When you are a people pleaser, the list of people in your life that you try to make happy can often times be endless. It is not always confined to just your spouse, kids, or parents. The list often extends to friends, coworkers, bosses, and sometimes even people you have just met or barely know. It takes a lot of energy each day to concentrate on keeping others around you happy and to avoid conflict. The biggest issue with this level of people pleasing is that you may be keeping others around you happy, but you are hurting someone else at the deepest level…you.
When you are people pleasing, the main objective is to make those around you happy. If they want to eat Mexican food and you want Italian; Mexican it is! If you want to buy a house on a quiet street in the suburbs, but your husband wants to live in the city, you live in the city. You want to quit your job and get a new one but the company you work for is short handed, you stay so that others at the company will not have to do extra work. In each of these examples of people pleasing the greatest offense you are creating is the abandoning of yourself.
People sit in my office everyday and are hurt, angry, and appalled when those in their life abandon them. They may abandon them by not hearing them, dismissing their needs, or cheating on them. Any way they may feel abandoned by their partner, they are so hurt and want it to stop immediately. The same is not true when they are committing the same abandonment to themselves. Ok, so they are not going to cheat on themselves so to speak, but not listening to what we want or need is very disregarding of us. They don’t listen to their own needs and meet those needs, they don’t stand up for things that are important to them, and they are so fast to put everyone else above themselves. This is the ultimate abandonment to us!
The person we are suppose to take care of more than anyone else in the whole world is us. Our spouses are fallible and human; they will not always be up for the task of caring for us. This is a task too important to ask others to do. When everyone else’s needs are top priority then where do our needs fall? How do they get met, how do we get heard? It is time to stop asking everyone else to meet our needs when we show them that we place those needs at the bottom. It is time to learn to balance your needs with those around you. Stop committing the ultimate pain upon yourself, stop abandoning yourself!
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