12. The Energetics of People Pleasing
Jul 31, 2024
ON THIS EPISODE
Hello, and welcome to another episode of the High Vibe Heather Podcast. I'm Heather, your host. And today, I want to talk about the topic of the energetics of people pleasing.
So first of all, what is people pleasing? People pleasing is prioritizing the needs and desires of others over your own. On the surface, this may sound virtuous, and I would even argue that in our patriarchal culture, this behavior is very much condoned, if not trained into and expected from women.
As someone who struggled with these behaviors for a lot of my life, due to a whole array of circumstances, that included being raised in a conservative Christian church, where I was literally taught as a child the acronym JOY = Jesus, Others, You. To then becoming a mom at 19, and never really getting the opportunity to fully choose myself. And then being in a 25-year relationship with a narcissist.
People-pleasing was deeply ingrained in me, and I didn't even know it. As a matter of fact, I didn't know it was a thing. I was just working hard to make everyone around me happy, because then I could finally experience peace.
Life was chaotic, and I just wanted everyone to get along and be peaceful. What I did know was how disempowered and unfulfilled I felt, but I couldn't understand why. I was doing everything right, or so I thought.
If I just made myself small enough, and agreeable enough, and didn't rock the boat, then everyone would be happy with me. I was the team player, the one who let everyone else go first and pretended to be happy with whatever time, attention, and resources I got. Did you catch that?
Pretended to be happy. I had to do a lot of pretending. I didn't feel safe to fully be me.
It was okay for other people to be emotionally expressed, but not me. I had to keep it together for the sake of the group. Right or wrong, that was my belief.
Man was I a sucker, and that's exactly what was happening to me on an energetic level. I was getting my life force sucked right out of me. As much as I'd love to point the finger and blame my circumstances or the people around me, this was my choice.
I was opting in to this whole dance in hopes that one day, someday, someone would notice and say, Hey, Heather, I see you and all that you've given and sacrificed. I think you're important. It's your turn now to receive.
But that's not how it works. No one was ever going to do that for me, because it's not anyone else's job to do that for me. It's my job.
You see, I've come to understand that the whole reason we are even born into this existence is to come to know our own worth and to live it out through being the most authentic version of ourselves. We find our purpose through our being, not through doing. Again, this is counter to everything I learned growing up in a Western patriarchal society where productivity is worshiped.
No one came up to me and hit me over the head and said, hey, dumb dumb, you're doing it all wrong. But little by little, these truths seeped into me and were a healing balm to my soul. It started with my introduction to human design which gave me an opportunity to see the world and my place in it from a new perspective.
I could finally put aside the narrative that I was born a sinner and needed someone else outside of me to save me, which gave me the authority to step up and save myself. I was aware that what I had been doing all along only led me to frustration again and again. It clearly was not working.
I was a complete doormat. I was 40 and I needed to figure out what would work. I was great at helping other people get what they wanted.
How could I begin to give myself what I wanted? That question became a catalyst for me that set me on a journey of self-discovery, connected me with my intuition, and helped me to finally get my priorities straight. Once I stepped into the world of energetics, I began to see things from a whole new level.
It was about shifting my own thoughts, beliefs, behaviors, and attitudes in order to shift my experience of life itself. I came to understand that life is simply mirroring back to you your own beliefs. Everything is an energetic exchange.
What you put out into the world through your words and deeds is returned to you in some way, shape, or form. This is called manifesting. Therefore, the more clearly you communicate what you want through your words and deeds, the more likely you are to get back what you want.
When I believed that others were more deserving of me, that was the experience I received. I've been on a journey of shifting my beliefs for years now. This stuff takes time.
It's one thing to understand it on a cognitive level, and quite another to embody it. Because to embody requires that you shift on a subconscious level. When I realized that my problems in life stemmed from people-pleasing behaviors, I began to investigate this topic further.
What I found was that there are five symptoms of people-pleasing. overfunctioning, lack of boundaries, codependence, self-sacrifice, and seeking approval. Each of these symptoms is a way of giving your power over to another, and communicates that what they want is more important than what you want.
Granted, it can be hard to stand up for yourself, depending on the other players in your life, and people-pleasers tend to attract relationships with the opposite. Narcissists. You've probably heard this term thrown around all over the place.
Narcissist this, narcissist that. But what actually is a narcissist? A narcissist is someone who only thinks of themselves and works to serve only themselves.
They lack empathy for others and have a need to be admired. They don't care about what you want. And because you care so much about meeting other people's needs, you are exactly who they are looking for
Narcissism exists on a spectrum. There is a difference between someone who acts selfishly and someone who has narcissistic personality disorder. I'm not here to diagnose anyone, but it can be helpful to understand that there is a dynamic at play here where all of the energy of both people is getting funneled into meeting the needs of one of them.
If this sounds familiar to you, I encourage you to begin to evaluate the relationships you have with the people in your life. Ideally, relationships are reciprocal and include a healthy give and take where both people's needs are getting met. Conflict can be difficult enough, but conflict with a narcissist is a real mind fuck.
They cannot be wrong. They don't seek to understand, and they see an argument as something that must be won rather than an opportunity to build intimacy. A narcissist will take everything you have, and it will never be enough.
These relationships can be extremely difficult to leave. Especially for a people pleaser, which is why you must begin to take your power back through reshaping your narrative around your personal worth. You do not exist simply to please others.
You do not exist to unwaveringly support others in living their best lives. You exist for you. You have your own distinct purpose apart from anyone else.
And while we all feel a sense of fulfillment when we serve others through using our own unique gifts, that fulfillment comes when we do it in our own way and at our own time.
Let's take a deeper look at each of these five symptoms. The first we'll look at is overfunctioning.
Overfunctioning is taking on the responsibilities, emotions, well-being, and needs for those around us, whether they want us to or not. Often as a way of managing our own anxiety or insecurities. In short, it's about managing other people, because we do not trust that they will come through for us.
So instead of just handing a task off to someone else and trusting that they will complete it, we hand it over and then jump in to supervise. There are all sorts of reasons why you wouldn't have the trust that others would come through for you, and most of them relate to your upbringing.
It's important to remember that people-pleasing is a coping mechanism that was developed to keep you safe, whether that be psychologically, emotionally, or physically.
We do these behaviors out of a response to what we've learned is necessary to keep us feeling safe. Being an adult now who has control over your own life, you can begin to examine these behaviors and notice if they are truly still necessary, or if they have just become habituated patterns. When we live our lives from the place of habituated patterns, we are allowing our subconscious to run our lives.
And that means that we're not actually awake and in control and driving ourselves forward. Instead, we are just merely reacting to life. And if we live from a place of reaction rather than a place of intention, it's very difficult to make changes or to drive yourself forward.
The next of the symptoms we'll look at is a lack of boundaries. Boundaries exist not to keep others out, but to keep ourselves in. Like I talked about with the last one of overfunctioning, that is a clear scenario where if we had boundaries, that wouldn't be an issue.
Boundaries define our personal limitations around what's okay with us and what's not, what we're willing to do and what we aren't. They definitely include the use of the word no. It's important to define boundaries for the different areas of your life.
The boundaries you create need to be based on how you feel in your body when someone asks something of you. If something makes you feel uncomfortable, you can and should communicate that. You don't owe anything to anybody.
So when we're functioning with boundaries, we're in touch with the physical sensations of our body. We're tuned in to what we're feeling in the moment, which means we're not stuck in our heads, thinking about what the other person wants from us, but rather, what do we need? What do we want?
And when you're coming from that place, you can be genuine and authentic in your response. And I have often feared that by setting boundaries, I'm going to upset someone. But what I've found in reality is that through setting boundaries, I get more respect.
Next, we'll look at codependence, which also exists on a spectrum. With one end being a dynamic where one person in the relationship is carrying all the weight by taking the role of the caregiver who desires to rescue the other, but in reality is simply just enabling them to continue on in their poor choices.
To the other end of the spectrum, being you placing your emotional needs in the hands of another and expecting them to emotionally caretake for you, people pleasers can easily find themselves on either end of the spectrum because they genuinely care for others, and they don't necessarily know how to meet their own emotional needs.
Healing these behaviors requires that you learn new skills to support you in becoming sovereign over your own life.
And then there is self-sacrifice, which is just that. Sacrificing your own needs and desires in order to meet someone else's needs and desires.
Sometimes in life, this is required. Like when you become a parent. Of course, you will go without sleep to feed your crying newborn.
It only becomes a problem when one adult is forgoing their own personal ambitions for another adult to realize theirs. This isn't necessary. There is enough room for everyone to meet their own personal ambitions.
You shouldn't have to back burner your life in order for someone else to get ahead. Again, it's a different scenario when you're a parent. Of course, like we will allow our children to come first.
And ideally, we can find a situation where we are supported in our child rearing, so that we still have the bandwidth to go after our own ambitions while raising children. It just, you know, may take some creative adjusting or some extra time to get to where you want to go. And that's not what I'm talking about here.
What I'm talking about is between two consenting adults, where one is being prioritized over the other. That's not necessary.
And then finally, seeking approval is the last symptom.
And this is about looking outside of yourself for permission to do the things that you want or need to do for yourself. Or looking to others to validate that what you've already done is good or acceptable. Learning to give yourself permission and validate yourself frees you up to live life on your own terms.
And no one knows better than you what you need for your life. So these are the ways that I've personally struggled with giving my power away, by putting others' needs, wants, and even opinions above my own. To say the least, living this way kept me stuck, but it wasn't until I decided that I was worthy that I began to shift to these behaviors and make choices that supported me in moving my life forward.
It took a lot of practice, and putting these changes into place was really scary for me at first. My biggest fear was that I would lose connection with others if I prioritized myself. And to be honest, I did lose connection with one person, and that was necessary because that relationship thrived on me abandoning myself.
But all of my other relationships became stronger because I began to fully show up as me with my own needs. My authenticity deepened my bonds. I have learned so many new skills that have served me in creating the life I want for myself.
I want to help you learn those skills, too. I assure you that you do have what it takes to live life on your own terms. You just have to be willing to work through the fears that are keeping you from it.
If I can do it, you can do it too. I've been working on a special program for quite some time now that teaches people-pleasers how to protect their energy so they can experience reciprocal relationships. I'm excited to share it with you in the coming months.
In the meantime, I would love it if you would reach out to me with any questions, or even if you can just relate to my story. I would love to connect. Thank you so much for listening, and I hope you have a beautiful week.
From High Vibe Heather: 12. The Energetics of People Pleasing, Jul 31, 2024
ADDITIONAL RESOURCES
If you have questions or feedback, I'd love to hear from you. You can DM me on Instagram @high.vibe.heather.
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