How I’m Dealing with My People Pleasing Behavior

Hey, beautiful souls.

PS: I have a new book on Amazon called You Make Me Feel Like Crap. Click here to check it out.

If you’ve been reading Cognitive Heights for a while now, you know that I have a people-pleasing issue. I find it hard to say no, because I don’t want to make people feel bad. I just don’t want to hurt others. I’m sure I’m not alone in this. Sometimes I feel really bad about this people pleasing behavior of mine. I’ve always tried to heal myself, and I’ve written about it with tears of rage and pain clouding my eyes.

Here are just some of the posts that I write to help myself defeat this agonizing and self-defeating behavior that seems to be programmed into my system:

• Unethical Guide to Setting Boundaries
• 5 Crucial Life Skills for Empaths and Codependents
• How to Stop Being Too Nice
• How I’m Unlearning All I’ve Been Taught About Emotions

My people pleasing issues are just one of the many dysfunctions that come with being a co-dependent and empathic person with boundary issues. Remember that being a co-dependent personality type means that you are a ripe juicy apple for a narcissist to terrorize. Suffice to say, I’ve had my fair share of narcissistic abuse. If you’d like to read my take on narcissism, and how to save yourself, head on over to my narcissism page.

I’m very interested in the psychology behind why I act the way I do. I love to read self-help books and watch YouTube videos about the human mind. That’s partly why my blog is aptly called Cognitive Heights.

One of my favorite spiritual coaches is Teal Swan. I absolutely love to watch her many insightful and amazing YouTube videos. One video of hers that really elevated my search for the cure of my people pleasing is titled: Self Sacrifice…The Most Self Centered Thing In The World!

Before I watched this video, I had already realized that most of the time, I did things out of love for myself. I wrote a journal entry a few years ago, and I figured that I was tough on myself because of the love I had for myself. Luckily, I still have the entry, so I’ll post it here:

The truth is, maybe I truly love myself. Sometimes my dreams pour into reality; and what I feel in the dream spills into my waking thoughts. So, today I felt, maybe I love myself. I do everything I can to make myself a better person. I keep myself company, I argue with my own thoughts, I try to make myself feel better. I just want the best for myself. Maybe sometimes I’m the tough coach that gets you to do 100 push-ups just so you can get stronger biceps, and maybe some days I’m the calm therapist that listens without judgement. Ok, a lot of the days I receive the coach treatment from myself.

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In the end, I think, I really love myself. I want to be the best. I want to be better than other people. But as they say, Comparison is the thief of joy. From today, every time I think some other girl is cooler than me, I’m going to tell myself it’s because I love my self so much that I want to be better than that person. But I probably am. I have so much love for myself that I fail to see how cool I am, because I want to push myself to be better, better.

In the video, Teal Swan says that we do things for other people because we want ourselves to feel good. You do that thing for your sister so that you don’t have to go through the discomfort of her yelling at you. You help that random boy from school so you don’t have to deal with being called a miser (or a bi*ch as they are wont to say). This video really resonated with me.

In fact, it must have set forth a chain reaction that helped me to reach where I am today.

I’ve been reading Glennon Doyle’s Untamed, and I must say, it has some paragraphs that vault me into a higher plane of existence. It really helps me to think about not living for others. I mean, I was brought into this world to serve myself, and to discover what kind of a person I want to be. To have unbridled passions and ambitions. To dream with the freedom and ferocity of a wild horse. Here are some of the quotes from Glennon Doyle that hit me hard:

Life is alchemy, and emotions are the fire that turns me to gold.

There is no glory except straight through your story.

Pain is not tragic. Pain is magic. Suffering is tragic. Suffering is what happens when we avoid pain and consequently miss our becoming. That is what I can and must avoid: missing my own evolution because I am too afraid to surrender to the process. Having such little faith in myself that I numb or hide or consume my way out of my fiery feelings again and again. So my goal is to stop abandoning myself—and stay. To trust that I’m strong enough to handle the pain that is necessary to the process of becoming. Because what scares me a hell of a lot more than pain is living my entire life and missing my becoming. What scares me more than feeling it all is missing it all.

When a woman finally learns that pleasing the world is impossible, she becomes free to learn how to please herself.

Should and shouldn’t, right and wrong, good and bad —they’re not wild. They’re not real. They’re just culturally constructed, artificial, ever-changing cages created to maintain institutions. It struck me that in every family, culture, or religion, ideas of right and wrong are the hot cattle prods, the barking sheepdogs that keep the masses in the herd. They are the bars that keep us caged.

We can make our own normal. We can throw out all the rules and write our own. We can build our lives from the inside out. We can stop asking what the world wants from us and instead ask ourselves what we want for our world. We can stop looking at what’s in front of us long enough to discover what’s inside us. We can remember and unleash the life-changing, relationship-changing, world-changing power of our own imagination. It might take us a lifetime. Luckily, a lifetime is exactly how long we have.

We forgot how to know, when we learned how to please.

I never really had a singular goal, you know? I knew I wanted things, but I didn’t have a course of action that I wanted to follow for a life-time goal/dream. I was controlled, even in my thoughts and dreams. I didn’t ever have a “wildest desire” or a pipe dream. I just floated around, waiting for the people who controlled my life to keep controlling it.

However, one night I was taking a shower, and I found myself admitting to myself something I knew deep down, but was afraid to admit to even myself. This shook my being. I realized what I did not want to do in my life. It was the beginning of me discovering my passion. I do have a blog post on How to Figure Out What You Truly Want in Life + Free Self Discovery Worksheet. You can check out to see how I found out what I wanted to do in life.

It’s really just a succession of events that leads to this sort of discovery. The books you read. The videos you watch. The movies you watch. The things you learn.

That’s how I realized how to deal with my people pleasing behavior.

I realized that I was people pleasing only to build a certain image of me in someone’s mind. I was manipulating people into thinking of me as a good girl. I wanted people to know me as a person who would and could not ever do anything bad or wrong.

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I never really did anything for the true, genuine reason for doing it, whether helping someone, caring for them, or loving them. Most of the things I do are so that people think of me as a good, kind, helpful, caring and loving individual. It’s always the main theme at the back of my head, whenever I do something. I’ll always want them to think of me as the selfless, helpful girl. It’s like a filter over all my actions.

I don’t think I get the concept of unconditional love. I never really thought about it. Even if I’m helping my mom with the dishes, it’s so she thinks I’m good. I don’t do it out of the goodness of my heart. If I’m texting my friends about how they are, or a happy birthday, I’ll keep track, and see if they return the favor. If I do something good for someone secretly, I’ll always be lurking, waiting for them to praise me or notice how good I am.

I think that’s manipulative. I turn into a chameleon in order to please people. But the thing is, in pleasing them, I’m manipulating their image of me in their heads into a pristine, perfect human who can do no wrong.

I’m allergic to people thinking I could do any wrong. I believed it was wrong to be bad, or to do wrong things. I was not allowed to do bad things to other people. I was not allowed to put myself above others. It was just plain evil, according to me.

I had to get down to the bottom of it all. Why was I this way? Why did I believe that I had to prove to people by any means necessary that I was a good girl? Why was it ingrained into me? Why was it programmed into my very instincts? I spent a while pondering on this phenomenon, until I hit me.

It was ingrained into me. It was. But how? By my parents, of course.

The only thing that my parents praised in me was how good I was at being obedient to them. How fast I would jump to their commands. They would praise me for those kinds of things. They never really cared that I was great in school, or sports.

In a family where I never felt seen or heard, being praised was like being given a treasure chest. I never really felt loved. But when I was praised for being “energetic” and “snappy”, I felt elated. I beamed with joy. I felt like a better person than my siblings.

Deep down, my poor brain had hacked the system. It realized that the only way to feel that love was to be a good girl. What child doesn’t want the love and validation of their parents?

Even now, I’m considered the most dutiful out of all my siblings. I’m always the one counted on to do the more hardy tasks, like fixing the lights, or repairing broken stuff. I never really thought about how I was in essence being used because I hacked the family system to fulfill my needs as a child. My family thinks of me as the person who likes to help, but the truth is, I don’t. I don’t like helping. I don’t like doing anything for anyone. Not unless I’m going to get praised.

I don’t like doing things for the sake of doing them. I desire to get that love and validation out of doing it. I desire to be thought of as the good girl who always listens.

This obedience is rooted into my very being. I don’t question what is being asked, or if I want to do it; I will mindlessly do the thing.

As if that isn’t enough, this desire to be the good girl who never does anything bad makes me act this way to other people. In the outside world, I’ll find myself never letting others think I could ever do anything bad to them.

But that’s wrong. Every human has their good actions, and bad actions. To think that you shouldn’t do anything wrong is to severely restrict yourself. Sometimes, doing those wrong things is what is right for you. Besides, those wrong stuff? They’re just culturally constructed, artificial, ever-changing cages created to maintain institutions. You are allowed to do wrong things. You are allowed to be selfish for yourself.

That is one thing that my parents failed to teach me.

They restricted, and confined me to be the good girl. They created the people pleaser. I want to please people by never hurting them by doing the wrong thing. I never want to be the bad guy.

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Finding that out was all well and good. What action was I to take next? How could I learn to undo all of this programming? I was yet to discover one last thing in order to truly learn to deal with my people pleasing.

The first thing that set me on the journey to realizing that I had to focus on myself and not others, is this:

When you begin to listen to your inner intuition, and follow what it guides you to do, is when you will see the universe start to align for you.

I can’t remember where I read this from, but it was a push to start listening to myself. It promised me that if I listened to my intuition, I would start to see clarity in my world. It was just one of the butterfly wing flutters that would cause the storm.

The next thing to impact me came from Glennon Doyle again. In her book Untamed, she says that a lot of the women out there aren’t really listening to what their inner feelings are telling them. They only do what is best for their families. In fact, Glennon herself continued to live with her husband after he confessed to cheating several times. The thing is, when you are allowing yourself to be controlled by some unseeable forces that make you want to stay in line, you are going to be very, very unhappy in life.

This is when I realized that I was being controlled by my people pleasing. CONTROL. Did you know that being controlled by someone or something can cause depression? Human beings enjoy freedom. It makes them happy and healthy. If you lay down rules on what they can and can’t do, you are stripping them of their free will. They will become sad.

I always feel some sort of control in my life. And you know what? It causes me to feel deprived and frustrated every single day of my life. It’s a running theme in my life. It is such a part of me that I don’t even notice it sometimes.

I’m so restricted by my people pleasing behavior. It haunts my every action. I’m afraid of people. I have fear bordering on phobia, that someone will think I am bad to them. The frustration in my life is too real.

The reason why I feel so depressed, deprived and trapped is because I only do things to seek validation, recognition, and reward. I only do good and appear to care because I have a good girl image to maintain. That’s why my life is full of frustration. I don’t do things out of love. I do them out of a desire for recognition. I refuse to do anything that makes me a bad guy.

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I don’t want my life to be like this anymore. Especially now that I know what is causing it. From now on, I do things out of genuineness. Not so other people can see me and label me. But just doing a thing for the sake of doing it. I want to be genuine.

I want to be genuine when loving, helping and caring for others. I want to be able to do things out of the good of my heart. I want to be unconditional in my love. I want to stop pleasing people. I was not born with the job of making sure other people see the good dutiful girl that I am. They have no right to have access to only my good, and not my bad.

Who on earth deserves that I should only show them my good sides, so that they may be filled with pleasure and happiness? I feel sick even typing this out. How could I have gone through my life wanting to be the best for other people, like some sort of sick fantasy? It’s vile to expect someone to be a pristine human.

I can’t be a people pleaser anymore. Not when I know that I do good things just so people see me as a good girl. Not when I know that it causes me pain and frustration in my life, to go against the grain of my being, just to cater to someone else’s needs.

When I go out of my way to be good to others to my own detriment, it kills my soul slowly by slowly. My life faces the brunt of the consequences. I get feelings of depravation and failure. All because of people pleasing.

One last thing. Meditation has really helped me to learn how to reach within and discover my soul. I didn’t know how to do that before. I didn’t know what it was like to understand the crevices of my mind. I didn’t have the ability to pinpoint the reasons for the habits that had sprouted unknowingly into my daily life. There is no way it’s not meditation that taught me to do this.

Meditating helped to teach me to look deep within and understand my patterns. I didn’t really know how to meditate. I doubt I really know how to do right now. My saving grace is the guided meditations that I listen to from YouTube. I’ll include a video in this post. Listening to the prompts and sinking deep into my soul has helped me to open up my mind like a flower.

I’ve never been the biggest fan of meditation. I just didn’t get it. I didn’t see the point. But now, here I am, defeating my demons one by one, all because I can sink deeper into myself. There are tons of guided meditation videos out there. Experiment and find the ones that you like. Explore the deepest waters of your mind.

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Thank you so much for choosing to read this long post about everything that I did to defeat my people pleasing behavior. It was a long journey, and I’m sure there will be times when I forget what I learned. I have learned a lot, and the truth is, I can never go back to how I was before. I can only move forward.

Sending you all the love and light,

Aza.

Check out my new e-book on narcissism: Click Here