The Dark Side of Being a People Pleaser
How being a giver nearly wrecked me
Your mind works in strange ways when you’re a people pleaser. For most of my life, I have worked within a certain ideology: If I can make someone feel happy, I have value to them.
This seems pretty simple and harmless. It’s not. It’s actually pretty messed up.
The issue is that I have also worked within the ideology of the converse:
If someone’s not happy with me, I have no value to them. I am useless.
It wasn’t easy for me to have friends growing up. This is not to say that it was hard to make friends. Having them was the difficult part. There is a big difference.
Making friends in school was as simple as sitting next to someone in class.
Actually maintaining a friendship sometimes felt like someone tied my hands and feet and threw me in a pool. A complete struggle.
I had one friend in particular in grade school who was so horribly manipulative. She was the leader of our group, a role she appointed herself to and no one was going to fight her on that.
