27. Redefining Self Worth - A candid conversation with David Redbord

After infidelity, it's common to feel like your value has been shattered, like you're not enough, not lovable, or no longer worthy of trust and respect. The betrayal cuts deep, and rebuilding yourself from that space can feel overwhelming. But what if there’s a way to start piecing yourself back together, from the inside out?

In this powerful episode, I’m joined by therapist and self-worth coach David Redbord to explore how infidelity impacts self-worth, and what it really takes to rebuild it. Whether you’re the betrayed or the one who strayed, this conversation is a must-listen for those ready to heal.

Key Takeaways:

• Understand the link between self-worth and infidelity through powerful emotional frameworks.

• Learn how to stop taking betrayal personally, and why that matters for healing.

• Discover simple, proven tools to reconnect with your emotions and rebuild inner trust.

• Explore how societal “shoulds” can disconnect you from your true self.

• Begin to forgive yourself, release shame, and cultivate authentic self-worth.

💬 Reflection questions:

Have you struggled with redefining self-worth after infidelity? What helped or what’s holding you back?

Connect with Luke:

• Website: www.lifecoachluke.com

• Instagram: @mylifecoachluke

• Email: luke@lifecoachluke.com

Join the After the Affair community at www.facebook.com/groups/aftertheaffaircommunity

Episode Transcript:

The After The Affair podcast with me Luke Shillings is here to help you process, decide and move forward on purpose following infidelity. Together we'll explore what's required to rebuild trust not only in yourself but also with others. Whether you stay or leave I can help and no matter what your story there will be something here for you.

Let's go. Hello and welcome to episode number 27 of the After The Affair podcast with myself Luke Shillings. Self-worth.

Self- worth is a fundamental aspect of somebody's identity and sense of value as a human being. It can be greatly impacted by a variety of factors including personal experiences and relationships. Infidelity, the act of being unfaithful or disloyal to a partner is one such factor that can have significant impact on your self-worth.

The betrayal of trust and the violation of commitment can leave you feeling devalued, unworthy and uncertain about your place in the relationship and within the world and in this context understanding the complex interplay between self-worth and infidelity can be a critical part of healing for individuals who have been affected directly as a result of infidelity who are trying to rebuild their sense of self. To help me explore this further I've invited David Redbord onto the podcast today and we're going to have a discussion specifically around this topic. David Redbord is a number one international best-selling author practising therapist in the state of Colorado and a self-worth coach who works primarily with men.

He has two master's degrees one in public health and one in counselling and he's here to chat with us today about the intersection of infidelity, trauma and self-worth. So let's get into it okay so first of all David thanks ever so much for being here it's great to have you on the podcast and could you start by letting everyone know who you are what you do and perhaps a little bit about your own journey. Hey I'm David Redbord I'm a practising therapist in the state of Colorado and I'm also a self-worth coach primarily for men.

How I got here is for a long time I struggled with my own self-worth and my own self-esteem and even my own emotional journey. At a young age I was diagnosed with anxiety and depression and certainly I had a bunch of trauma as a kid that I think majorly contributed to that and so it's been a long healing journey for me and now I'm enjoying supporting other people in their healing journey. Amazing so is this something have you been on this journey sort of literally throughout your entire life or is it something that you recognised more in adulthood and then have worked on it more specifically more recently? I'd like to say that I've been on it in a hardcore way for about 13 years or so now.

So a fairly significant amount of time. Yeah. So how would you define self-worth and why is it important? So to me self-worth is made up of two things.

It's made up of these other words that we often use in its place so self-confidence and self-esteem. So I would say self-esteem is how you value yourself right like esteem coming from estimate right what's the value of something so how am I estimating my own value and then self-confidence is how am I portraying myself to other people am I portraying my value to other people and so to me self-worth is a combination of both those things right how am I valuing myself and how am I portraying that value to others. That's amazing that's a great summary actually and makes it really really clear it's an easy to understand.

Now as you know obviously many of the listeners have experienced infidelity and this can be on either side of the spectrum both on the betrayed and the unfaithful side but in both cases in the aftermath of infidelity many people struggle with feelings of low self-worth and I'd like to know what your thoughts are on how someone could begin to rebuild their sense of self-worth after experiencing betrayal. So there are a couple of really important ways of looking at this before we even begin considering rebuilding our self-worth and so I want to go through those two two lenses before we even talk about self-worth. So the first place I want to start is a framework called the drama triangle and this is one of the most empowering frameworks I've ever come across and it's got three positions on it that's why it's called the drama triangle and so you've got the victim the persecutor and the rescuer and so really briefly this framework is so powerful because this is such a common dynamic and when I run through the positions on the drama triangle now I think it'll make sense why this is so common.

So as you listen see if you can recognise yourself and how you've shown up either in your romantic relationship or in any of your other relationships in any of these positions. So the victim position on the drama triangle looks like feeling helpless, feeling powerless, not knowing how to make change, not believing you can change. The persecutor position points the finger of blame at the victim and judges them blames them and criticises the victim keeping them in the victim role and then the rescuer looks at the victim and says don't worry I'll save you even though I don't want to I feel obligated to do so and over time as I continue saving you I'm going to resent you more and more and more and so this is the dynamic like the rescuer is is catching a fish for the victim over and over and over rather than teaching the victim to fish by his or herself.

When we're going through infidelity it's very easy for us to to take personally the infidelity that happened right our partner did this to us and thereby put ourselves in the victim role right this person did this to me they have hurt me really this is where the second so we're putting ourselves in the victim position and we're putting them in the persecutor role right there they're harming us we're making them the bad guy really this is where we now have to bring in the other lens which is from Esther Perel and this idea that Esther Perel talks about why do why do couples cheat why do people cheat and essentially what it comes down to is this this culturally normative idea that we expect our partner to meet all of our needs right we expect expect them to be our confidant our lover our friend our adventure companion and so on and this idea that we're putting a lot of pressure on one person and when we don't get those needs met through one person we end up looking outside the relationship to meet those needs whether emotional needs or companionship needs or sexual needs and so really when infidelity is happening that's what the other person is doing they're looking outside the relationship as a way of getting their needs met and they're not actually trying to do anything to you so much as trying to get their own needs met and so if we can realise that then we can avoid taking the infidelity personally and making it mean something about us and if we can avoid making it mean something about us then all of a sudden our self-worth doesn't take nearly as much of a hit because the the fact that they couldn't get their needs met in the relationship is also kind of normal right because of all the pressure we typically put on one partner it's so common that all of our needs can't get met in a relationship it's normal and that's why actually getting some needs met outside the relationship through friends through family right getting some of these connection needs met there rather than all in one place is actually very normal and so if we can recognise that it's not necessarily something that we said or did that led to the infidelity that it doesn't necessarily have anything to do with us all of a sudden it's okay we're okay right we're it doesn't mean anything bad about us and so our self-worth doesn't have to take the same the same hit right it's not to say the the cheating it's not say I'm condoning cheating or infidelity but rather that if we can not take it personally by recognising that this is just another person trying to get their needs met then we don't take such a big hit to our self-worth exactly that's brilliant and I think from my perspective and some of the things that I look at with my clients or some of the things I talk about on the podcast specifically we look at this concept of the want match and very much in the way that you're talking about people thinking that their needs need to be met by their significant other exactly what has created that is I think is a complex thing but so there's definitely a societal pressure there and but of course the reality is that like you say you that's not realistic it's not realistic to expect all of your needs to be met by that one other person and therefore you are setting yourself up to a guarantee failure because then there's no way they can possibly meet all those needs when you're using something or a term that I use is called the want match which is something that was taught to me this is this idea that when two partners come together they can agree on all of the things that they both want and anything that they don't agree on that they don't want together well those are the things that they can be can comfortably seek elsewhere from other friendships relationships family members professional colleagues you name it and there's many other things that can be you know fulfilled in that way so I think it's a fascinating perspective so when we feel betrayed by our partner it can be difficult to trust ourselves and all of a sudden our own judgement really does come into question how can developing a strong sense of self-worth help us trust ourselves again in order to start trusting ourselves again and looking at how self-worth can support our ability to trust ourselves first we need to look at how do we build our self-worth and then how does that relate to our capacity to trust ourselves so I want to dig into what I consider the first step to really building self-worth and that is connecting first with yourself in my experience of Western culture most of us are walking around as talking heads right so almost like our body is a vehicle to transport our head around and there's a disconnect there and so the first step to really building your worth from my perspective is actually reconnecting with your body and reconnecting with your emotions and noticing what am I feeling noticing what am I where do I feel that in my body right and as we get familiar with what we're feeling and where we're feeling it now we're developing this this new source of information that makes our decision-making so much more rich and and so we can actually make healthier better decisions when we have our body online and our emotions online as sources of information in addition to what we're getting from our mind and if we're using all of those sources right body heart mind now we can begin to trust ourselves because of being in tune with ourselves right when we have that information we have this capacity to listen to ourselves in a way that we we didn't have before okay and and the way that we we start to bring these pieces online is through intention and practise right I talked to my clients about going home and asking yourself what emotion am I feeling at various intervals in order to start building that emotional literacy and then asking themselves where do I feel that in my body right where do you feel that sensation related to that emotion in your body as a way of starting to build that body literacy and then the third step that I work with clients around there is starting to breathe into intentionally the sensation when you notice it in your body and by breathing into it it moves and changes Wayne Dyer has a quote where he says when you change the way you look at things the things you look at change and so just by just by staying present with these emotions they move through and so the idea here to summarise all of that is this practise I call it breathing and noticing this practise is the practise of you staying present with you most of us when we're walking around as talking heads are not actually being present with ourselves we're not staying with what's happening in ourselves and so this is the practise of getting comfortable staying with you and as you stay with you you're going to trust yourself more and your self-worth is going to improve so just obviously we've we've both had different training we've come from slightly different areas different backgrounds how would you define an emotion so I really like defining it from the lens of nonviolent communication and from that perspective essentially we have feelings that arise I use feelings and emotions synonymously when I think of emotions I if I were to break it down I had someone break it down for me once as energy in motion right so there's something in you that wants to move and so from this nonviolent communication perspective we have different feelings when our needs are being met or when our needs are not being met and so to me emotions kind of like I hinted at earlier are information they tell you how you're doing in any given moment they're they're like the dashboard in your car right and so it's it's like don't pay attention at your own peril they're there to to tell you how you're doing and yet most of us almost gloss over them as if they weren't there I love the idea that being that there had been disconnected from the body in some way and you're right it's this this this walking heads concept and I think from like from my perspective emotions are the way that we interpret the world they are essentially the signals that our body gives us for us to be able to make sense of all the things that are going on around us and we can take it to the you know to one extreme and consider the sort of the fight flight freeze responses but actually it's much more complex than that and it's a much more beautiful fabric of potential emotions that you can experience and becoming like you say well I forget what word you use now but you know improving your emotional vocabulary can have a massive impact because your emotions ultimately once you've received those signals you've experienced it they're driving all of the things that we do they decide what they help us do the next thing whether that and of course a positive emotion is going to point us in a direction that we're heading and a negative emotion is probably going to withdraw us from that or possibly even push us in a direction that we really don't want to be going I want to add in something here and I I'm really enjoying how on the same page we are with this stuff there's an awesome TED talk by Ryan McKelley called unmasking masculinity in there he talks about something called the male emotional funnel and this actually comes from a book published in 1987 that this concept of the male emotional funnel and essentially what it looks like is the idea is that there are three socially acceptable emotions for men to show in public so those are anger pride and contempt and for women it's joy sympathy I want to say compassion and a host of others is how he puts it or men what ends up happening because if you if you listen carefully to what I just said right so for men there are three acceptable emotions for women there are three and a host of others right so the the range of what's socially acceptable for men is so much less and so what ends up happening for men is when we have uncomfortable emotions like pain hurt sadness fear guilt shame doubt humiliation anything that's uncomfortable we end up avoiding them often and the the beauty of this framework is male emotional funnel framework is he talks about the five ways that men in particular but really everyone avoid their emotions through denying them suppressing them blaming others ignoring them or self-medicating with drugs and alcohol okay so I'm gonna say that again ignoring them denying them suppressing them which would be pushing them down self-medicating with drugs and alcohol and now I'm missing one so because we avoid them they build up in our system and then we end up feeling tense uptight and then they come forward or we show them typically as anger possibly as contempt right if we're if we're feeling insecure it's gonna come across as contempt if we're feeling insecure it might also come across as pride overcompensating by by showing so much pride but most often we mask our emotions with anger because anger is safe to show where these other things are not safe to show because they feel more vulnerable it's interesting as well how that sort of that overlaps with the yeah I'm always fascinated by the different models and techniques and ideas that people have to be able to sort of you know put this into some kind of usable thing that people can help themselves with of course and as anybody listening to this podcast will know that I often talk about the the four things that you can do with your emotions and they start with the three that we would rather not do and that is you react you resist or you avoid and I think actually the the five that you listed there all fall into some subcategory of those three and of course the important one which tends to get missed out and even more so for men I think but I think it's true across both both sexes and is allowing them just letting those emotions be there processing them recognise them just like you were talking about earlier really sort of getting in touch building up that vocabulary and understanding what your body is trying to tell you and not treating it as just some separate entity some separate part of you beyond just building up the vocabulary to talk about what's happening we first actually need to develop the capacity to notice what's happening right because if we're not aware of what's happening we can't even talk about it and and so that's where that three-step process that I was mentioning earlier right what emotion am I feeling where do I feel it in my body what happens when I breathe into it and stay with it and keep breathing into it that's where we develop this capacity to notice what's happening and to stay present with ourselves right and I just want to throw out this question here which is how can I expect anyone else to stay present with me when I'm having a difficult time if I'm unable to stay present with myself and so it's like peace begins with me right so let me cultivate my capacity to stay with myself which then helps me stay present with other people in their own experiences and creates a space for others to be present with me in mine but it begins by me being willing to stay present with me again so so powerful and so true and it also relates back to something that I can think of when I when I first went through my own infidelity experience I chose to focus on my children they were they were there and they were something that I could use as like a distraction for want of a better word or at least I thought you know and also that was the messages I was receiving from externally it's like this is the thing that will help you get through through this difficult time and so it's like basically what I was hearing and what I was believing myself was put the children first now I can't with I've said this live on the podcast before or not but actually what I learnt pretty quickly actually and what I realised was so powerful that actually the most the best thing I could possibly do for my children in fact everybody in my life was to put myself first and that really started with getting a better understanding of what I was feeling what I was experiencing exploring not just the the emotions and the physical vibrations that we've been talking about today but also the thinking behind that and what beliefs I had and really started to sort of appeal unpick that and sort of peel those layers back which created just a completely different version of me and now I'm a much much better person for it and many of the clients that I work with are experiencing the exact same changes so yeah it's a great comparison there amazing the way one of my teachers put it to me was fill your own cup and then serve others with the overflow you can't serve anyone from an empty cup so truth so so true so sometimes after an affair we can become fixated and this touches a little bit what I mentioned a moment ago fixated on the opinions of others and feel like we're constantly being judged I remember specifically feeling like everybody knew how I should feel and how I should act and what I should do which was quite strange because actually a lot of the time once I actually made contact with myself I recognised that they weren't necessarily the ways that I did feel or the way that I wanted to act and behave in that moment so how can we work on developing a sense of self-worth that doesn't rely on the external validation so you said two key words in there to me one is shoulds right getting these shoulds from others and the other one is contacting yourself okay and I notice that that's a theme of our our chat today is is really about connecting with yourself as a source of self-worth and also well-being so essentially when we're shooting ourselves or someone else is shooting us it's like there's something happening right so for example if I'm feeling angry and someone else looks at me and says you shouldn't feel angry you should feel happy essentially what they're doing is they're they're sort of layering over how I actually feel with a sense of how they think I should feel and so what we want to start doing is letting go of the shoulds right the should is not reality the should is someone else's make-believe about what they think reality should like look like so if you let's say let's say they were like you should be happy when you're feeling angry essentially if you bought into that you'd be you'd be like buying someone else's version of reality it's not actually true and so what we need to concern ourselves with is what is true right what what actually are you feeling and that's where of course contacting yourself comes into focus right and again it's so funny on this on this particular conversation I I sound a little bit like a broken record in so far as that's where knowing what's true for you comes in handy right because then you can say well actually this is what's true for me and let go of anyone else's pressure as to how you should be feeling or what you should be doing and the way that that comes is by being in tune with yourself again knowing that most of us culturally are not in tune with ourselves because the culture is really supportive of putting the attention outside ourselves I think it's a message worth repeating yes you are we have touched on this a little bit and of course the whole element of self-worth and self-esteem and building up that self-confidence that you spoke about earlier all of these things really play into being the individual and taking full responsibility for ourselves and then showing up as the best version of ourselves not only for us but also for the people in our lives but it's interesting as you were talking then it was making me think I wonder how how far through life so many people go bouncing from one pillar to the other living through the shoes of others both through the individuals through the expectations from their parents and their peers and then society social media or magazines and things from the past we were sort of moulded unintentionally well at least from our perspective and not really realising what impact that has and it's only you get to a certain point in your life and sometimes it takes a significant event like infidelity or like some other you know traumatic experience to really sort of shake the system up to then be able to give you some perspective where you can actually all of a sudden realise who am I who am I and and I think everything that you're speaking about everything I'm speaking about is really falling in line with actually starting to really identify who you are so that you can start working on all of those things and recognise that actually that external validations I mentioned it's just not necessary and not only is it not necessary it's actually quite damaging because it's taking you further from your true sense of self now we know that infidelity can cause a lot of pain and and it can obviously damage our self-esteem and our self-worth as we've been speaking about today one of the common things that gets brought to me it's also a concept that I speak a lot about is the element of forgiveness now of course when it comes to betrayal of any sorts the natural thought is well I should be forget if I'm going to get to the point where I'm going to forgive I'm going to be forgiving the other person like it's always about the person who's done the wrong so so bringing back up to what you were talking about earlier in terms of the like the the victim the persecutor and the rescue well obviously this is the victim wanting theoretically to forgive the persecutor but of course there's actually quite a lot of room for forgiving yourself because of everything that we've just discussed this life that we've bounced through so yeah I'd like to sort of ask a little bit more how can we begin to forgive ourselves and move towards healing and growth from your perspective I want to respond to something you said before you asked me this question about forgiveness and then I want to circle back to forgiveness in just a minute I really appreciated what you said about expectations from others from family from culture from religion from school etc and how in the process of receiving those expectations we can actually lose touch with who we really are and what we really want and so I wanted to issue a an invitation to your listeners and invite them to pull out a piece of paper and maybe even just pause the podcast episode right here and pull out a piece of paper and make three columns and in the first column write down different areas of your life right what you do for work what you do for relationship what you do with your kids and then in the middle column write down what are the beliefs that you got from other people about how you're supposed to be doing this right what did other people tell you that this is supposed to look like that it should look like what were their expectations and then in the third column write down what do you really want right what's true for you and how you want to show up in each of these situations that make up your life is that making sense and so then to take it even a little further you might ask yourself once you've written down how you want to be showing up in those situations ask yourself what are the obstacles that are keeping you from showing up that way in those situations and then to take it even a little further what can you do to overcome each of those obstacles and so the idea here to put all of that in a single word would be authenticity letting go of other people's expectations and noticing how you want to show up instead and taking action to show up that way that's gonna lead you to show up more and more and more as your authentic self and as you show up more and more as your authentic self your self-worth is going to improve and other people you're going to magnetise the people that are drawn to you showing up that way and you're going to repel the people that are not interested in the real you and this is actually how you're going to determine the people that are real friends the people that are real connections and the people that are not the ones that are not are going to move away the ones that are are gonna be drawn in further by your honesty your openness your authenticity fantastic it's interesting you we already mentioned sheds a couple of times and we've we've used it more in the context of sheds from others and but of course it's very easy to take those sheds on board as your own and this is can obviously get very I say obviously maybe it's not obvious should when you start shooting yourself it can be very dangerous because it leads to set an expectation and therefore it's an expectation that you can fail to achieve now you've already got some thing that you're trying to do in the world and you already feeling maybe unsuccessful in that particular endeavour whatever that may be and then when you set an expectation I should achieve that thing I should do this thing and then you fail to do that then it's just an extra thing to beat yourself up about and send you on this downward sort of negative spiral so just as a quick reframe of how you could look at that alternatively you could maybe insert I'm learning how to do this thing or I'm moving towards this thing I'm creating the this new thing that I'm trying to achieve rather than having that should word in there I think that's just important to add in just in case anybody had missed that as we were talking through so bringing us back to forgiveness David what are your thoughts on forgiveness and how we can begin to forgive ourselves specifically you took the word you took the words right out of my mouth about I am learning to in your in your affirmations and goals rather than looking at it and holding yourself to a standard and not meeting that standard yeah you took the words right out of my mouth there so forgiveness so we have two issues here when it comes to forgiveness we have forgiveness of the other and we have forgiveness of ourselves so what I want to offer here is I want to come back to the drama triangle and I want to come back to this idea of taking things personally versus noticing that this is another person trying to meet their needs most likely not doing anything out of malice or a real intent to harm so much as they are just trying to meet their own needs when we're in the drama triangle and we're holding the idea that this other person is doing this to us we're putting ourselves in the victim position which is where we end up feeling helpless and powerless and so then what we need to do is we need to step out of the drama triangle we need to step out of the drama triangle and this is where I spend some of my time with clients talking about two things right this is how we get out of the drama triangle number one what did I say or do that contributed to the present dynamic okay so is there a way in the relationship getting super honest with yourself that I wasn't is there something that I said or did is there a way that I was showing up that supported my partner and not getting his or her needs met right not to say that you did something wrong exactly but more just acknowledging what did you say or do or didn't you say or do okay and the idea here is if we were to if we were to summarise this this is this is taking responsibility okay where it moves into blame is when we add judgement to it okay when we make ourselves wrong for what we said or do or didn't say or do so instead of judging ourselves and making ourselves wrong we just want to be able to acknowledge it and kind of observe it like oh this is what I said oh this is what I didn't say that my partner really needed to hear right and when we take that responsibility a couple things happen we can let go of blaming the other person right when we can notice that this other person was just trying to get their needs met and this is what I did that contributed to them to their needs not getting met now we can remove the blame that we have toward the other and this can help us move toward forgiving them okay when I take responsibility for what I said or do excuse me said or did or didn't say or do this is like a tongue twister it also allows me to acknowledge what was my role in the dynamic and when I acknowledge my role in the dynamic I can start to let go of the blame that I have for myself I can start to observe how I showed up and notice how I would like to show up differently going forward but first it starts with me being willing to acknowledge what I did or didn't do already like up till now does that make sense yeah that makes sense and I think it's just worth sort of reiterating there that it's very normal and we regularly experience on the betrayed side this these questioning is like well what could I have done differently how didn't I see it what what you know there's this self-deprecating to an extent you know sort of self-shaming which is the very difficult to take and particularly if you're not very well versed at dealing with your emotions so that can immediately let's link back to that anger and that anger can come out as blame and then that's very outward and pointing really towards the other person so they're taking all the responsibility and of course it was their choice we're not we're not saying anything to the contrary the the betrayal is always a choice on the behalf of the person who betrayed but prior to that you are in a dynamic relationship and that relationship is involves both people and there may be things that you can learn from this going forward either in that relationship should you have the option to or choose to stay but also if you do separate from that from that particular relationship then taking it into relationships going forward because what I see very often is patterns of behaviour that show up in one relationship people try and change the circumstance they think that maybe it's there the partner isn't quite the right fit or they're to this or they're to that or they're to the other and then they go into a new relationship and surprise surprise it's almost the exact same things play out and a lot of that can just be down to how you're showing up in the relationship so again it's taking that responsibility for yourself understanding yourself and then showing up as the best version of yourself which yeah it really builds a strong connection with a partner going forward yeah there's a quote to characterise what you just said about going from one relationship to another and expecting it to somehow be different wherever you go there you are right so if you don't address the things that that relationship to not work out chances are you're gonna bring the same factors to the new relationship right and so that's where again as Luke has just said turning our attention inwards and looking at what's happening in us and how that might be contributing has a lot of value in terms of either improving the relationship should you choose to stay or moving on to the next one I want to I want to just kind of summarise how to get out of the drama triangle here because when we follow these two steps this actually leads to a sense of empowerment which leads to a sense of self-worth as well okay so again what did I say or do or didn't I say or do that led to the current situation so that's taking responsibility for your role and then number two asking for what you want instead sometimes that looks like asking for the other from the other person for what you're needing or sometimes that can look like you noticing how you showed up and asking yourself how would I like to show up instead and then practising showing up that way next time and if you miss it next time noticing that setting the intention to do it again the following time and just being gentle and kind with yourself as you're as you're noticing how you want to show up and starting to shift that exactly just that recognising it step-by-step not trying to go from one extreme to the other and some of the analogies that I'll often use like in weight loss for example somebody might step on the scales and see the number on the scale and think to themselves I hate myself or I hate my body and what they're really wanting to be thinking is that I love myself and I love my body but to go from I hate myself to I love myself it's just too big a jump it's not something that they can consider taking on board so when they're changing their thinking and changing their intention then all they really need to do is just improve that thought by just a little bit and make it believable and that will help you move that one step closer each time recognising each time that negative feeling comes up which is linking to some kind of belief or thinking that you've got going on and then just making those slight adjustments and eventually working your way through not dissimilar to what David was just talking about okay so it's common to feel like we're not enough after experiencing betrayal you know we've spoken about this and I would really like to explore how we cultivate that sense of self-worth that allows us to believe that we are worthy of love and respect and I'm talking more about the love and respect that we expect to receive from others let's say it's like it's one we start by rebuilding ourselves and recognising the things that we have control of and taking responsibility for that and acknowledging that the actions and behaviours of other people are outside of our control but then I've seen people who start to build that journey and they start to get more self-confident about themselves and more trusting of themselves but they're still not quite at that point where they're ready to open the door hypothetically speaking to love coming in from another person or the attention and attraction that they might receive from another person so this links back together with the trust that we've been speaking about so I'm just interested in knowing what your thoughts are from that perspective David yeah thank you what a what a beautiful question so if I'm hearing the question right it's it's how do I feel good enough and how do I feel worthy enough to to allow myself to receive love again yes the receiving yeah so the first thing is when and this might sound so obvious so bear with me for a second when we experience infidelity we feel hurt right I think it's so natural to feel hurt and in that hurt in that pain there can be a closing of your heart okay and that closing is happening as a way of self-protection it's it's to shield you unconsciously from receiving additional hurt and pain that would mirror the hurt and pain that you felt as a result of the infidelity okay so to say that slightly differently once you experience that hurt there's a way that we can close up and close off and protect ourselves so as to not get hurt the same way again however in that hurting in that closing off rather we also keep ourselves from receiving love and appreciation and kindness and care and these other beautiful good things that actually make life worth living and so what I would say here is very much in line with what we've talked about so far about getting present with yourself it starts with you right it starts with you slowing down and being able to be in the here and now and noticing the things that you're doing in your own life right probably you're doing the best you can at work if you have kids you're probably doing the best you can with them if you're still in relationship you're probably doing the best you can there right and so it starts with actually slowing down and even recognising the things that you're already doing and expressing gratitude towards yourself expressing appreciation towards yourself for those things and really letting yourself feel that okay and then another way that you can start to move toward opening and allowing yourself to receive love would be when friends when family are complimenting you rather than blowing it off or moving past it or glossing over it in some way like actually pausing and breathing and really being intentional about taking in what they just said maybe saying thank you and verbally acknowledging it and not immediately moving on to something else but actually breathing in intentionally and breathing in that compliment and moving it through your body as a way of being so intentional about taking in what's just been said to you and so now we're cultivating our capacity to receive both from ourselves and from others and over time this is gonna support you in shifting toward being able to take in love I want to add in one other piece here too which seems really important in infidelity just like when a loved one dies there can be a lot of grief okay and that grief can be a barrier to taking in love and so what we want to do is we want to make sure that we're giving ourselves the space to really feel that grief if it's there or to feel that hurt and not make it wrong and to not ignore deny suppress blame or self-medicate right we really want to be present with what we're feeling and allowing it to move through so that by letting it move through it it leaves space inside for us to be able to receive something new in its place right if we're not allowing it to move through then it gets stuck in the system and then we're not going to be able to take in new energy new love new appreciation care and so forth and I think that's a great place to to stop and wrap it up today I can't believe how quickly the times gone it's been absolutely fantastic having you on the podcast today David so thank you again very very much I have no doubt that my listeners will have found it extremely helpful so before you go where can everybody find out more about you and the work that you do so I would love to share something with your listeners I have a guide the six steps to creating lasting self-worth they can go to see your worth challenge comm slash guide to go ahead and get that and then I have a YouTube channel as well where they can get awesome tools to further their development of self-worth amazing so I will include those links in the show notes and yeah again thanks ever so much David and take care.