A Resilient People Pleaser: Recovering from External Validation

Attempting to make other people happy made me miserable because my people pleaser end of the exchange was mired in giving it away for free. Absolving myself of setting my own direction for the shortcut of taking the one I thought would earn me praise.

As a child, I loved playing alone and inventing fairies, sprites, and nature spirits for my stories. After my parents kept pushing me, I tried playing with other kids. I got assaulted, maimed, and robbed by them, but I was slowly socialized as expected.

Still, I found it difficult to make and keep friends, doubting they were worth the effort, convinced there was something wrong with me.

I used to draw. I stopped when I realized that some people could easily capture reality on paper, and I was not one of them. But what if that was not the point of art? What if reality is best left to cameras, and creative expression is encouraged in everyone?

The secret is that I won the art award in high school for portraiture. My very realistic-looking portrait of a screaming man was courtesy of the way I was taught to draw in grade two – applying a grid pattern and copying the grayscale in the grid, grid by grid.

First, I was taught to draw using symbols, like the icons on a phone. Then, I was taught to draw using grids, like a computer. Finally, I was encouraged to look. When no one was looking, I pulled out my ruler and calculator and stayed up all night mimicking the grey.

Frankly, that’s not art to me; that’s cheating, or at least explains why I went into engineering, not art.

Defining Values

It wasn’t my decision process that was to blame. After recovering from external validation, I realized it was the orienting principle of a people pleaser.

Struggling with misery for years, I examined my decision-making process, making tweaks. Yet, the end result was complete and utter misery. Finally, I realized it wasn’t the process, but the values that undermined it – definitions of “good” and “bad”.

These definitions are taught to us. We pick them up from society, family, marketing, everywhere. But they are also taught to us through our emotions. When those two conflict, you take the safer one.

When you are a kid, your emotions are not the safe pick. So, you ignore them, relabel them, stuff them aside. You have an unbelievable number of ways to do this, and you do it without realizing it.

But one day, you become safe. Your body knows that it’s no longer the safe option. You find yourself feeling differently than you used to.

It’s accepting that you feel differently, that’s the hard part. Now you lead where you used to follow. You feel where you used to be numb. Now you must think about where you automated. It takes time and effort, and might only creep in when you have both. For when the student is ready, the teacher appears.

The teacher is Chase Hughes. He says that the one thing most people never figure out is that we aren’t making decisions. Instead, we “are executing protective behaviors that are shaped by three things: fear of rejection, learned helplessness, and shame-based programming.

He says this shows up in tone, posture, body language, language, and tone and pacing, where they are looking, and even breath. I know for me, figuring that out was the key that set me free.

Contrasting Behaviour

I am a recovering fidgeter. Chronically, I was unable to sit still, and when required to, I’d pick at something – whatever was handy. If I tried wearing nail polish, it would be all picked off within hours.

Constantly, I’d be scolded to sit still, yet in class, in the schoolroom, I was a quiet student.

In reconciling contrasting behavior, I think that when you are afraid of the person on whom you depend, your impulse to flee frightening situations gets rewired or hijacked.

I was afraid of both of my parents and the pain they could and would inflict. But a child can not run away, though I tried once. Unfortunately, I was only in grade two at the time.

To stop fidgeting, you have to correct your fight-or-flight behaviour, the most basic of our unconscious behaviours. You have to feel the fear you were rightly feeling. You flee situations that have proven perilous. You’ve previously experienced this as your “comfort zone. ” It’s where you’ve spent most of your time, and mislabeled as comfortable. You know it’s not. Accept what you know.

To cure my fidgeting, I had to accept what I knew, even though I had no experience in this new world of being without being a people pleaser. I had a pace of life and direction to maintain while knowing a major about-face was required. A life on automatic, while thinking about what to do about it.

Recovering from external validation meant putting myself in the driver’s seat, for real. It was to face life with a blank map. Previously, for the people pleaser, highways were laid out before me, paved with external validation and approval.

Defining Progress

The illusion of control was maintained with the appearance of choice – just pick one, there are so many options.

In fact, here they are – become a mother, make sure you have a career too (one as a teacher, secretary, or nurse), and marry a doctor, lawyer, or engineer.

Luckily for me, I had the choice to skip the ring, the motherhood, and the pink collar and become an engineer myself. I was the ultimate people pleaser, aiming for praise.

Recovering from external validation, defining progress my way means the same way I experienced it – for youth to hear of a future with limited and determined options and blow that future out of the water with possibility.

Today, I fear divorce. Marriage is off the table as the only way to avoid something I don’t want to experience. Recovering from external validation, I believe in the possibility of a new, innovative solution to my closed door.

Sorting through life’s options with a compass oriented toward internal approval can be slow. You have to try on some options that looked like they’d flatter, only to find out that they don’t fit.

When society invents materials that hug your skin and make it easy to move, you don’t have to wonder why living in yoga pants is such a common thing to do. You also realize that the more eyes on you, the more discomfort you will tolerate.

Trying on options as you assess and redefine your way forward is a matter of changing your personality. Your personal reality has changed, and so will your personality.

You are no longer the people pleaser who suffers instead of complaining, who goes along to get along. You might not even be in the room.

Recovering from external validation required swapping praise for principles to light the way.

Your principles lie at the root of your conflicts. You don’t have to question yourself and decide on your lofty principles. Nor do you have to worry about whether you are a poser or an aspirational human. You simply look into your history of conflict. What is the one thing on which you do not agree?

I was taught that there was a rank. I used to argue my place on the scale. It wasn’t until the Great Awakening that I realized that I believe a soul is a soul is a soul, and that while each may be rewarded differently or experience better or worse things, it doesn’t make one better than another.

Having been raised in a hierarchy, recovering from external validation, I wanted to bring it all crashing down, even though evidence of it is easy to find, and those who hold high places on it will do anything to maintain it.

It was the week I visited my father for the last time. He’d spent the whole week trying to convince me that I was last on the scale – each of my siblings was better than me, in some way that was more important than any way I ranked.

I was done arguing where I ranked, and I simply wanted him to keep his analysis to himself. In my analysis, there has to be a kid who is the worst, and fine, if it were me. Just don’t keep reminding me, thank you.

The people pleaser failed and quit.

As it turned out, healing meant leaving the room. I am not a fan of competition in any way, although I feel as if I was steeped in it, and society celebrates it.

Tune Internally

I believe in a world where business strategy is the blue ocean. Being different is the way to grow the economy instead of fighting over existing markets. But I’ve also been on Amazon, wondering what the difference is between two products.

Recovering from being a people pleaser to being a self pleaser makes me selfish, and I know that word with scorn. Society taught me to be ashamed, but I’ve learned why, and shame on society for pushing me in an unhealthy direction. It’s the equivalent of making me think I’d been cool if I smoked, and approving the sale of toxins as a marketable product.

That’s society. It takes something sacred and rarefied like the tobacco leaf and makes it mainstream and polluted before everyone realizes they were duped and fed chemicals, lies, and shiny ideals.

We all were.  Imagine if we all took ownership and accountability for our need for control, approval, validation, and attention instead of looking to get it from someone or somewhere else. Recovering from external validation might be something we all need.

Make yourself proud. Drive your own life. Pat yourself on the back. Give yourself attention.

When you become selfish and tune internally, you might just find your highest self, your clearest purpose, and your most confident principles.

I read that boiling lobsters is illegal in some countries, and that Canada is considering it because it might cause lobsters to suffer. If the result causes a drop in the demand for lobsters, several towns and families would suffer the pain of financial constriction.

What about all the years I’ve suffered as a people-pleaser? Suffering is inherent in life. Are they going to take away my hunting licence if they realize that the deer suffer?

Observing Nature

Recovering from external validation, the ex-people pleaser became a hunter. I want to eat meat and take accountability for that desire, not being blind to the realities it.

As a hunter, I am quick and legal. The last deer I shot with a bow through the heart was as clean as it gets. However, I watched it leap into the air by several feet, twisting and turning, before running off as fast as he could. I watched him faceplant, as I found out later, he broke a shoulder. He made about ten paces before he collapsed and let out his last breath.

There was no way that lacked suffering.

What about the doe, who is looking for her fawn, a fawn that was harvested the previous day with one tag, and set up for the second hunter to fill his tag, because they know she will come looking. She is missing a dear family member and can’t be on her way until she finds her child.

I think every mammal experiences the grief of separation. In studies of cows, I read that mother cows experience separation anxiety when their calves are taken away.

In years of observing nature, I think sometimes the only way to explain their behavior is through the lens of whatever emotion they are likely experiencing, without the words to express it, without the consciousness to overcome it.

When you realize this about animals and their products, you can become vegan. You can become vegan for many reasons, but don’t do it because you are no longer causing or contributing to harm.

Trees have feelings, too. They protect their offspring like children, and communicate with each other like communities. If that’s true, it wouldn’t surprise me if the lettuce experiences pain when I pick it.

Choosing Energy

Lynn McTaggart, who studies this edge of science, tells us that yes, plants act in ways that seem to suggest that they know what’s happening with them. They read your feelings of harm or health, and react accordingly. Even bacteria.

When you realize that your mere existence requires something to die so you may live, you take each day, each life, with the sanctity that life deserves.

You sit down to a meal with a prayer, not just one that you’ve learned from a tradition and repeat a prayer you’ve memorized and repeat with great reverence, but because you genuinely understand what has been given up for you to continue. That’s what it is to be grateful, and to use what you’ve taken without waste, as cleanly and thoughtfully as possible.

Not wasting a morsel or a minute, asking for an offering instead of taking a harvest.

Choosing energy, not the trappings of material pleasures.

Energy cannot be created or destroyed, but matter comes in and out of existence. Embody pure, clean energy and let go of material things, and all the problems they cause and create.

You have the consciousness to choose that matter doesn’t matter, which is so closely intertwined with how you think of what other people think of you that you have to wonder how much of your attachment to success is about someone or something else.

Recovering from external validation meant realizing that impressing other people with titles and possessions wasn’t doing the trick. Hauling out my credentials, my greatest accomplishments, and my impressive victories felt like a poor way to start a relationship, and I quit with the performance that never felt good. Full stop, retirement.

It was a struggle to realize I needed to make myself proud first—no one but me.

To be self-directed, I needed to be proud of and tune into what I valued—working hard, contributing to humanity, and being kind.

I surrendered to the realization that my attachment to praise was holding me back. The people pleaser looked in the mirror, on the road to getting comfortable with the reflection.

In recovering from external validation, I let go of the trappings of success. They are called trappings because that’s what they do – they are hard to get rid of and dial back once you have them until you recognize them as traps.

This is freedom of connection, spiritual mind mastery, and consideration of our attachments to this plane of existence and this life.

Looking back, I reflect on all my accomplishments with the internal question, “Now do I matter?” What I know today, and always should have known, was that I mattered through existence alone, because existence is potential. It’s not the past that determines our value, but what we do with our futures, our intentions, not our spun history, because for everyone’s history, there is an element of luck, destiny, and assistance more than there is merit.

If you don’t think so, perhaps you haven’t noticed all the people pleasers assisting you and waiting for you to reciprocate with praise.

Completely recovering from external validation, I’m headed back to the drawing board – literally. I am leaning on Betty Edwards’ assistance to help me end cheating in portraiture by drawing a few angels, sprites, and fairies.

I seem to remember a day, before rejection, helplessness, and shame took hold. When you no longer look externally, all three disappear. There’s no one to judge; there’s no one to help. There’s just you and your heart’s desire.