it people just want to hang out with
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girls like her and because I'm not like her nobody's ever going to want to be around me the world is an unfair place and I am always going to be judged based on these superficial things now I'm not saying that the world
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does not have any people who judge others on superficial things but if you're unable to differentiate and to develop good discernment around who is judging you for superficial things or for whatever it is that your low self-esteem is based around and who is
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not you're going to be walking around projecting one thing onto everybody and missing all of the deep opportunities to connect that could be available to you if you were not doing that projecting so closer to the end of this video we're
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going to talk more about how to do that but for now we're going to get into the third and final way that having low self-esteem tends to create social blind spots for you and this one is in the
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realm of self advocacy when you have have this intuitive belief that you've been carrying around for the majority of your life that your needs do not matter and that nobody is going to want to fulfill them what you naturally do not
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do is advocate for your needs getting met you might instead start behaving angrily and passive aggressively when other people are not meeting your needs not realizing that those people might not have any idea what your needs actually are and this is something that
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I think is particularly tricky when insecurely attached people try to get into a relationship of whatever form with more secure people the secure people because they are naturally aware of their own needs and tend to ask for what they want directly might assume
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that if you are not stating your own needs it's just because you're fine and there's nothing in particular that you're wanting help with but because you might be operating from a different script where the idea is that you give
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hints about which of your needs need to get met and then the other person's job is to pick up on those hints and respond to them you might start getting angry and lashing out at people for not meeting the needs that they have no idea
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you are expecting to have met and so now you might be behaving aggressively or passive aggressively or in a kind of cold or unkind way towards others when they have no idea why you are doing that and so they're going to interpret that
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as a rejection and probably back off a little bit and give you some space when that is the opposite of what you're actually wanting and needing so the less we value our own needs the worse we're going to be at asking to get them met in
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a pro-social way instead we're just going to be developing all of these resentments and we're probably going to start acting those out whether we intend to or not so it's kind of a brain Bender to realize that becoming aware of our
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own needs and being clear and direct about them is actually a a much more pro-social thing than pushing them down and pretending we don't have them it's going to lend itself to healthier relationships to Dynamics where nobody feels like they're on edge or can't
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figure out what's going on and so there's actually an immense value for other people in US recognizing and voicing our needs but again this is going to feel like a total upside down world for those of us who grew up
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insecurely attached or with low self-esteem now for the rest of this video we're going to move into how to start healing these wounds and how to start taking different actions that get us more of those close- connected relationships that we want and less of
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these accidental messy projections that are uncomfortable and difficult for everybody to deal with so the kind of turning point for all of this I feel like can be summarized in one of my favorite eart toll quotes which is
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whatever you believe the world is withholding from you you you are withholding from the world so this idea that if I feel like I'm just not getting a lot of attention affection positive reinforcement from other people it's probable I'm not putting a lot of that
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out into the world or if I am I'm not doing it in a way that is truly authentic and a true outflow of my own appreciation maybe I'm doing it in kind of a desperate cloying way because I
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want it in return but that is a very different energy to be in so we're going to go through these three problems again and start talking about their antidotes so that first problem the problem of feeling like our help isn't good enough
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to help people what we're going to start doing to counteract this one is start getting as attuned as possible to the people in our lives so getting really present with people when they're going through challenges asking them questions
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instead of backing off as well as asking them directly is there some type of help that I can give you around this and an even deeper level of this is being able to be proactive with the people in our
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lives about the help that they need from us but once again doing that requires deep Attunement when our self-esteem is very low it can actually be really challenging to attune properly to people because Attunement means being present with them and open to whatever is coming
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up inside of a given moment in our relationship with them when we have low self-esteem we're often preoccupied by the thought does this person like me what are they thinking about me right now are they judging me all of these
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thoughts that we think are about the other person are actually about me me me me me what type of validation am I getting or not getting out of this interaction and in order to really be attuned to another person we have to
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shut that part of ourselves off we have to be willing to not worry for a little bit whether or not this person is liking us or approving of us and to just be present with whatever they are showing
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up with and whatever they are telling us and the more we can practice this skill of being with someone in the moment and shutting off that internal script that's wondering what they think of us the more we're going to become aware of what this
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person's unique ch challenges struggles and opportunities to be given support are and so we're going to get steadily better at predicting areas where we might be able to fulfill some need for them without necessarily having to ask super directly so this is the process of
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getting attuned to the people in our lives the next problem this problem of going around believing that the way we're behaving towards people is not influencing our Dynamic with them to start counteracting this one we need to start checking in on our stories about
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how people are something that's going to be big here is first of all being willing to look back at interactions we had with people and really analyze what we were bringing into that interaction again this might be a very
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big blind spot when we were talking to this person instead of thinking about how they were reacting to us try playing that interaction back through their eyes and be really aware of what you're noticing about how you were showing up
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in that interaction were you smiling at them were you asking them questions about themselves try to really start getting inside of other people's minds and developing an idea of how they're perceiving you and how your energy and what you're bringing to a situation
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might be impacting the way that they are responding to you and the other thing we're going to need to start doing here to counteract this is to start checking the stories that we have about other people or other groups of people so once
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again let's say you have this idea that all men are inherently judgmental when we have trauma or early wounding the brain tends to think in very black and white terms and the reason it does this is because it is
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over assessing for risk so it's getting rid of that maybe category in your brain that allows you to think in Shades of Gray and it's going if there is any risk of this thing harming us it goes in the
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bad category and then you're going to start behaving as though that is true so what we need to start doing here is challenging that black and white thinking the accurate statement is never all men are critical and judgmental nor
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is it all women are critical and judgmental it is absolutely true that some men and some women and some non-binary people are critical and judgmental however the art form lies in figuring out how to tell which of those
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types of people you're talking to so what are some clues or some cues inside of a person's Behavior Beyond this generalized category that you have them in that might indicate they are a very judgmental person or not so once again
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this is going to require some backtracking and some intellectual factchecking have there been instances where you had someone in one category in your brain and it turned out you were wrong what was the evidence that led you to
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realizing you were wrong and how can you log that as something to watch out for in the future so this is the ongoing process of developing discernment about people also this needs to be done on an individual level so you might have black
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and white thinking about a particular person and you might have this idea my partner secretly hates me when in fact your partner likes you quite a bit 95% of the time and the other 5% of the time yeah they feel angry but it passes
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because like all human emotions things come and go but if you have this belief that people can only feel one thing anytime your partner or someone gets in that state where they don't like you you're going to use that as confirmation
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that you knew it all along and they actually hate you full stop so once again this is the process of allowing your thinking to become less black and white and making a lot of room for the gray in between some people think like
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this other people don't think like this people can really like us most of the time and also have certain times where they just get frustrated with us if we expect things to be all one way or another as soon as we see the negative
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thing the thing that our brain logs as a risk we're going to latch on to that and make it the entirety of our experience and then once again we're going to be in that negative Loop of projecting outwards something that we believe to be
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true about another person and showing up as though it is true which gets us into that negative feedback loop so we want to be really careful here about challenging our All or Nothing assumptions when something happens how do we stay really aware of the situation
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or context we're in so that we do not overgeneralize so this is the process of recognizing the shortcuts that our brain naturally takes because it's doing its best to keep us safe and being intentional about challenging some of
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those assumptions and getting a more accurate and detailed view of how other people or individual relationships manifest and another thing we want to do in this process is just check ourselves at various points in our interactions with other people for congruence so if I
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go up to someone and what I'm saying with my words is very friendly maybe I'm introducing myself and asking asking them questions about themselves but the energy I'm in is quite defensive remember that people respond to us primarily based on the energy that we're
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giving off so even if we are saying all of the right things to them if we come in and our posture and our tone is just kind of strange and doesn't match our words we're probably going to be making
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that other person quite uncomfortable so we're not necessarily going to get the warmest or most engaged response the art of noticing when we are in some weird energy is probably something that I will make an entire other video around
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because it's actually a very important thing to keep aware of but for now we're just going to note that the energy we're coming in with matters in many cases much more than the actual words that we are saying to people and the last
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Distortion that we're going to talk about as well as how we can get more in reality with it is that idea that other people do not want to help us and that our needs are not important what's important to note here is that in Secure
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relationships and in the world of securely attached people people enjoy helping each other it's part of the inherent social contract everybody wants to feel valuable and like they have things they can offer to their loved ones so just like in the first step of
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this process we started getting attuned to what other people needed from us our work also becomes getting attuned to what type of help people like to give and then figuring out who we can go to when we're having a particular need
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arise who might actually be really happy to help us and really grateful or flattered that we're coming to them with a problem so we're going to want to notice things like where are my friends or my partner or my family members
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naturally showing up to help other people that's probably the area where they like to give help the next question we're going to ask ourselves is do I know how to ask for help in a way that is complimentary to another person
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rather than diminishing or insulting so if the only way we know how to ask for help is to criticize another person for what they're not doing for us it's likely that they're not feeling very good when we're coming to them to ask
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for things and we might actually be pushing them away there is also an art to pro-social asks for help so going to someone and telling them that you really appreciate let's say their perspectives on a given an issue and would like to
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know what they think of your problem is a very pro-social way of asking for help you're making the other person feel valued and important as you're getting your own need met once again going in with the assumption that our needs are
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unimportant and that we're inconveniencing people by asking for help puts us on the automatic defense when we go into situations that we really need help with going into situations with the idea in our minds that other people might be quite willing
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to give us help allows us to approach it in a totally different energy and this once again is a skill that must be learned but the more we work on developing it the more we're able to get at these really deep Mutual connections
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where help is readily offered and received otherwise known as secure Dynamics all right I'm going to leave it there for today on this topic as always let me know what's coming up for you guys as you go through this video any
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thoughts feelings questions you have please leave them in the comment section below I love you guys I hope you're taking care of yourselves and each other and I will see you back here again really [Music] soon
Topics:low self-esteemrelationshipsblind spotsattachment stylesself-worthemotional needsprojectionsecure attachmentinterpersonal dynamicsself-awareness
