People Pleasing

People pleasing often develops as a response when children feel they must caretake the adults around them in order to be loved. As we grow, it becomes difficult to voice our true feelings because love has become attached to always being pleasing and easy to others.

Over time, this results in feelings of resentment and anger as we feel disconnected from our true selves and don't know why. We blame others for our discontent, often telling ourselves we are required to make everyone else happy yet no one does this for us. We tell ourselves we have to people please or else others won’t be okay. We don't see our behaviors as a choice. Life feels unfree, and we feel trapped by needing the constant approval of others. This can have an impact on our physical, emotional, and spiritual health. It can leave us feeling isolated from others and prisoners to our need for external validation.

One of the keys to overcoming people pleasing is to develop awareness that what was once a survival mechanism is now hurting us and our relationships. People pleasing as adults prevents us from authentically connecting with ourselves and others.

One of the first steps to growing out of this tough pattern is to become compassionately aware of the underlying unconscious motivations keeping us locked into patterns we would like to outgrow. Symptoms are painful but they also protect us in some way. That’s why they developed- to communicate something we could not yet verbalize.

The more direct and sincere we can become in our communication, the less need we have for painful symptoms. To really integrate though requires looking at our shadow sides and identifying how our symptoms are also allowing us to hide out. When we are brave enough to do this difficult shadow work, we can begin to slowly grow into a more authentic relationship with ourselves and others.

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Dr. J