Low self-esteem wreaks havoc in anyone’s life. It is easy to see the connection between low self-esteem and things like never putting yourself out there and not taking chances and feeling overall depressed in life. But it is harder for people to see the connection between low self-esteem and relationship problems. But the connection is strong indeed. And here is how:  

1. When your self-esteem is low, you are insecure in your relationships and because of this you make your relationships insecure. Why? Because you do not see your own value and therefore, you do not see what the other person is getting out of being with you. We all know that a person will only stay in a relationship with us if they value us. Therefore, if we perceive we have low value, we are convinced we are going to be abandoned. This makes building up a secure bond in a relationship very hard. We become hypersensitive to anything that could indicate we might be left. We adopt self-protective behaviors in the relationship and the ways that we start behaving unnecessarily sabotage the relationship. Self-protective behaviors like unnecessarily ending relationships before the other person does it to us, withdrawing emotionally, avoiding exposing any vulnerability in the relationship, withholding affection, withholding praise, negative criticism, shutting down, stonewalling, over reaction to little things that are not really a threat, avoiding commitment, avoiding conflict, creating unhealthy dependencies on us, lying, manipulation, gaslighting, becoming hyper controlling, extreme jealousy, cheating, isolating the other person from others and the list goes on and on. Basically, your own insecurity makes you behave in ways that make the relationship insecure if not impossible.
2. We can slip into the covert depreciation pattern. The covert depreciation pattern is a toxic protection mechanism. It is a projection of how we feel about ourselves, out onto the world. Simply put, the Covert Depreciation Pattern is when low self-esteem causes a person to devalue everything else, including other people. When we feel bad about ourselves, recognizing the value of other things, most especially the value of other people, causes us to feel even worse about ourselves in comparison. And so, we go to work subconsciously or consciously depreciating everything around us, so that we can feel better about ourselves. This pattern shows up in two forms: The first from is: Because a person feels bad about themselves, they find active ways to devalue, diminish, cut down to size, disqualify, reduce, misprize, negate, disparage, discredit, minimize, put down and deflate something or someone in order to feel better about themselves and their own value. The second form is: Because a person feels bad about themselves, they depreciate the things they come into contact with, by virtue of association with themselves. Essentially, if anything is associated with them, they can’t think highly of it anymore. If you want to learn more about this, you can watch my video titled: The Covert Depreciation Pattern. This SUCKS for anyone to be in a relationship with. 
3. Low self-esteem creates an inferiority complex that demolishes relationship. We may constantly see ourselves as beneath or smaller than other people. When we do this, we start to lack confidence in our own decisions or abilities. This lack of confidence can cause us to not even step into the relationships that we really want and need and that would benefit us. We essentially unnecessarily disqualify ourself from the very relationships that we are desperate for. This lack of confidence can cause us to stop making decisions for ourselves and rather defer to others to tell us what to do. This means you stop leading and directing your own life. Instead, you follow other people’s lead. The problem is, a lot of the people who are very happy to tell you want to do, do not actually know what is in your best interests. Rather, they are deeply connected to only their own best interests, which they are projecting onto you. So, this puts you in the position to be used as a puppet to bring about what they want for themselves. On top of this, by losing confidence in your own decisions and abilities and therefore not bringing them into your relationships, you create narcissistic relationships unnecessarily. You’re making it so there is no “you” to be in a relationship with. So, you are creating a relationship of one… the other person only. So people will feel alone with all the pressure when they are in a relationship with us.       
4. Having low self-esteem often causes you to be inauthentic and dishonest in relationships. If you feel you have no value, you don’t want to put yourself out there, including to other people. Rather, you may choose to erect a façade which you know they will value, accept and approve of. This makes you fake in relationships. It is a form of duping. You can’t dupe other people and have relationships go well. SO many issues come as a result of being inauthentic and dishonest. Here is just a small list of what I mean: Being inauthentic and dishonest ensures that you will never be valued or loved for who you really are. It will make it so you can never find true belonging. Other people cannot and should not trust you if you are doing this; so, it is an antithesis to trust in a relationship. You will end up dissatisfied in every relationship because it will not feel like you can have yourself and be in relationship at the same time. And this will create a kind of unnecessary poisoned water dynamic whereby you are desperate for relationship, but relationship puts you in pain. If you reveal your true self in the relationships you formed through a façade, you are in for serious conflict and potentially un-repairable relationship rupture. When you get into a relationship on a false premise, you are setting yourself up to be rejected once you reveal you are someone different than you sold yourself to be. Thus, creating a manifest destiny scenario for yourself regarding the belief that you are not going to be valued for who you are. And those relationships you got into with a façade and dishonesty are very likely to end. If you are inauthentic, you cannot make the correct choices regarding who to be with in life and because of this you guarantee that you will cultivate incompatible relationships. Incompatible relationships are absolute misery.
5. You will really struggle to communicate your own needs and bring your own needs into the relationship. In order to end up with poor self-esteem, we grew up in childhood environments that made us feel like we had little to no value to others. These environments made US bad and wrong. This means, we were rejected for what was true about us. Our feelings, thoughts, preferences, aversions and most of all, our needs. It isn’t like this association changes when we grow into an adult. We still feel we will be rejected for these things. This causes us to not reveal how we are feeling when we are in relationships and not be honest about what we truly think. It also causes us to suppress, deny and disown our needs. When we feel bad about ourselves, we feel ashamed of our needs. We cannot conceptualize of the idea that someone would want to meet them and might even get something themselves out of doing so. And so, we keep them away from the other person and the relationship. There is no way to create an actual relationship this way. A relationship is a dance between two beings and a big part of that dance is needs. Also, just because we deny and withhold needs, doesn’t mean they are not there. They will come up in subconscious ways. You are likely to become extremely manipulative because manipulation happens when we don’t feel we can meet a need directly, so our subconscious goes to work getting that need met indirectly. Not having needs met will cause resentments and dissatisfaction with the relationship. It will also cause unresolved conflict because a big part of resolving a conflict is identifying what is needed by both parties. Unresolved conflict that keeps coming up again and again wears down a relationship to the breaking point.   
6. You may spend your whole time in relationships overcompensating. You can think of overcompensation as being the behavior of taking excessive measures and going to extreme lengths to try to keep other people interested in being in a relationship with you, because you feel you must do this to overcompensate for your lack of value. This can manifest in many ways. For example, it can manifest as abandoning your own needs so as to focus only and entirely on your partners needs and on meeting them. It can manifest as trying to become beyond excellent at one skill you know people desire or value and essentially peacocking with this. It can manifest as doing everything you can do to please others and do what they want to do. It can manifest as perfectionism. It can manifest as showering others in gifts and other expensive experiences so as to compensate for the inadequacy you feel. It can manifest as letting go of every other relationship in your life for a partnership. If you recognize this behavior in yourself, you may want to watch one of my videos titled: The Dancing Monkey Pattern in Relationships.
7. Constant seeking of reassurance and validation within the relationship. When we have low self-esteem, we are like a bottomless pit for reassurance and validation. We become totally dependent on the other person to behave a certain way towards us so that we can feel good about ourselves. The reason being that when we feel bad about ourselves, it taints us. Other people’s positivity towards us is entering the constantly poisoned water of our self-concept. Because of this (coupled with the fact that it makes us feel bad to tell the other person this is the reason behind our need for reassurance and so, we are unlikely to do so) it will start to feel to others like no amount of reassurance or validation is ever effective. It can make them feel constantly questioned or doubted or like they are not being good enough in the relationship and are not doing the right thing in the relationship. All of this can make the other person start to feel like they are pouring energy into a cup with holes in it. This wears a person down and can cause the relationship to feel strained and even futile. Like no amount of energy they put into making the relationship secure ever works. 
8. Jealousy and isolation of the other person. When we have low self-esteem, we have jealousy issues. We tend to feel a kind of resentful enviousness towards others that have what we want or that we think pose a threat to us losing what we value. At its root, jealousy is really a fear of losing something that we value. This fear makes us really anxious and suspicious and defensive and distrustful and hypervigilant and covetous and negatively protective. It makes other people who we perceive to have more value than we do, a potential threat to us losing the person we treasure. And this can cause us to become unnecessarily oppositional to other people, as well as to isolate the person we treasure from others. This isolation can take the form of discouraging them from being in contact with others, monitoring their communication with others and tampering with it, intentionally creating a sense of isolation from others in the person, causing insecurities in the person so they will isolate themselves from others, triangulating the person we treasure against other people, creating emotional consequences for them when they engage with others and even in extreme situations, physically preventing them from seeing other people.   
9. Conflict avoidance. When we have low self-esteem, we feel we are always on such shaky ground in relationships, because people have so little incentive to be with us, that we cannot afford to have a conflict. We feel so much terror when conflict arises, we find it intolerable. We feel we are always on the brink of abandonment. The problem is, conflict is a necessary part of a relationship. It is also the only way to make it better and stronger. Conflict forces two beings to re-configure things so as to construct a stronger and better relationship. It forces two beings to consciously create a state of symbiosis. Two people cannot learn how to dance together in life without conflict. When we avoid conflict, we do not actually bring up issues to resolve them and so they never get resolved. Instead, the pain and fear and other negative emotions just keep building up and building up. This unresolved stuff in the relationship puts tension and pressure on the relationship and the relationship starts to crack. Also, it makes it impossible to resolve issues when they are small, which guarantees they will grow into huge issues (especially trust breaches) which will create the kind of big ruptures that are very hard to repair, if not impossible.          
10. Having low self-esteem can cause you to isolate and push away relationships entirely. When we feel like we have no value, we anticipate that relationships will be a painful reminder of our inadequacies and that we will be abandoned. In order to avoid that pain, and to be more in control of the pain we experience, rather than being at the mercy of experiencing someone else doing it to us, we withhold ourselves from relationships completely. We reject others before they ever get the chance to reject us. We isolate ourselves. This way, we are in control of our own loneliness. We keep ourselves in the pain of deprivation, which many people feel is better than having someone we deeply need and then being rejected by them and losing them.
11. Low self-esteem causes us to stay in and maintain unhealthy relationships. When we feel bad about ourselves, we don’t feel worthy of being treated well. Nor do we feel we can be with people who are high value people. We believe they will reject us, so we are safer with dysfunctional and undesirable people. This means, we are likely to put up with really bad treatment from others. We will cling to dysfunctional and abusive individuals. We may tell ourselves that the person we have is as good as it can get for us and that no one else will want us. We may get into relationships with people who reinforce our negative self-concept. We won’t set boundaries that need to be set. We settle for less. We both create and stay on the receiving end of very painful relationships. When we do this, we may not put the energy into making these relationships healthy and instead, be a contributing factor to a cycle of dysfunction. Or, we may put in all the effort to a relationship that is actually futile. Or we may have an uncommitted person on the other side of the relationship and take 100 percent of the responsibility for the relationship working rather than end the relationship when we need to.  

Changing your self-concept for the better is a critical part of building a life that is worth living. And it is an essential part of creating the relationships you want to have in this life, which should now be obvious given that you now understand the incredible impact that low self-esteem has on relationships.