People Pleaser

It wasn’t until I met Counselor that I learned I was a people pleaser, which was such a foreign concept to me. Like a bomb going off in my brain, I just stare back at her blinking, dumbfounded. Me? Wait… me? No. Everything I had been told my entire life was the complete opposite.

I push back.

Mother always told me I was too much for people, I was selfish, I only thought about myself, I was so demanding.

Then I feel horrible. Am I fooling Counselor in session? Does she have the wrong person? It felt like the mountain of words I had always been told were stacked so high against this other ‘one’. How could I be this other word that denied everything I had ever known? Counselor had to be lying. I was onto her.

She had me sit on it, ponder it. It felt like strange name calling and an idea of my identity that took months to wrap my brain around. This happens a lot with Counselor, where she’ll tell me something and it feels like she’s speaking a foreign language that I deny. It always takes me months to mull over situations in my life and to come to terms with her obscure labels of me.

People Pleaser.

After I come to terms with this idea, it actually sounds pretty cool to me. A cool idea that potentially squashed the shame mountain of words Mother had called me. You mean I put people first to please them and I’m not a selfish monster? To some this might seem simple, but to me it was jarring.

In the end, I guess it wasn’t so cool after all because: People pleasing, by definition, is a person that feels a strong urge to please others, even at their own expense.

People pleasing, to me, was an abandonment of self, which is exactly what I was always trained to do from childhood. To abandon oneself to lift up, support, encourage, lend a hand, lend an ear, take on someone else’s needs or problems. I was always this tiny human faced with very adult problems learning how to morph and react and be there for what the adults in my life needed. I can see where it started and how it’s peppered itself all throughout adulthood and my relationships.

- A few years ago, Mother gets sick with cancer. She needs someone to take care of her. She doesn’t even ask. I immediately volunteer my new husband and I to move into her house to take complete care of her. I quit my job while Husband continues to work. “I know you will be the only child that I can count on when I’m sick. You’ll always take care of me.” Mother constantly says to me in front of my other siblings as some manipulative wedge she always put between us.

Trained.

We move in. Months go by changing diapers, cooking, running errands, doctor’s appointments, having my phone on loud in the middle of night waking up to help, all while trying to deal with my mother dying right before my eyes.

Trained.

So stressed every day while Mother yells at me for cleaning the dishes too loud, pokes condescendingly at my life, pointing out how my “poor” husband has to deal with me, constantly annoyed with how I help her out of the car, how I eat, how I even move through the world. “You were my most difficult child!” She screams. It must all be my fault. I am bad. People please. Morph damnit. Be better.

After that stint living with Mother, I wanted to die, and I had no idea why. That was one of the lowest points in my entire life – the abuse I endured while living there, constantly being re-triggered, re-traumatized, but of course not knowing it at the time. No. Mother had trained me to be confused, never to trust myself, blame myself for everything, and to always be there for HER. What was wrong with me? I was in a happy marriage, I had just done something good by helping Mother, so why did I want to die? I tell Husband. He gets me help.

Months go by and I later tell Mother how hard it was living with her and that I probably couldn’t do it again based on how I felt. I pour out to her that it was tough on my new marriage, that maybe quitting my job was too much and we were struggling financially. “What?!” She barks. “You lived here for free and didn’t have to work! How could that have been hard?”

What is wrong with me? I must be a selfish monster and her worst child after all.

OR, alternatively, a rebellious people pleaser speaking my truth.

Un-training in session.