Valeria interviews Andrew G. Marshall a marital therapist and author who offers straightforward advice for creating successful and fulfilling relationships. Getting the most out of love needs skills and the good news is that these skills can be taught.
If there is a critical voice in your head which not only runs you down but makes it hard to accept praise from work colleagues, friends, or family, Andrew’s work will help you make peace with yourself and the world around you. Unlike many programs for boosting self-esteem, Andrew not just treat the symptoms but go to the root causes of your negative messages and show how to make peace with the past.
In this way, you will not only learn how to challenge that little voice in your head but replace it with something kinder, more understanding, and loving. Most importantly, by improving your relationship with yourself, you will improve all your relationships. So that if you’re looking for love, you will start attracting people who’ll treat you better (rather than play games) and if you’re in a loving relationship, it will become more equal and balanced.
It is a common piece of advice - you’ve heard it a million times on T.V. talk shows and from friends and family: ‘You’ve got to love yourself before you can love anybody else.’ There are also variations on this theme like ‘If you don’t hold yourself in high regard nobody else will’ and ‘Loving yourself is the greatest love of all.’
In fact, we’ve heard this basic idea packaged in so many ways, so many times that we tend to switch off and carry on as normal. But what would our lives be like if we did at least like ourselves? Wouldn’t everything be easier and certainly more enjoyable, if we weren’t so self-critical? We’d start standing up for ourselves, stop friends or work colleagues taking advantage. When looking for love, we’d make better choices or when we’d found a partner not let him or her walk all over us. Unlike a lot of other obvious truths, there is real nugget of wisdom in the idea of loving ourselves. So why haven’t we taken the advice on board?
From time to time, Andrew does meet people who seem to have a very high opinion of themselves. “I’m only been attracted to really handsome men,” said Charlotte, forty-two when she arrived in Andrew’s counseling office, ‘unfortunately they’ve all known just how gorgeous they were.’ As he took down her relationship history, Charlotte peppered her conversations with examples of just how much she loved herself - ‘I’m used to a lot of attention’ - or had been loved: ‘He absolutely adored me and would have done anything for me.’ Twenty-five years of counseling has taught me that how something appears on the surface and the reality underneath are often very different.
At first sight, Charlotte did seem confident and up-front. However, she felt a little brittle as if the slightest setback or anything beyond 100 percent approval, and she would start to crumble. She had come into counseling because despite being able to attract plenty of men, she could not keep any that she truly wanted (and did not seem to want the ones that wanted her). The more Andrew got to know Charlotte, the more he realized that she was swinging from high to low self-esteem - with nothing much in the middle.
Andrew G Marshall is a marital therapist and author of twenty self-help books on relationships. His most famous book are 'I love you but I'm not in love with you', 'How can I ever trust you again' and 'Learn to love yourself enough'. You can follow him on twitter at andrewgmarshall and like him on Facebook Andrew G Marshall - Therapy. He is based in Berlin where he has a busy private practice and he leads a group of therapists based in London.
