Your parents, your relationships, your self esteem: your evolution

Think about the relationship you had with your parents growing up.  What did that look like, and what does it look like today?  Are you close with your parents? What was the emotional relationship you had with them when you were growing up?  Did your parents fight at all, or fight often?  Were you a favorite child or middle child?  Think about the dynamics in your family with your siblings.  Did you grow up feeling emotionally secure?  How much does your culture play a part in how you were raised? Were you praised for your achievements, or were they never ‘good enough’ for your parents?

In all of our current relationships we bring a piece of our past .  Undeniably, there is a part of human nature that yearns for validation, justification, approval, confidence, praise, you name it.  Something lacking searches for something fulfilling.  But at what price do we allow ourselves to bring emotional baggage to our next journey, next relationship?  Why is it hard to let go if we’ve been wronged by a friend?  Self-esteem is affected by rejection, failed friendships, leaving us wondering what we’ve done wrong, and how we can be a better friend to others, or search for better friends.  In my south Asian culture, there is a sort of unstated obedience to our family ties, which imposes us to maintain (even if fake) relationships, even when they’ve soured.  Talk about negatively affecting one’s self esteem: you still have to visit your uncle’s family even though you don’t all get along, because culturally it is taboo if you write them off completely.  We are mechanical in our and we pay an emotional price for the experience.

There are many cultural undertones to how we nurture relationships.  Many of my peers of south Asian descent will tell me they did not receive much praise in their childhood. Many would say bringing home a report card of A’s was not enough, that they had to be A+’s.  Girls, when praised, often receive only compliments or critiqueswhich are physically descriptive.  Someone’s hair is not long enough, behavior is not feminine enough, or someone’s complexion is fair & lovely.  It’s easy to praise or criticize girls based on their physical attributes; we do that all the time as a society.  And look where that has gotten us.

Consider same-sex friendships and the concept of ‘best friends forever’.  Young girls, (I was one of them) take great pride in having a ‘bff’ (think necklaces, bracelets, etc), and sure, many adult women do too.  At what loyalty standards do we hold our bffs and are they really forever?  Some girls maintain temporal friendships, ending with a falling out, and often with no explanation, while others have ups and downs for years and years.  Those are beautiful relationships which can withstand the test of time and life changes.  My parents taught me values of loyalty, honesty and reciprocity in their friendships, so naturally these were qualities I sought out in my own relationships.  I examined a handful my own ‘close’ friendships and realized that only two of them were real and authentic, based on the aforementioned values.  The others had soured and consumed me daily.  Why did I care so much? Why can’t we move on?  Is it just a girl thing, I wondered.  My self-esteem was challenged again, and all the values my parents instilled in me were questioned.  I realized that as much as it hurts to admit it to myself, some of those girls simply befriended me to get from one place to another; others dissociated from me when I reached a new place in my life (i.e. had children).  Because I needed validation, I spoke with Aisha Khan, an LCSW based in Chicago, to probe this broken friendship phenomenon further.  She talked about the relationship we maintain between our parents and the impact that has on our self-esteem as it is demonstrated in our friendships and relationships.  Often an experience of rejection from our past can prevent us from moving on, or prevents us from trusting someone knew.  Self-esteem is delicate and can be strengthened with healthy relationships.  She asked me a tough (rhetorical) question, ‘What was lacking in my life that I’m trying to compensate for now in these failed relationships which I continuously seek to rectify?’  How a girl thinks about herself is directly related to how she is perceived by the world.  If she has a lot of friends, good friends, she will have good self esteem.

How we are raised not only affects our friendships, but also romantic relationships (marriage, etc).  We seek out partners who remind us of our parents or are very dissimilar.  We bring baggage from childhood, failed relationships into our romantic lives, seeking validation and appreciation.  Sometimes this can work for us, others against us.  We have blamed romantic partners for not living up to certain, idealized standards that were created long before the partner entered the relationship!  To preserve marital integrity, we need to be cognizant of how we were raised and what that childhood looked like because those are the experiences which shape our self-esteem, which in turn shapes our self-perception.

Friendships are like library books, sometimes we renew, we return the item, or sometimes we lose the book and have to pay a fine.  That fine is emotional damage.  My work with HEART Women and Girls has allowed me to be introspective and forced me to confront factors affecting my own self-esteem.  I’m hopeful that as a society we continue to think deeper about the sources which affect our self esteem, and how that impacts our relationships with one another.