In a prior post I wrote about the Mid-life evaluation that many women experience. In response to requests for further information on this issue, I’m going to do a brief series of posts expanding on some of the common elements that lead women to the midlife re-evaluation.
Many women are trained from birth to engage in people-pleasing. This is often due to a family culture that rewards young daughters who keep the peace and take on adult responsibilities.
People Pleasing often continues over the course of the lifespan. Over time, in trying to keep everyone happy and avoid conflict, you likely started over-compensating. People Pleasing seemed effective and became a self-reinforcing experience, leading you to believe that it’s always best keep the peace and “make” everyone happy. In a way, it was the means of controlling your environment, therefore keeping you safe.
Because of the positive response to People Pleasing, you expanded the strategy, affording yourself little opportunity to develop more healthy approaches to life. In addition, by acting this way in all your relationships, you inadvertently developed the belief that you MUST play the People Pleasing role. Beyond believing it yourself, you also trained the people around you to expect much more from you, to solve their problems and bear burdens that they can shoulder themselves.
Setting boundaries and making them “suffer” through their problems seems unthinkable to you. You’re in an exhausting loop of doing much more for everyone else. Unfortunately, the loop only gets bigger as you continue to say “yes” and your obligations mount.
You can wind up feeling overwhelmed as you continuously try to “put out fires” and satisfy the demands of others. “Others” are often close family members, including children (even adult children), parents, and spouses.
With People Pleasing as a primary coping strategy, it’s easy to see why you’ve given your all to everyone else for most of your life.
Take heart. Through Mindset training you can learn to finally, give to yourself.
The best to you.