The Poison of People-Pleasing: Part 1
Somewhere in my childhood, I chose people-pleasing. I don’t mean that I was aware of a list of options - like a menu of maladaptions that every human is required to select from when they start school. Hey Joel, it’s God. You’ve reached the age where you now must decide whether you will be an aggressive bully, a lying manipulator, a manic overachiever, or an anxious isolationist. Pick your poison. Naw, I believe the choice was unconscious. Like all children, I adapted to my environment the best I could to experience the love, attention, and care that we all crave at that age.
Side-Note: It’s a whole other blog post, but I see personality as a container that every human necessarily creates when they are young. The spiritual path is to stop over-identifying with that persona and to break free from its constraints.
Back to people-pleasing. Like all maladaptive strategies, it worked. Honestly, I was really good at it, so it actually worked for a long while. Until it stopped working. Then I started to notice the logical consequences of my behaviors:
Only expressing ideas that I intuited others would agree with left me feeling inauthentic and frustrated.
Focusing on the happiness of others created anger - and sometimes rage - when the people I cared about didn’t seem to care about my happiness in the same way.
My efforts to maintain harmony by subtly manipulating everyone to like me through my litany of codependent tactics depleted my energy to the point of exhaustion and, eventually, depression.
The conflict that I was so carefully attempting to avoid ended up happening regardless of my intentions.
I’m in a new space now. I have toiled for decades with inner work - breaking up the hardened ground of my psyche and cultivating something alive and authentic. I had a friend once call it my “secret garden.” I think we all have that inside of us, a sort of individual Eden, providing sanctity, dignity, and freedom. A place to relax, and to be. However, to abide in this paradise, we must abandon the shanty towns our egos are so fond of inhabiting.
To be continued…