Are You Mad at Me?: How to Stop Focusing on What Others Think and Start Living for You

by Meg Josephson

People-pleasing is the behavior we engage in when we fear that we’re disappointing someone, that we’re in trouble, that we feel unsafe in some way.

It’s the behavior that falsely soothes the queasy feeling that we’ve done something wrong.

Women in particular are conditioned to overextend, overexplain, overapologize.

We’re taught to not be too much or want too much, so we learn to get used to being unsatisfied with our lives.

We’re taught to meet everyone else’s needs before our own, and along the way we lose the opportunity to get to know who we really are, what we need, what we like and prefer.

Being nice is often easier and a way to avoid conflict, but it can create long-term resentment if we’re constantly sacrificing our needs to make someone else happy.

Repeating yourself or trying to prove yourself to someone who’s emotionally immature will not work and will keep you stuck in the cycle of pain, anger, and disempowerment.

Our brains and bodies don’t know the difference between an imagined experience and an actual experience. Physiologically, they feel the same. So when we torture ourselves with the worst possibility and it actually does happen, we’re living it twice—once in our heads, and then again in reality.

The greatest irony is that in an attempt to avoid conflict and keep the peace, we create so much more tension within ourselves. When we shove our emotions down—our resentments, our frustrations, our needs—they don’t go anywhere, they don’t just disappear.

Clear, direct communication reduces long-term suffering, even if it brings about short-term discomfort, because it cuts through and addresses the situation that’s right in front of us. If our efforts to make everyone else happy are making us really unhappy, we’re not on a sustainable path.

With fawning, we unconsciously believe in two extremes: either we need to abandon ourselves to feel at home in the world or we need to abandon the world to feel at home