I'm the problem, it's me.
The three big tip-offs that you need to set a freaking boundary already and the insight that got me to start.
Earlier this week, I wrote about the lesser-known stress response of fawning (the well-known ones are fight, flight, freeze), wherein one tries to merge with and over-flatter people they see as threatening as a way to protect themselves. Learning that this was an actual thing was one of those mindblowing reveals, like in The Sixth Sense when Bruce Willis realizes he’s dead. Suddenly I saw what had been going on the whole fucking time, and, Whoa.
So, knowing that fawning was a thing and not just me being a spineless pushover was a relief, but I also wanted to know how to fix it.
Introducing: boundaries! Yay.
Nobody in my generation talked about boundaries. They’re a regular part of my 13-year-old daughter’s discussions with her friends (alongside the status of their mental health and what happened in therapy last week) but us 80’s and 90’s kids? Ha lol. The first time I heard about them was around 2012, in my late thirties, probably at an AA meeting.
Anyway, people-pleasing is all about boundaries: not having them, not feeling like you have the right to have them, being scared to practice them, and especially for women and mothers, feeling guilty for even thinking about the fact you might—one day—maybe need some. (Note: fawning is sort of an extreme example of people-pleasing behavior; not all people-pleasing looks like that.)
Yeah yeah yeah, most of us know this, but here’s the insight that lit a fire under my ass and got me to start practicing boundaries instead of just talking about them: people-pleasing is lying. It’s dishonesty. It’s deceit.
I’d always thought of people-pleasing as sort of a faux-negative, like saying you’re a workaholic or a perfectionist or that one of your weaknesses is that you take on too much responsibility at work in a job interview. Like, We’re going to pretend like this is a bad thing but we both know it’s good thing because it means I’m selfless and self-sacrificing and will work until my eyes bleed.
But people-pleasing as dishonesty? That was different. That was actually bad, not faux-bad. Perhaps it was this universal, ungendered view of dishonesty as negative—and thus, I felt more permission and justification to start setting boundaries—or perhaps it was that I had learned how critical honesty was to my sobriety that caused such a big shift for me. Either way, it woke me up and got me to start the very uncomfortable, very awkward work of setting limits and expressing needs.
When all this is new, it can be really hard to identify where and when a boundary needs to be set, which is why in my forthcoming book, Push Off from Here, I define three of the biggest tip-offs.
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