Escape from Emotional Hell – Stop Trying to Be a People Pleaser

I get a real emotional boost when someone feeling stressed or struggling with an emotional problem tells me something I said or did helped them in some way.  Do you?  Most people do.

But I do not make the mistake of becoming addicted to that boost – I notice it but I make sure I do not crave it.

We have no direct control over when we receive such feedback and, if taken too far, this kind of supportive behaviour turns into an unwanted intrusion into the lives of others and they will turn on us for it.

As soon as I detect my help is no longer wanted (not when it is no longer needed, but no longer wanted – there is a difference) I am out of there.

During the times we receive social affirmation for having helped someone in this way (or social acceptance in any area of life) our brains release a neurotransmitter called oxytocin.  We feel safe and peaceful under its affects.

But we can easily make the mistake of becoming addicted to the affects of oxytocin and I have seen this in others and myself.

Folks who crave social acceptance can end up becoming either::

• easily manipulated or


• manipulating.

Easily Manipulated?

The easily-manipulated tend to advertise for and attract cruel-natured manipulators.

In the television series ‘The Martian Chronicles’, based on the stories by Ray Bradbury, there is the story of an alien who takes on the physical appearance of dead people the new human colonists are mourning for.

In this way the alien brings comfort to its human hosts while at the same time guaranteeing for itself a form of camouflaged safety and acceptance in their home.

The human family it lives with know their ‘house-ghost’ is not real but refuse to argue with it because the alien, who is telepathic, is able to physically mimic the appearance and behaviour of their lost loved ones so well it makes them happy to believe the illusion – even, for example, when they know the lost person was lost back on Earth.

This works well when the family live in isolation in the Martian landscape – but for some reason the family and the alien go into town.

The alien finds itself being followed and then surrounded by a group of people because they start seeing their long-lost loved ones in it – forced to keep changing physical form the alien turns from one person to another until dropping dead from exhaustion.

I saw that particular scene more than twenty years ago but the message is still fresh in my mind: being all things to all people kills you.

This is not to say you should not deal with individuals in the way they individually wish to be treated – it just means you need to do everything from the starting point of a strong central self-image.  You need to know who you are.

Situations in which you are ‘pleasing’ people are OK temporarily so long as you know it is what you are doing.  Assertiveness training, for example, tells us it is fine to be passive now and again – but it all goes wrong when you lose the awareness your passive behaviour has become permanent.

A couple of signs you have fallen into this pleasing-everybody trap without realising it are:

• you have difficulty in saying no – you always feel guilty when you do and you are not sure if you should


• you struggle to make your relationships work – people who are supposed to care about you do not and spend all their time sitting in judgement as to whether or not you are ‘good enough’ (they do this to get more out of you while giving the minimum in return)


• you are super-empathic – you want everyone else to be ecstatically happy and are willing to sacrifice your own happiness to bring that about


• you hold back on your real feelings – someone deeply offends you but you search for a psychological clothes hanger so you can stick in your mouth upside down in order to produce a permanent smile in response .

Manipulating?

The flipside to being easily manipulated for a while is we can ‘join the war’ and begin deviously returning the manipulating treatment.  I see this done mostly by people who are intellectually but not emotionally intelligent (yet – this can be developed).

Manipulators who lack self-awareness become increasingly narrow-minded and socially self-destructive without knowing this is what they are doing to themselves.

If we are leading already highly stressed lives a craving for these ‘oxytocin moments’ can lead to our feeling deeply hurt when not receiving them.  Getting ‘nothing’ back seems like an affront in the mind of a manipulator.

I have seen people of an age where they should know better cause social mayhem in groups when others have not met this craving.

They are trapped in a ‘reverse people pleaser’ state and blame others for the needy position they are now in.

They may fool, trap and manipulate others into feeding them the emotional boost they crave.  We call these folks ‘attention seekers’.  Consciously they are unaware they are doing this and it comes as quite a shock, accompanied by a lot of denial, when this behaviour is presented back to them as a package.

A couple of signs you have fallen into this manipulating trap are:

• you see small harmless acts as major insults – no-one else sees things this way


• you are power-mad; you undermine the work of others and put them down because you want all eyes on you; you dominate the social atmosphere and have to be ‘right’ about things – the important thing is being seen as ‘right’ rather than actually being socially right and appropriate


• you hate it when others receive positive social feedback


• you maintain a secret ‘them or me’ philosophy but do not show it because if you did the enemy would know there was a war on


• you must never reveal your true agenda – because you would have to notice it too and even the threat of this feels painful.

How to Get Out of This Trap

Decide:

Who do YOU want you to be?

Pick a version of you that you and you alone would like and stick to it.  This is what we call a strong self-image.  Generate your own oxytocin-fixes by getting all warm and cosy inside your own skin.

Develop a strong self-image of the kind of person you want to be and how that kind of person behaves, then make sure you behave that way so you can trust that person.  This way if someone criticises you you will be able to tell which parts of their criticisms are valid and which are not.

Ensure you like yourself regardless of how others treat or have treated you.  Do this and you only have the job of pleasing one person; just one.

The paradox is that this apparently super-selfish-self-obsessed-single-minded person then becomes, by default, someone naturally helpful to others because that is naturally the kind of self-image such a person will wish to develop.

Occasionally you will go off track – but that is the whole point of having a strong, central self-image.  You return to it.

Work at being, and loving, just you.  Be a ‘you’ that helps people but is not dependent on receiving positive feedback for it as a measure of self worth.  If you are anything like me you will know just how difficult a job pleasing that person inside is.  Getting feedback from others then just becomes icing on the cake but not a necessity.

By the way, if you know the name of the alien in the Martian Chronicles I am talking about above please let me know.

Regards - Carl

.