Intimacy Hurdle: When you feel unworthy of love

Feeling unworthy of love

There are many reasons why you and your partner may not be able to reach the level of intimacy you desire. One often overlooked block to intimacy occurs when one partner is unable to fully accept love from the other.

Why might this be the case?

We all know the old adage: In order to love someone you have to love yourself first. I would add self-acceptance to the requirement for you and your partner to develop a deep and fulfilling emotional connection.

When you feel unworthy of love, you have no choice but to close parts of yourself off to your partner.  Intimacy is a two-way street that will suffer when one of you cannot give and receive love.  Your rejection of love (and intimacy) may not be immediately apparent or it can be obvious--either way, your relationship will not reach its full potential.

Self-assess:

Do you feel worthy of love?

How do you generally feel when your partner expresses his/her love to you?

Do you accept compliments and praise from your partner?

What do you need from your partner in order to feel more intimate?

Take you time answering these questions. Your answers can help you determine if you have trouble fully accepting love or emotional and physical intimacy from your partner.

Until Next Time,

Rich Nicastro
www.StrengthenYourRelationship.com

Comments

[anonymous]

I am an avid reader of your blog and I thank you for your insight. However, this entry is all assuming the loving partner is actually capable of loving or sincere I suppose. Perhaps many relationship problems are seen as one's inability to accept love when in reality the other's behavior isn't loving, making it seem illogical to acceot loving statements, or perhaps the other uses the phrase I love you without honestly meaning it. If the person refusing or unable to accept love can sense this they are not deficient, but wise. This all assumes one partner is right, loving and capable of love while the other is somehow lacking in incapable of accepting that love. To me this seems like a less likely scenario than it being a two way road as you pointed out later in the entry. A more likely scenario in my experience is that one partner rejects anothers love or claims of love because of their unloving or insincire behavior, not just because of their inability to accept love or love themselves. If one partner is rejecting the other's presumed love I think you should add some questions such as "what are your reasons for having a negative reaction to the other's loving statements? What part of their behavior makes it difficult for you to accept that they feel as they say they do?" This entry sounds uncharacteristiclly one sided compared to your other blog entries.

[Rich Nicastro]

Hi,

Thanks for your response and for raising important points that I did not address in this post. In this brief blog post my focus was on how someone struggling with low self-esteem (deep-seated feelings of being unlovable) might unwittingly create challenges to accepting genuine love from another.

You make an excellent point that one's inability to accept love may actually result from a decision to protect oneself against insincerity, rather than an inability to accept love. In this case, I would imagine that the insincere partner or spouse has become untrustworthy. This lack of trust will definitely erode one's willingness to accept love.

Again, thanks for the feedback.

Rich Nicastro

[anonymous]

Thank you for taking the time to clarify that. In reading your prior posts I assumed that the focus of this blog was on couples that were, for the most part, emotionally healthy and stable. I can certainly see how it would be difficult or nearly impossible to achieve intimacy with somebody experiencing deep-seated feelings of being unlovable and also sufferd from extremely low self esteem! In fact I would expect that a relationship where one partner was healthy and genuinely loving and the other was unable to give or receive love would be not only challenging but would require extreme committment on the part of the healthy partner, therapy for the ill one, and couples therapy!Otherwise the relationship would be doomed don't you think?

Personally, I know none of my friends who have been in serious relationships with a partners with that much past baggage or any serious mental illness were able to sustain the relationship, although it might be possible with the help of a relationship therapist such as yourself.

Prior to your clarification when I assumed the focus was on couples where both partners were relatively emotionally stable I was intrigued and compelled to comment for the first time because I found this post odd. I was confused as to why one and only one partner would be unable to give and receive love while the other would be capable of showing honest and true love for the other, unless the person rejecting intimacy had good reason to do so in response to the behavior of his or her parther. This brought me back to your earlier post about getting to know and respect eachother's core vunerabilities. I suspect that if either partner isn't extremely careful not to repeat similar events or elicit similar feelings that caused the other's initial deepest hurts in childhood, even inadvertantly, then a lack of trust will result, leading to the wounded partner protecting and becoming unable or unwilling to give or receive deep love and true intimacy. I imagine this would be much more of a challenge if one was in a relationship with a person who has deep seated wounds from childhood or a serious illness where they completely felt unlovable.

I now wonder if you are also addressing issues related to forming and preserving relationships with partners who are either mentally ill or have a lot of emotional baggage. In general I don't think healthy people match up well mentally ill people, but there are certainly people who find themselves in relationships where they come to realize the person they love is either ill or suffering from more than the typical childhood hurts. Since you brought this topic up out of the blue, I'm wondering if you are going to address these types of issues. I've personally had to leave a relationship where my partner was incapable of intimacy because of his personal issues. How does one go about continuing to love another who can not accept that love, love themself, or achieve intimacy? I didn't find that he was incapable of showing love as you suggested but he was certainly incapable of believing he was lovable, and it seemed like each small mistake on my part was a catastrophe for him. I will admit to my fair share of mistakes in not realizing what his deepest vulnerabilities and hurts were because he could not share them and so I was not able to help him with those areas. Is it worth staying in such a relationship? Are all people who feel unlovable also incapable of truly loving other people, as you suggest, and are such relationships doomed to failure from the beginning?

Again, this post just struck me as random and out of character compared to the the rest of your blog which is why I felt the desire to post for the first time. Why would a healthy person who is seeking intimacy and is able to give and receive love knowingly enter a relationship where the other partner was incapable of the same? If they inadvertantly found this to be the case would such simple questions work to heal the person stuggling with low self esteem and deep seated feelings of being unlovable? I would guess such serious problems would only be the result of some much deeper hurt.

I enjoyed the focus of your earlier blog entries about healthy couples but must admit I also find this interesting. Will you also be addressing relationship issues where one or more of the partners is ill, or was this just a single thought on these issues? I think it would be too complicated to address mental illness, which you were essentially addressing in this entry. In these cases if the relationship is to survice and thrive I suspect the ill person needs individual therapy and the couple would need quite a bit of support in couples therapy!

For all couples though, I think your earlier post about core vulnerabilities and this post about feeling unworthy of love are closely linked. In your earlier post you wrote, "Once your guard is down and you feel secure, you're able to become fully authentic and vulnerable with your partner. It is vital that you and your partner create conditions that allow mutual vulnerabilities to surface." You can see how if one parther becomes completely vunerable and the other doesn't completely respect and protect their partner in regards to those areas of deepest hurt it would almost definitely lead to a person putting up their guard and rejecting full intimacy!! I would guess this would be a much more serious issue if the a person suffered from serious self esteem issues and feelings of being unlovable, but it would be a serious problem in any relationship even with two self confident people.

This is undoubtedly a very interesting topic, though the way it was originally worded made it sound as if the norm was for one person to be perfectly healty and fully capable of unconditional love while the other was fully incapbale of any giving or receiving any love or achieving any intimacy! This sounded more like an illness issue than a typical relationship issue! However I think all people have sensitive areas they are reluctant to share even with their life partners, areas where they fear if they were known they would be unlovable, and that all people may feel unlovable at least to some degree in some areas of their life.

Thank you again for your reply! I wasn't expecting one because you don't seem to post often but my husband and I have been reading this blog along with other blogs for quite a while now. I look forward to your next entry.