When Pleasing Others Means Betraying Yourself

Spam Filter For Your Brain - Episode 134

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How many times have you been worried about saying no because you're worried about what other people think?

And most importantly, I suppose this could be summarised as the fact that you don't want other people to feel uncomfortable.

That's right, people. We're on the grand old topic of people pleasing once again because it's something that just keeps coming up.

What's so interesting about focusing on the fact that you "have to" do something that you don't want to do? This idea that we have to do something because we don't want other people to feel uncomfortable doesn't acknowledge the fact that we're actually people and we are also feeling really uncomfortable.

What's really wild about this notion is ignoring our humanity for the fact that we are not willing to feel an emotion. An emotion is just a sensation in our body. And the strange thing is that we try and navigate our way through this by doing stuff that we don't want to because we don't want other people to feel uncomfortable.

And that thought in itself makes us uncomfortable. We are willing to suffer the thing that we don't want other people to suffer so that someone doesn't have to feel the thing. So you are willing to say it's almost like we think we can take this burden away from other people.

But the truth is, if the person who you're doing the thing for really knew that you actually didn't want to, that probably would make them feel a little bit uncomfortable. So in truth, what you're doing is doing something that is almost, let's face it, a little bit deceptive to try and avoid another probably adult having their own human experience about what is actually the truth. I. You don't want to do the thing.

When we are ignoring our own humanity. What we're doing is denying the truth of the things that we want to do. And, and if I'm being real honest, trying to sort of manipulate how other people about feel about things. We're trying to control other people's emotions so that we don't have to experience anything that we may say to ourselves if we think that they may be uncomfortable.

It's not that we don't want to feel the discomfort. We don't want them to feel uncomfortable. What we're really worried about is the kind of shit that we're going to say to ourselves. If you label yourself as the kind of person who doesn't put other people first, who isn't willing to take on that burden of trying to alleviate discomfort from somebody else. We're worried about the things we'll say to ourselves if we're not the person who puts ourselves last.

Things like, "I'm really selfish", "I should have thought of other people more.", "other people's time is more deserving", "I should have done this in a different way", I should have managed my time better", "Their needs are more important than mine", These kind of thoughts just like pop up like a little Rolodex in our brain. And what if we could just skip that?

Because the truth is that we can if we know that we have our own back and we are not going to be assholes to ourselves about the fact that we haven't put other people's needs above our own. What that takes us back to is trying to check in with what we need in our lives. And frankly, if more people were doing that, we wouldn't need to be getting all up and involved in other people's business all the time because we'd all be looking after ourselves.

It's because we are often overstretching ourselves and lending ourselves to other people's supposed needs or what we presume their needs to be to such a great extent that we're often leaving ourselves in deficit and then need other people to come and step in for us. It's a whole big borrowing game. And the zero-sum game is that everybody feels like they're putting themselves out too much and not getting the things they need.

We can bring this stuff home and we can bring this stuff home by not being so unkind to ourselves about the fact that we have needs and being willing to feel the discomfort of the fact that other people are allowed to think what they think about us. And we still get to look after ourselves without that meaning some great big terrible thing about us. That it could actually be something that's a really good attribute. It could be something that is an incredibly strong characteristic to be looking at how we want to be treated, to be modelling what our needs are to other people and to the youngers in our life, to be able to be showing them that you're allowed to have wants, desires and needs and you're allowed to have those met and you're allowed to have those met by yourself.

When we have our own backs, we are not so worried about trying to extend and overextend ourselves out to other people and leaving ourselves in deficit. When we have our own backs, we become the kind of person that we would really wish our friends to have around them the whole time. And ironically, we have more to give to ourselves and others.

I hope this has been useful this week. As always. Stuff is available in www.SelfCareSchool.co.uk should you wish to go and get some actual practical tips how to do some of this stuff. And there's loads of free resources in the show notes should you wish to get them. Nice free workbooks and the like. And I'll speak to you next week.