I learned a tough secret about how dangerous people pleasing could be.
Oh, it wasn't that people can use you and throw you out like a piece of old, flavorless gum. Or that people are laughing behind your back while you are protecting theirs. Or that people you cared for will only later on prove to care about the things you have done or been or not done and not been.
No, that stuff was bad, but none of that even comes close to the horrendous, treacherous, seedy understanding of what being a people pleaser really teaches us over time.
You see most people pleasers take on the stance of being a good person at heart.
I mean who else would drive over 6 hours to go to a party where they are almost killed for a person who had members of their own family not too keen on showing up. But as they say in France, what the fxck.
No, the worst part of people pleasing is that just like the people, people pleasers are content on pleasing, we are both simply manipulative xssholes.
You see people pleasing much like the people who enjoy what people pleasers do for them is all an act of manipulation.
On one side the people who enjoy what people pleasers do for them, well they do pretty much anything to keep that person around, well a little less than everything, because they never try simply being a good human being.
On the other hand, people pleasers in the name of being good humans, are willing to go to the limits no man or woman has ever gone before to be liked, or even worse to feel loved. Appreciated. Cared for.
Those are heavy motivators that make people pleasers and the retiring people pleasers like me, willing to do one of the most dangerous things we can do.
And that is forgo on just about every bit of like, love, appreciation, and care we could simply show to ourselves.
You see we pour into people with every fiber of every being and wonder why we do not see that back.
We in a way are asking for someone, something, anything, anyone to show us unconditional love, when we ourselves have made love the most conditional and transactional thing.
We will never admit to ourselves, but all the running around, saying yes, showing up, being there, putting off our comfort to keep others comfortable, all of it, is so someone can tell us how good we are. Or lovable. Or likeable.
It's embarrassing really.
I mean sure, something must have happened to bring us all to this place where we feel absolutely so overlooked and unappreciated and uncared for that we go seeking it in people who could never make us feel those things.
It gets even scarier when we combine that need with an eye for seeing people's potential rather than their true personality.
We want, so bad that someone we like likes us too.
Please, we say. Please so bad, that I am willing to forgo pleasing myself, to please you in anyway possible.
Sure, we have our limits, maybe or maybe not.
We should see where this goes.
How many times have we let ourselves go in order to hold on to others?
People pleasing is dangerous, because it is dangerous to those who please people.
We become to ourselves, what others become to us. We deny ourselves the love, appreciation, care, joy, peace, and fulfillment that we can provide for ourselves to have a fraction of the promise that someone else will do it for us or give it to us.
We are just as much a part of the seedy underbelly of the psychological, emotional underworld as emotional abusers, mental manipulators, narcissistic derelicts, and "dark psychology" conmen.
Maybe worse, because unlike those twisted souls, we are only content when we are stealing contentment from ourselves. We wrap our joy up in the most expensive gift wrap so we can afford others' needs.
Then if we are lucky, we see through the other people's ruses and savagely begin the cycle anew.
Break the cycle.
Come out from the dark underworld where the victim many benefit from us accepting we are is living. Choose to come up and out into the light where the love, appreciation, joy, peace, a fxcking day off, whatever it is that is needed, can happen, right now.
No hesitation. No regrets. No more seedy underbelly. Walk away.
Please the one person that matters, that needs it, that deserves it, please people please you.
For more check us out next Tuesday.