People-Pleasers

[MajestyJo]

Thursday, February 27, 2014

You are reading from the book The Language of Letting Go

People-Pleasers

Have you ever been around people-pleasers? They tend to be displeasing. Being around someone who is turned inside out to please another is often irritating and anxiety- producing.

People-pleasing is a behavior we may have adapted to survive in our family. We may not have been able to get the love and attention we deserved. We may not have been given permission to please ourselves, to trust ourselves, and to choose a course of action that demonstrated self-trust.

People-pleasing can be overt or covert. We may run around fussing over others, chattering a mile a minute when what we are really saying is, "I hope I'm pleasing you." Or, we may be more covert, quietly going through life making important decisions based on pleasing others.

Taking other people's wants and needs into consideration is an important part of our relationships. We have responsibilities to friends and family and employers. We have a strong inner responsibility to be loving and caring. But, people-pleasing backfires. Not only do others get annoyed with us, we often get annoyed when our efforts to please do not work as we planned. The most comfortable people to be around are those who are considerate of others but ultimately please themselves.

Help me, God, work through my fears and begin to please myself.

Lived my life through others, that old adage "If you are happy, I am happy," which is a load of crap. We set our own happiness aside in order to please others, and I don't know about anyone else, but I had a big load of resentment, anger, and hurt, because after all I had done for them, they didn't reciprocate.

I had to learn the difference between being selfish and self-centered and self care and self-worth.

I can identify with the fear, fearing they would leave, fear of saying no, fearing they didn't love me, and the list went on and on, not knowing that my people-pleasing was enabling instead of taking care of someone. I didn't have the power to change them, and I was as powerless over my own dis-ease as I was over theirs.