The Side Effects of People Pleasing
Having others like, love or approve of us has a tendency to feel good. It can make us feel seen, welcomed and wanted, all things that this vessel of humanness can appreciate.
This isn’t an issue per se, but for some people, me included, somewhere along the journey of living, it seemed appropriate to begin to contort and conform to bring forth another’s approval. As a child, you can decipher that when you behave a certain way, speak certain words, appease others, then, simply put, you get liked. You can achieve that like or approval through an active stance. It dawns on you that you have an element of agency in getting others to like you. So you do more of it. You contort a little more, you become like a chameleon; you change your colours to suit your environment. You change your opinions or dilute them down, emphasizing them depending on whose company you are in. You watch out for signals; changes in tone, facial expressions and you play an internal game of hot and cold and you adapt your behaviour accordingly.
They seemed to like when I said that, let me say more of it. They smiled when I did that, let me do more of that. And in the process you feel safe; you now know a way of always being liked or approved of and most of all wanted in a world that can also feel dangerous and isolating, but you have a way of making sure you are never alone, never disliked and God forbid never thrown out of the tribe.
But what you forget along the way is that you are abandoning yourself. Each time you twist and turn and fold as though you are a piece of paper origami, you are becoming someone you are not. You are making it a priority to be palatable to whomever is in your presence. And you are lost. These are the side effects of people pleasing over a long period of time.
You forget who you are, you lose sight of your own likes and dislikes and you cannot tease out which opinions are your own and which belong to another. It is a strange sensation when for whatever reason you tire of people pleasing and you can’t bring yourself to do it anymore. Because you may find you don’t really know who you are. You lost yourself in tiny increments when you exchanged a piece of yourself to fit another.
No one ever really gets an honest version of you because you are shape shifting depending on your environment. Other people are only getting a rendition of what you think, they think you want them to be. You are assuming their needs and then packaging yourself to them as a gift you think that they want. So no one gets to know who you are. We don’t even know if they like the gift, it isn’t even real, that person doesn’t even exist, it is a falsely generated version of you.
The world and the inhabitants of it don’t feel safe to you internally because you are seeking outside approval for your body and sense of self and that is exposing to your nervous system. If you are at the whim of others to like you before you can feel ok or feel safe then you are like a person with exposed nerve endings, everything is potential for pain and you are constantly trying to protect yourself through the process of people pleasing.
You were most likely a small child when it occurred to you that if you did and said things in a certain way then you felt safe or felt liked, but now you no longer need the perspective of a child to manage your life. It may have been of great use when you were too tiny to be able to help yourself in other ways, but now you are a unique individual that can foster a sense of self worth and safety within yourself for yourself, without the need of outside assistance.
The reason for your existence was never meant for people pleasing and to change yourself for the approval of others; you are meant to show up as yourself and allow space to be disliked and disapproved of and still advocate for yourself. You are meant to like, love and approve of yourself without external contributions; to be rooted into a foundation that knows your own self worth and feels safe enough within to show up out in the world without any backbending contortions.
The world misses out on you when you don’t get to share your unique self; your opinions, your perspective, your inner thoughts and feelings and worse still you forget your own uniqueness when trying to forge an ever shape shifting identity.
Not only will life feel freer and your sense of self move into a state of equilibrium, you will be able to exhale from that withheld inhale whilst waiting to see what another person’s verdict is on you. You will find you can inhale and exhale, take full breaths without waiting for the green light from another. And in that space you will find a freedom that you may have lost and you get to rediscover who you are, what you like, what you think and you get to be you without fear.
How does this relate to your creativity? At its most foundational level; artists are humans, so it informs it in every way. Are you creating to seek applause from the people looking at your art? Are you only creating art for an audience, for public consumption? Are you too scared to share your art for fear of negative reactions to it and so it remains unseen. Because art in all its forms also requires you to be who you truly are. It seeks to express itself through you as its channel and it can’t do that when you are pretending to be what you think another person wants you to be. It has no place for its creative energy to use you as its conduit.
Art is informed by the creator and that person is you. Therefore you are meant to be using your lived experience, your own perspectives, your interpretation of the world to create the art that wants to find expression through you. Not a version of you that you recreate on a person by person basis. Your art needs a home within you to be a full embodiment of you and for that it needs you to accept yourself. So it is crucial for your creativity to be able to access the full, real, very human you as you are. So that the art that only you could ever make has the chance to be born. This world needs both you and your art.