Truth Bomb Tuesday: This is not universal, but it’s common.
Having worked with tens of thousands of students over the years, there is really one fact that’s jumped out at me.
No two people are the same. Our psyches are as unique as fingerprints.
But that doesn’t really help me much if my mission is to give people I haven’t met yet actionable hacks for personal growth and self-improvement.
(Though my guess is you should probably drink more water.)
But while tailored, bespoke insights are behind the paywall, there are still patterns that play out across the human spectrum.
One of those patterns, which I’m going to start talking about now, is often called people-pleasing, though I don’t really love that label, and I think the phenomenon is broader than what that term generally captures.
What I think happens is that if you don’t develop and inherent sense of safety as a little one, you connect your sense of safety to your place in the tribe.
This is a natural instinct for a herd species like the human, but in some people – many people actually – it becomes over-worked. We rely on it too much – sometimes exclusively.
That means we become fixated on our place in the tribe. We want to please the adults and caregivers around us because we believe that if they’re happy with us, they’ll keep us safe.
It’s kind of transactional.
This people-pleasing pattern becomes established early – and it’s not the only pattern we can be working with. We are complex beings. But our sense of safety in our nervous system becomes tied to ‘doing the right thing’ and ‘being a good person’ and doing things that make others happy.
In the extreme, we don’t even bother to see if we’re making anyone else happy. We just think that if we’re working against our own needs and interests, that’s enough.
At any rate, the net effect is that if we’re stuck in this pattern, we feel safe if we’re making other people happy – if we are putting other people’s needs above our own.
Now of course, this is one of those things that quickly stops making any sense if we look at it. Our safety can’t be bought with the happiness of others. Putting other people’s needs ahead of our own doesn’t make us any safer – if anything it makes us less safe.
But that doesn’t matter. If we have trained our nervous system to draw a sense of safety from the tribe at a young age, that’s a pattern that sticks. It’s carved deep in the psyche.
And it’s not something that we can just walk away from.
I mean, I could tell you that there are no adults. There are no caregivers who feel a responsibility to keep you safe, just as there are no adults that even could keep you safe in this crazy old world.
All your people-pleasing and self-sacrificing is for nothing.
“Your worst sin is that you have destroyed and betrayed yourself for nothing.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment
And you might hear that and agree with me. It makes perfect sense.
But that doesn’t help you.
Because now you have to face the reality that one of your primary sources of safety is an illusion.
That leaves you feeling unsafe. That leaves your nervous system feeling very nervous.
And so while you might accept it at a superficial level, at a deeper level, you just reject it. You refuse to update your mental models, and just keep meeting the world as you have been – sacrificing yourself in the belief that at some point your Fairy Godmother is surely going to show up and reward you with safety and blessings.
It doesn’t happen.
You have to accept that there are no adults.
But to do that, you have to find another way to ok being a fragile little organism in a sharp and spiky world.
That’s a whole blog in itself… at least!
I guess I’m just outlining the sketches of a work-program here.
But I just wanted to unpack this pattern a bit, because I see it all the time.
So many people instinctively put other people’s needs ahead of their own…
… and then end up bitter that they never receive the care and the safety they were craving.
It’s a sad story.
But it’s an avoidable one too.
DB.