Say It Like You Mean It
What This Season of MAFS Taught Us About Standing Up for Ourselves
If you caught yourself yelling at the TV during a commitment ceremony this month, you're not alone. Married at First Sight Season 20 just wrapped its finale and reunion, and everyone is talking about it.
But the reason we can't stop talking about it isn't really the drama. It's that some of these women did something a lot of us are still learning how to do, standing up for yourself. Self-advocacy gets talked about like it's one thing, but it's really three things working together: knowing where your boundary is, being willing to say it out loud, and trusting yourself enough to protect your peace even when someone pushes back.
When Someone Else Actively Works Against Your Ability to Self-Advocate
A perfect example and one of the couples we followed closely was Nikki Jefferson, and Shawn Best. Early in the marriage, Shawn pushed Nikki toward physical intimacy she wasn't ready for, at one point framing it as a "wifely duty." Nikki told him she felt caught off guard. Instead of slowing down, Shawn denied he'd ever said it, insisting the words never happened, even though the moment aired on camera for millions of people to watch.
This is worth naming specifically because it's a documented pattern, not just a bad boyfriend moment he was actively gaslighting her. Gaslighting, is a term that gets thrown around alot, but all you need to understant is that its a blanket term often used to descrbe a process where someone repeatedly disputes another person's memory or perception until that person starts to doubt themselves rather than the person lying to them.
Studies on gaslighting from the Society for Personality and Social Psychology found that this pattern leaves people feeling like their sense of self is shrinking, and makes them more guarded and less willing to trust their own read of a situation going forward.
That's the actual obstacle to self-advocacy in a relationship like this one. It's not that Nikki lacked a boundary. She was clear about needing more time from the very beginning. The obstacle was that holding a boundary requires trusting yourself, your own memory and perception, and having someone who you trust (like Shawn) actively working to make you double yourself. Self-advocacy also isn't just about knowing what you need. It's about staying anchored to your own reality when someone with influence over you is telling you it isn't real.
By Decision Day, we saw Nikki’s strength and commitment to her boundaries all season. When she read him a letter naming the specific ways he'd hurt her, he defended himself and said he'd felt like he was walking on eggshells the entire marriage, which ultimately ended in their divorce. Weeks later, Shawn posted a public apology admitting he had gaslit her and that pressuring a partner to move at a different pace than her own was never okay. Whether he came to that conclusion on his own or not the important thing we can take from them is that she held her ground and the thing she was told wasn't real while it was happening, turned out to be exactly what she said it was.
Why This Isn't Just a Relationship Skill
Here's the part that matters beyond the relationship itself. Therapists who work with people recovering from gaslighting and similar controlling tactics or dynamics report that the damage rarely stays contained to the relationship where it happened. People who've spent months or years being told their perception is wrong often show up to work less sure of themselves, pull back in negotiations, and stop advocating for their own ideas in meetings, even in professional settings that have nothing to do with their relationships.
That's the throughline: self-advocacy in a marriage and self-advocacy in a performance review are not two separate skills. They're the same muscle. If you spend years not practicing it because someone in your personal life has made it costly or confusing to speak up, that muscle doesn't just show up strong somewhere else. It atrophies everywhere at once, in your friendships, in how you negotiate a raise, in whether you correct a family member who keeps overstepping, in whether you tell a friend that something they said actually hurt you.
Confidence Is Both the Cause and the Result
This is where insecurity and confidence come in, and the research shows the relationship runs in both directions. Psychologists studying assertiveness describe it as part of a reinforcing cycle: people with higher self-esteem feel more entitled to state their needs, and every successful instance of stating those needs and having them respected builds more self-esteem. Correlational research on assertiveness training backs this up, showing that when people practice advocating for themselves, their sense of self-worth rises alongside it, not after it.
The problem is that the cycle runs just as strongly in reverse. Low confidence makes self-advocacy feel riskier than it is, which leads to more silence, which removes the exact evidence, successfully speaking up and being respected, that would have built the confidence in the first place. And for women specifically, that reverse cycle gets an extra push from the outside. Research out of Yale found that women in positions of power face measurable backlash for talking as much as their male peers, even when the content and delivery of what they say is identical to a man's. Talkative men get read as more competent. Talkative women get read as less. That's not a confidence problem inside any individual woman. It's an external cost that makes staying quiet feel like the safer bet, which is exactly the bet that keeps the cycle running the wrong direction.
What We'd Actually Do
This is is the part of the work we care about most: not just building this skill for ourselves, but knowing how to walk a ourselve or someone else through it when she's in the middle of it and can't see it clearly yet.
Recognize the pattern. Sometimes the first step is to just see what is happening and to say it out loud to yourself, or someone you trust. The moment you say the exact words to another person, you have an outside anchor to your own truth that's harder to talk you out of.
No one who is on your team would ever expect you to dim your light for theirs to shine brighter. Whether you love someone and whether the relationship, situation or event opportunity is safe for you to stay yourself in. If you cannot be yourself you cannot shine your light.
Neither of those truths require the other person to admit anything, apologize, or even agree with you. Nikki got her closure from her own Decision Day, not from Shawn's apology weeks later. That's the actual goal of building this skill: not winning the argument, but trusting yourself enough to act on what you know, regardless of whether the other person ever comes around.
Build the Skill With Us
None of this is meant to happen without support. Practicing self-advocacy alongside a friend or a community who will actually check in on how it's going does real work here, the same work an outside witness does in a gaslighting situation. It gives you an anchor to your own reality that isn't dependent on the person you're trying to hold a boundary with agreeing that your reality is valid. EmpowerU is where we practice confidence, self-awareness, and speaking up for yourself with real tools, not just pep talks. → Explore EmpowerU
Sources:
TVLine, "Married At First Sight Season 20 Finale: Who Broke Up? Who Stayed Married?" (Aug. 2026)
Realityblurb / Yahoo Entertainment, coverage of Shawn Best's public apology to Nikki Jefferson (Aug. 2026)
Swooon, Nikki Jefferson's post-reunion interview (Aug. 2026)
TODAY.com, "Which 'Married at First Sight' Season 20 Couples Are Still Together Now?" (Aug. 2026)
Society for Personality and Social Psychology, research on gaslighting and sense of self
Annie Wright Therapy, clinical writing on gaslighting's effect on workplace confidence
Psychology Today, "The Synergy Between Assertiveness and Self-Esteem"
Victoria L. Brescoll, Yale University, Administrative Science Quarterly (via Association for Psychological Science)
