One of the main issues for people pleasers is that they feel deeply unsupported. They feel like they pour themselves out helping everyone else, but no one is there to help or take care of them. I get it. I’ve been there. I have also learned that I was the one creating the barriers to other people helping me.
Let me ask you something, if someone came to you today and said you could go and put your feet up and they would cook you dinner and clean up the kitchen and the dishes and then give you a massage, what would come up for you in your body and mind i.e. what would you think and feel?
If you are a people pleaser, you would probably feel a lot of resistance to having someone do those things for you – things you do for other people all the time. You would probably feel things like contraction in your body, tension, nervousness, unease, guilt and anxiety. Your thoughts may race with things like:
“I can’t let someone do all that for me. Maybe I can do part of it”
“I haven’t done enough to earn this”
“I can’t sit here and do nothing, that’s lazy”
“I wouldn’t know what to do with myself if I wasn’t working”
“This feels really uncomfortable”
“Why do they want to do this for me?”
There may also be thoughts like, “I need to do it so that it is done right”, because there can also be a lot of control and perfectionism tied up in people pleasing. A lot of needing everything to be right so that you feel good enough and safe.
As a people pleaser it is highly likely that consciously or subconsciously you think you need to earn love and support through doing things for others, and when you have that belief it is very easy to get stuck in the loop of feeling like you never do enough for others, and always have to do more than others to make sure that you have done enough.
One of the key reasons that we people pleasers feel like no one else takes care of us, is because we feel uncomfortable, or even resistant to, receiving help and support. I know that may seem ironic, because we really want it, but then we struggle to let it in. Even if we do accept help, we usually experience what Skott Jones has termed “Guiltitude”.
i’m often saturated with a simultaneous feeling of guilt and gratitude – an enigmatic emotion I’ve come to call guiltitude. – Skott Jones
There are a whole bundle of societal and personal beliefs and expectations that can underly this discomfort with asking for and receiving help and support such as
- Valuing being strong and independent
- Fear of being seen as weak or incapable
- Not wanting to be a burden to others
Some of this is connected to primal imprints around survival of the fittest. Some of it is generated by performance based capitalist society. At the heart of it all though, is your own sense of worth. The key reason we do not ask for help and struggle to receive it even when it is offered, is because on a deep level we do not feel worthy of it. When I started on my journey to learn to love myself after my second marriage broke down in 2016, one of the first changes that I noticed was that I began to feel more comfortable asking for and receiving help, whereas before I had resolutely done everything myself and consistently turned down help even when it was offered. This shift became even more powerful after going through a course of embodied coaching sessions. Following that, asking for help didn’t just feel more comfortable, it felt logical and natural, like, of course I would ask for and receive help when I need it.
Please understand that there is no judgement in this. It is not that there is something wrong with you that needs to be fixed. Coming to an awareness that what we experience in life is largely a projection of what we believe about ourselves can feel confronting. The pivotal shift to feeling more supported, is deeply knowing your own inherent self-worth in your mind and in your body. This cannot be achieved with only a mindset change. In my experience this transformation happens when you learn ways to accept and love all parts of yourself from the body up. When you begin to develop your internal self-love and self-worth, then your beliefs can alter effortlessly to align with that. It can be a relatively simple process, but it is a process, and it can be uncomfortable at times. If you are wanting to know how to get started, then my book 10 Steps to Happiness describes all the practices and belief shifts that I went through as I began my self-love journey, and I still use many of the practices from the book to help me maintain my wellbeing. If you think you need more in-depth coaching support then feel free to message me, or email me at info@janinelattimore.com and we can have a chat.
Aroha nui, much love
Janine
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Thank you for reading this post. If you would like weekly insights and tips from me about how to transform your people pleasing habits and have more confidence, love, respect and freedom then you can subscribe to my People Pleasing Evolution newsletter. When you subscribe be sure to check out the welcome email from me as it contains a link to my FREE ebook: How to Say No Without Feeling Guilty. This ebook It gives you practical tips to successfully overcome the three main issues for people pleasers learning to say no:
1. Knowing what words to say (sample phrases provided)
2. Confidence to say the words
3. How to manage feelings of anxiety and guilt about saying the words
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