Jordan Gray > Quotes

“You gain self-esteem largely by DOING. You build self-esteem by engaging in the behaviours that you partake in in your daily life. Self-esteem isn’t something that you can just think your way into (as much as the pro-affirmation crowd would like to believe it to be true). Self-esteem is the byproduct of having done or accomplished things in your life that you are massively proud of.”
― Jordan Gray, Overcoming Intimacy Anxiety: How to Love When Loving Someone Scares You

“One of the best ways to discover what your triggers are is to pay close attention to all of the moments that your reactive emotional response comes up for you.”
― Jordan Gray, Overcoming Intimacy Anxiety: How to Love When Loving Someone Scares You

“Emotional energy is pure movement. You could even think of the word emotion as energy in motion. It is when the energy gets stuck inside of us that we start to suffer with sadness, grief, anxiety, depression, and feelings of low self-worth.”
― Jordan Gray, Overcoming Intimacy Anxiety: How to Love When Loving Someone Scares You

“You can only build self-esteem by acting congruently with your heart’s deepest desires. If your core values tell you that your mission in life is to help others via your chosen career path, and yet you to choose to engage in something that isn’t aligned with what you actually want (for example, choosing to be a doctor because it would make your parents proud when you actually want to be an actor or a poet), then you will suffer. We can only build our self-esteem by acting congruently with what we truly want…not what society or our families tells us we want, but what we actually want. Your gut-level emotional guidance system is always there to encourage you in the right direction as long as you are ready and willing to listen to it.”
― Jordan Gray, Overcoming Intimacy Anxiety: How to Love When Loving Someone Scares You

“especially the ones that run on autopilot just below our conscious awareness.”
― Jordan Gray, Overcoming Intimacy Anxiety: How to Love When Loving Someone Scares You

“Every human on the face of this earth is flawed, messy, and vulnerable in one way or another. And anyone who denies that is just further in denial than most others.”
― Jordan Gray, Overcoming Intimacy Anxiety: How to Love When Loving Someone Scares You

“Similar to people with low self-esteem, people who suffer from anxiety, depression, addictions, and OCD are all at risk of wanting to avoid intimate relationships.”
― Jordan Gray, Overcoming Intimacy Anxiety: How to Love When Loving Someone Scares You

“When you feel hesitant or scared to tell your partner about something that you need, or you are nervous about letting your partner love or nurture you in any way, simply take a deep breath. If that doesn’t do enough, take an even bigger breath. Then let them know what’s going on in your mind and tell them what you need from them in that moment. That is the act of building courage. You breathe in courage and exhale doubt.”
― Jordan Gray, Overcoming Intimacy Anxiety: How to Love When Loving Someone Scares You

“Even something as seemingly insignificant as your parents having a difficult time expressing or accepting emotions would rub off on you. If sadness, grief, anger, and other negative emotions were hidden or repressed, then you would have learned to put emotions in a hierarchy and learned which ones were more acceptable than others. This resistance to recognizing or expressing a full range of emotions could then carry on into your intimate relationships”
― Jordan Gray, Overcoming Intimacy Anxiety: How to Love When Loving Someone Scares You

“Self-compassion is defined as extending compassion towards one’s self in times of perceived inadequacy, suffering, or failure. An example of self-compassion would be if you studied for months for a big test, ended up getting 70 percent on it, and then told yourself, “I tried my best. I did the best that I could with the time and energy that was available to me.”
― Jordan Gray, Overcoming Intimacy Anxiety: How to Love When Loving Someone Scares You

“Low self-esteem is a silent killer that keeps people from many great things in life. Chronic low self-esteem sufferers choose professions or jobs that aren’t worthy of their highest talents and gifts (because they feel that they don’t deserve the better jobs or career paths), are more likely to engage in addictive behaviours (attempting to fill the void in their sense of self), and avoid or barely commit to intimate relationships for fear that people will “find out the truth” about how unworthy they are. Self-esteem is something that can be cultivated, and I will talk about how to do exactly that shortly.”
― Jordan Gray, Overcoming Intimacy Anxiety: How to Love When Loving Someone Scares You

“There’s a lot of unconscious social conditioning and primal drivers in your mind that offer up thoughts that might not ultimately serve you, your growth as a person, or your intimate relationship. Two of the best tools that I have found to help you begin questioning your thoughts are journaling and mindfulness (also known as observing ego).”
― Jordan Gray, Overcoming Intimacy Anxiety: How to Love When Loving Someone Scares You