People talk about self-respect in glowing terms, as a kind of mental health Mecca. It would seem that if we could all just have self-respect, then all of our problems would cease to be as big as they are and we would be free. The reality, however, is that self-respect stinks! It stinks because it means stopping ourselves from blaming our partners for our pain and our actions. Self-respect means asking more of ourselves than of our partners no matter what they’ve done.

You’ll know you’ve acted in self-respect by the tell tale signs. Self-respect is actually a kind of self-honesty – an honesty about yourself and your actions that wasn’t visible to you before because you were busy focusing on your partner and their short comings. It is excruciating to get those first few words out but once they’re out, there’s a kind of grace that happens. People invariably feel lighter and freer.

I still remember one of the painful moments in my own marriage when I was just beginning to have self-respect or self-honesty. It is a memory seared in my brain hopefully forever. I never want to forget what I am capable of in my worst moments. As Gandhi taught, there are no devils out in the world – only the ones inside of ourselves that we must fight. Anyway, I was yelling at my husband in a therapy session. Yes, yelling. I will refrain from revealing just what I was yelling about – I’ll keep that little bit of honesty between my husband and me and the therapist, of course. Anyway, in the middle of my moment of blaming my husband for something, the therapist asked me a question that made me stop short. (Sorry, I don’t remember the question.) Have you ever had one of those moments – when in the midst of anger you suddenly realize you were wrong? Ugh.

There was a VERY long bit of silence in the room after that. I am deeply grateful that neither my husband nor the therapist interrupted my silent reflection – because it became my crucible. It became the intense heat and pressure that forced me to see myself more fully and I didn’t like what I saw – a moment when my arrogant self-appraisal was popped like the fragile balloon that it was. When I finally spoke again it was to let my husband off the hook. It was to share my awareness of my own short comings and the fact that I had been trying to make him responsible for them. The irony here was that when I did let him off the hook, I came quite a bit closer to working through the shortcomings I was blaming him for in the first place!

Self-respect equals humility and humility – a word derived from the Greek humus meaning dirt or compost – stinks. But it will cleanse your soul. You just have to be willing to get dirty in the process.