Anonymous in Rochester, New York asks: “I read your piece on people pleasing and really related to the parts on how our childhood sets us up as adults. Now that the damage has been done I find that I still struggle to hold boundaries with my needy parents. I have my own life to live but at the same time feel responsible to them. It is making me feel resentful. What can I do?”
First of all, congratulations on coming to the realization that this is an issue. Most people never do. Our tendency is to continue year in and year out to go through the motions and never really explore the feelings that are rising up. So having the guts to confront it and find its origin is an achievement. Childhood adaptation work is challenging because it first requires us to discern differences. The norm is to not question things because we don’t know that our childhood could have been different. It’s like asking a fish to describe water. How could it do so when there is nothing to contrast it to? They don’t know what air is. Talking over your childhood in therapy or exploring the experiences of childhood with friends can be jarring at first. Our background is all we have ever known, so some cognitive dissonance is sure to result. I call cognitive dissonance the wrecking ball because it swings back and forth in our head, banging against our skull. These newly unraveling feelings can, say, cause us to have negative thoughts about our parents. There is a temptation then to label them as bad but --bang-- You love them and remember all the times they were good to you but --bang-- You are resentful that they constantly ask you for more than you would like to give but --bang-- They did all these good things for you as a kid (and they don’t hesitate to remind you) so you’re the bad person but Bang. Back and forth the ball swings. This makes boundaries difficult. One day you feel staunchly that you need to cut them out of your life, that you have put your time in with them. You may then tell them so. While the wrecking ball is firmly on that side you can stick to that hard boundary, but then some time passes. In that time they wear you down with guilt trips and pressure. You may miss them. Plus you are used to it being the other way. The wrecking ball comes loose, bangs to the other side, and the boundary is lost. The answer is to see how things are more complicated than either side of your head is seeing it. We humans want clarity at all times and feel great anxiety when we don’t have it. So label your parents good or label them bad, as long as there is a label, is what we think. The truth is your parents, like you, are a complicated mix of good, bad, and everything else. The truth is many things are true, even when they are in conflict. My suggestion is work on accepting the cognitive dissonance. The swing won’t be calmed by holding desperately to one or the other conclusion. It will be calmed by accepting that the whole picture is complicated. Now we take that fresh, accepted, complex picture and consider what action to take. A boundary that is based on complexity is a more stable one. You will feel less emotional swing and will have an easier time sticking to it. Your parents may still push, poke, and manipulate to try and get you back into the old ways. But you will be in a more stable position and less likely to be moved far from your position. How they react is beyond your control. This is another important thing to accept. But hopefully they will see the rationality in all of it and come around. - Want your questions answered? Toss them in the box here.
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I often meet with clients who have been thrust into middle management. It is a compliment to them of course: they are so good at their work that their higher ups now want them to do something completely different. But too often we are being taught how to be managers by people who were not taught how to be managers, who were in turn taught how to be managers by people who were not taught how to be managers. Being promoted to our level of incompetence means being taken out of the thing we do well and placed into a thing we initially do not. This is especially hard for people pleasers. We now have bosses above and employees below. We have people on either side with their own motives and expectations. One group is demanding results and the other group is trying to resist demands. It is a squeeze. With this change of position comes a needed change in philosophy. People pleasing is short-term focused thinking. It is taking action to remove the threat of immediate pain. Keep people pleasing and they won't hurt you with their guilt trips and disappointed faces. This doesn't work in management. A manager, a leader, needs vision that sees beyond the short-term moment. Our ideas on how things should run may not be immediately apparent to our employees, and even to our bosses. But if we bend to the feelings of the moment in order to not rock the boat, then everyone loses in the long run. People pleasing not only hurts you, it hurts the ones you are seeking to please. As we have discussed previously, the way out of people pleasing is setting boundaries. A helpful tool that is all about boundaries is the Eisenhower Matrix. Invented by the 34th president, this tool helps you categorize tasks. Each task can be placed into one of four categories depending on its urgency and its importance. In the above image, the things in the green box (urgent, important) get done right now by you and your team. The things in the red box (neither urgent nor important) are distractions to be abandoned.
Where people pleasers struggle is in the orange and blue boxes. People will bring you tasks that they claim are urgent. The instinct then is to set aside work so that person is not disappointed in you. This will often come at the expense of things in the blue category that are important but not urgent. This is how a people pleaser will find themselves not doing their own self-care or even the long term strategic planning that will benefit everyone. It is in the orange category where delegation is important. The new middle management role requires getting others to do work to benefit the organization, not just taking it on yourself. And it requires setting time and sticking to the important things in the blue category. When you set boundaries and stick to them, people win. If you are a people pleaser in Rochester, New York State, Colordao, Utah, and now South Carolina, I would be happy to talk with you about this! I am so excited to now be licensed to serve clients in the Rocky Mountain states of Colorado and Utah. All services are done remotely using Psychology Today's HIPPA approved secure video platform.
I am looking forward to talking with you in Provo, Fort Collins, Denver, Colorado Springs, Salt Lake City, Aurora, and even Telluride! Here is my contact page and here is a picture of a rock: “I believe that death anxiety is the mother of all religions, the mainspring of human creativity, and the ultimate therapeutic issue. Almost every session, at its deepest level, addresses death anxiety.” - Irv Yalom, ‘Staring at the Sun’
Yes, every session is at deepest about death anxiety. Our DNA is screaming up at us at all times, “stay alive, stay alive, keep your family alive, stay alive.” Of course it would hijack your brain to serve its sole purpose. I am not one to confuse correlation with causation, but I can’t help but notice a connection: rates among Americans, young adults in particular, who do not believe in an after-life are on the rise, and so are rates of crippling anxiety. An ever greater amount of people are concluding that Nothingness is what follows death. This is a thought that prevents people from falling asleep again when unknown forces jerk them awake at 3 am. My argument is that this is a snake eating its tail problem. That the anxiety creates the belief in Nothingness, which furthers the anxiety, which furthers the terror of the Nothingness. This makes sense when we understand anxiety. Anxiety is the fear of open-endedness. The fear of possibility. It’s a very stupid but well-intentioned part of the brain trying to protect us. Imagine you are sitting in an ordinary room in an ordinary house. Some thought rises up inside you that says “there is someone else in the room.” If we are using logic alone we tell ourselves that is absurd and go back to our activity. But we are not. So we glance around to reassure ourselves there is no one else. We take an action, so we can reach a conclusion. Anxiety soothed. With death we do not have such an option. We do not know what lies beyond. We want to know, but we are reasonably sure we cannot just die and come back to find out. Our anxiety will not be satisfied with that. It puts us in the bind of needing to draw a conclusion on the inconcludable. Whether the decline of religion in the West is good or bad is a separate debate. But surely we can agree that it has led to a decline in belief in the afterlife. Misguided or well-guided, religion gave an answer to this awful question. Into this void steps Nothingness. Nothingness, lights-out darkness, is solid. It is a conclusion you can hang your hat on. It removes the unknowness that anxiety hates. We can say to ourselves ‘that’s settled.’ Except it is not, because now you have to live your life with Nothingness looming over you. Your DNA wants only to exist but your conclusion is telling you existence is futile. The out here is embracing the mystery. Those who swear by Nothingness will say it is a scientific conclusion. But it cannot be theory if it cannot be measured. If there are no measurements, then there is no way of knowing what alternatives are plausible. Which means they are equally plausible. Which means anything is possible. We do not get to know what lies beyond. We do not know for sure it is Nothingness that lies beyond, but we know for sure a Mystery does. Nothingness is awful, but mysteries can be fun. Do not let anxiety run your life. Do not let it force conclusions. Especially unsupported ones that do you no good. Embrace the uncertainty. In the end it is the only thing we’ve got. No amount of achievement will create a time machine that goes back to tell 10-year old you “it’s ok that you got a B-, you should still be proud.”
We get trapped in this hamster wheel of thinking that if I just ace this next thing, I will have proven that I am valuable and worthy. We think taking the next step will allow us to rest, but taking the next step only spins the wheel more. Someone outside and above us telling us we did well and they are proud of us seems to scratch the itch. It gives us, for the moment, the satisfaction of approval that 10-year old you wanted. Then the moment passes, life continues on, and we go back to the blueprint of how to do life. And that blueprint says achieve more so you can get that itch scratched again. Only you can solve this. Only you can choose to stop spinning the wheel. Only you can “enough, look at what I have accomplished, I am proud.” Many men today feel like they’re falling behind, unable to meet traditional definitions of success. They see that others have succeeded, both before them and today, and conclude one thing: This is my failure.
In our culture, men are expected to be providers and achievers. You’ve “made it” if you can pay your bills and land promotions. The social status of another person is what we use as a shortcut to judge who he is. And so we assume others do the same about us. When a man feels he hasn’t reached the level he should, he works harder. He will bring work home with him, physically or mentally. Anxiety over unmet expectations builds, making it harder to get things done and often leading to burnout. The looming fear of getting fired - the ultimate blow to manhood - becomes a constant source of stress. These pressures are made worse by how work is set up. The primary goal of any employer is to get the most output for the least amount of input. So they put workers on a treadmill and gradually increase the speed. If they see you can run at 4 MPH without faltering, they increase it to 5. From 5 to 6. If at 6.5 MPH you struggle to keep up, then they now know what your max speed is. Some employers may demand 7 MPH, and the job market is such that if you can’t do it, they will find someone who will. But either way the preference is that you alone do it. Paying you $60,000 to do a ton of work leads to more profit than paying two people $50,000 to do it. So if we know work is naturally set up to always have us on the verge of breaking, why do we feel so terrible when we do? Times are changing, but much of it is still to do with a pressure to “man up.” Our grandfathers overcame the fascists without complaint, so the story goes. Being able to work through pain is the highest cultural virtue. And that mindset is exploited by those who want things from you. If you are not able to cut it, then it is ‘your’ failure. Buy an expensive watch and you can convince people you have succeeded. If they are convinced, maybe you can convince yourself. Buy the biggest TV and you have the most impressive way to distract from the nagging pain in the back of your mind. Go into debt. The same people who promote the idea that you must be strong, independent, and constantly working are more than willing to lend you money—at interest rates they control. In therapy I see again and again that the symptom is not the real problem. Men come in all the time with vague feelings of anxiety and inadequacy. They tend to want “tools” to get rid of the anxiety, so they can get back in the race. But anxiety is not an ailment, it is a beacon. It is a red flag. It is an alarm going off that says “here, over here, this is what needs attention!” Just addressing how not to feel anxious is putting a band-aid on a lopped off finger stub. We need to talk about how you got here in the first place. How we all keep getting here. And we need to question in what way we would like to participate in the culture that is exploiting you and grinding you down. I often will ask “what does being a man mean to you?” I find that the answers are not usually ones that we have independently come up with. Rather they are usually just a re-frame of what we have been told being a man means. Which to me means we are living someone else’s life instead of our own. Imagine yourself in, say Topeka, Kansas, 1938. The circus is in town, and out in a fallow corn field you see a huge beast of an elephant. You stare into her eyes. You do this long enough that something in the back of your mind panics as you realize “my God, this mammoth could break free and trample the whole crowd if she wanted to. We wouldn’t stand a chance.” But the elephant just stares passively back.
Your fear is not eased by the appearance of passivity. Nor is it eased by what you see as its restraints. The elephant has a simple rope tied around its ankle. No thicker than the rope your papa uses with the cattle. The rope is tied to a wooden stake, driven into the hardpan. You think to yourself that you and your buddy could probably tug of war that sucker right out of the ground. There is no reassurance there. How is it holding this monstrosity in place? The answer is standing right next to this long trunked colossus. Jumbo has an adorable little Dumbo. And around that baby elephant’s ankle you see the same rope. This being 1938 and you not having a smartphone to distract you, you sit and watch the elephants for a while. Every twenty moments or so the baby elephant yanks and yanks on the rope with childish exuberance. The stake does not budge, neither does mama. Then it dawns on you. The baby elephant is learning that the stake cannot be defeated. It gives up trying before it gets the strength to learn otherwise. That behemoth casting the long shadow on baby learned she was not capable at a time she was not capable. So she has gone through life believing she is not capable. It begs some questions: What were the ropes that were tied around your young ankles? Who are the circus owners in your life? Who is benefiting from your continued disbelief in your abilities? How can you break free from bondage with one sharp yank? What stops you? I was recently interviewed by Authority Magazine on the topic of being a people pleaser. Below is an excerpt from that article. The full version can be read for free on their website.
- What does “People Pleaser” mean to you? A people pleaser is a person who feels compelled to give more than they receive in any kind of relationship. Their default thinking will be some form of ‘what can I do to make people around me happy?’ On the surface, it seems like being a person who wants to please others is a good thing. Can you help articulate a few of the challenges that come with being a people pleaser? It does seem like a good thing on the surface. Certainly it is better than being the complete opposite. The trouble is the people pleaser invites others to take advantage of them. People pleasers will find there is inequality in their relationships. They are apt to grow bitter and feel that although they give so much to others, they get little in return. They may ask ‘when is it gonna be my turn?’ ... How does people-pleasing behavior impact personal relationships? If you establish in your relationships that you will give and give and not ask anything in return, the people in your life will accept that arrangement without much thought. People may assume you just take pleasure from giving. That you don’t want much of anything in return. Even well-meaning people can fall into this receiving without giving back trap. Receiving is easy, and if a person isn’t being asked for anything, it takes mental effort for them to notice that they should be giving. The above is the more common scenario. But there are more dangerous ones. People pleasers attract people users the way a glove attracts a hand. It is common for the victim in abusive relationships to be a people pleaser. An abuser may be the type of person who consciously only wants to take and take. So they sniff out a person who was raised to give. The abuser unknowingly plays the role of that childhood parent or caretaker. And the victim will play their old familiar role, possibly not knowing a different role is an option. This is exasperated by gender norms. Women are already conditioned to be givers in mainstream culture. If they grew up in a household that was both unstable and patriarchal, they likely would’ve received the message that it’s a woman’s job to quietly give and have no expectation of anything in return. ... Often while we say we want to change aspects of our lives that bother us, we don’t actually want to. That we actually prefer to keep the drama alive. This may be hard to accept. The drama appears to be everything you hate, so how could it also be your preference? The answer may be that the drama is familiar. In discussing anxiety I often use the metaphor of ‘the tiger in the room.’ Anxiety is the fear that because we have endured traumas and stressful events in the past, we will again in the future. So we have to be anxiously on guard for it, we have to be looking around for where the tiger -the threat- is hiding. Relief from anxiety can then come when you see the tiger, when a bad thing is happening to you. Because at least then you are in a familiar experience. The alternative is being comfortable with openness. That anything could happen, that there are no barriers, that anything can be in the room. This could mean a tiger is present, but it could also mean that love is present. It could mean a million different things good, bad, and neutral may be in the room. Anything may occur. If you choose to people please, then you will get the same familiar result. However if you choose openness, if you choose to take a new action, then you will get a new result. Is a new result what you want? Then take it. Full interview here. To book a counseling session, click here Emotional Distance and 'Other-Lifing' - In Yourself and in Relationships
What is other-lifing? I would describe other-lifing as a way in which a person is seeking an escape from their current reality. Perhaps there is a feeling of dissatisfaction with what is going on. Other-lifing is a way to get out of that day to day existence without making the often hard moves to change things. It's a form of alternate reality. An anxiety-pacifying way of seeing your life as just palatable enough to not face the pain of the unknown future. What are some examples of other-lifing? Examples can include excessive daydreaming, pornography usage, online, parasocial relationships, texting relationships with other people, and video games - especially virtual reality or role-playing games. Recently there has even been a growing trend in seeking relationships with AI chatbots. What are the dangers of other-lifing? It probably increases the risk of depression. Think of it as being like eating empty calorie food. The activities fill you up, but don't necessarily nourish you. They don't help with your growth, but instead replace healthier options. It's not that any of the examples above our inherently bad, but it's more of a question of what activities aren’t happening instead? The depression can come from knowing at a certain level that the other-lifing activities are only distracting from deeper problems. The longer the deeper problems go on, the more overwhelming they feel. This can further discourage change and only encourage the momentarily satisfying other-lifing. Are there any benefits of other-lifing? Potentially, other-lifing can be useful in situations in which you truly cannot change things. Examples would include being incarcerated, bedridden long term, or physically disabled. I would suggest a person intentionally wrestle with the question of how do these activities not distract from my current reality, but actually enhance it? What can I do to stop other-lifing? As I always say, the first and toughest step is recognition. I would recommend exploring with a therapist the actions and effects of this behavior. Big changes are daunting to make so perhaps there can be a middle step between recognition and action. (Book a therapy session here!) When you are feeling the itch to take an other-lifing action, resist the urge, pause, and instead stick with your mind and body in that moment. Without doing anything else, explore just what feelings arise in that moment. These could be emotions like irritation, anger, sadness, even boredom. Or the feelings could be physical, like a tightening in the chest or headache. If you can just stick with the feelings in that moment, try to observe where it is they take you. What thoughts do they cause? Do they bring a sense of fear to you? Do they seem threatening? This is important information. It can be of use in deciding what action to take next. What effect does other-lifing have on relationships? It should be no surprise to learn that other-lifing is damaging in relationships. If a person is disconnecting from their own life, then it will certainly come off as them disconnecting from you. If they are off in their own head (or in their own phone) an information vacuum can form. This is a space where we do not know what is going on, and we become anxious about it. So the anxious brain will inevitably fill that vacuum with worst case scenario thoughts. Anxiety is when we use ~80% of our mental energy to worry about ~1% possible outcomes. The most common probable conclusion is believing your partner is cheating on you. What can I do about other-lifing in my relationship? When your partner is other-lifing, a bit of a conspiracy of inaction can form. They don't want to address their dissatisfaction head on, so they withdraw. And you don't want to face the potential pain of what lies in that information vacuum, so you don't address it either. For similar reasons you can develop your own depression. Oops! So if they aren't going to do the hard thing and address the dissatisfaction then Plan A may be for you to. Be straightforward. Ask them what is going on in their mind, and push through any reflexive avoidance responses they give. Stress the importance of talking about it, and be a gnat. Push for couples counseling, a space for a non-bias third person to assist you. More info on couples counseling here. If that doesn’t work, shift to Plan B: do the opposite. This requires knowledge of the distancer-pursuer dynamic in relationships. The distancer is the person who values the energy of independence more in the relationship, and the pursuer the one who values the energy of connection more. Both people usually value those energies, but usually someone will value one more, so that energy becomes ‘theirs’ and the other energy ‘yours’. A partner who is distancing themselves is probably used to you pursuing connection with them. The more they withdraw, the more strongly you will pursue them as a consequence. It is the very reliability of you pursuing them - the knowledge that you will do the work of connection in the relationship - that encourages them to not give energy to connection. In an ideal relationship these energies are split somewhere near 50/50. But as time goes by, this split can start to approach near 0/100 proportions. So perhaps if they are other-lifing you need to just leave them to it. Go do your own thing, take care of your needs in other ways. This does not necessarily mean other-lifing yourself, but rather seeking out your own independence. Your own healthy hobbies. Your partner will begin to notice that you are not pursuing connection anymore. In this absence it will actually make sense to the more independent-minded person to want to pursue connection. They will feel the need themselves to rebalance things Why is acceptance important when it comes to managing a mental health diagnosis and living well with it?
Acceptance is important because if you are battling the diagnosis, then you are really only battling yourself. The longer you deny reality, the longer you put off the work of coping with things. I have found that acceptance can be a relief as well. If you know what it is that is going on with you, you can begin the journey of coping with it. How can psychoeducation help someone accept a diagnosis? We are not born knowing any of this. And sadly, due to mental health stigma and the differing priorities of the education system, we are not taught psychoeducation much either. Learning more about the diagnosis in particular and the mind in general can help make it all feel less overwhelming. How can support from others -- like peer support groups -- help someone accept a diagnosis? Support from peers, therapists, and even friends can be helpful in normalizing whatever the diagnosis is. With peers in particular, you can see that “oh, other people are like this as well, and they don’t seem as ‘crazy’ as I would’ve thought.” What else can someone do to work toward accepting a mental health diagnosis? Not take it TOO seriously. Diagnoses were created in part by the medical profession as a way to classify people. ‘OCD’ or ‘bipolar disorder', for example, are designed to be a shortcut for practitioners to understand the client’s situation at a glance. The mistake we often make is to turn it into a self label or a self identity. Whatever the diagnosis is, it is only one of many personal characteristics. What else to say about this topic? When I am working with clients and they tell me their diagnoses I try to avoid making assumptions about them. Rather I will often ask “what does that diagnosis mean to you?” I feel that is more important than knowing what the psychological world thinks it means about them. Click here to schedule a therapy appointment |
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