The People Pleasing Construct
This topic is one I know a lot about. Being a people pleaser was a badge I wore proudly for a long time. It’s an intricate construct with many levels, hallways, and rooms. From the grand ballroom to the secret attic, I built it brick by brick. I did an AI search to establish a description of the people pleaser, and how it shows up in different areas of life. You can read it in detail here.
People pleasers are empaths trying to figure out how to get the love and safety we need. We have developed our construct, or ways of interfacing with others and the world, based on what seems to work in our broken environment. We bend and mold ourselves around the wounded parts of others in an attempt to mend them, and in turn, ease our own experience. It’s a survival technique, and though it may seem to work in the short term, it becomes an unhealthy way to live. Our sense of self gets lost as we try to control outcomes because our happiness is dependent on the feelings and reactions of the people we love. We constantly adapt ourselves to avoid conflict at all cost. We sacrifice body, mind, and soul for the ever elusive peace we seek. I never even wanted to consider what the consequences might be if I failed at this, not understanding that whatever might happen would be the result of living my own truth. I didn’t trust my inner voice because it was antithetical to keeping the peace. I didn’t learn how to communicate my feelings because it mean saying things that might be hard for someone to hear. Over time, this pattern led to a lack of self-worth and a total disconnect from my heart.
It has been my life’s work to climb out of this construct and shine a light for others to get out as well. If you resonate with this, then you know how difficult it can be to take off the people pleaser mask and change your perspective. It feels like if you do that, the house of cards you’ve built up around you will fall and all your hard work will be lost. It may not even make sense that this is possible from the place you are within this delicate construct, both internally in your philosophy of life, and externally in your relationships. It literally becomes the truth by which you live, a paradigm that feels confining and unwavering. You give up your freedoms and live your life by restrictive, self-inflicted laws, putting more importance on other peoples’ rules than your own internal knowing.
This operating space makes us ultra-vulnerable to being programmed by society, religion, media, and the like, as well as being inauthentic in our relationships, abandoning our needs and desires, and contributes to an overall sense of unworthiness.