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

by Meg Josephson

remember secretly wishing they would divorce. So then at least the tension would be over, they could be happy, and I could be free.”

A tense home is the birthplace of hypervigilance.

In a high-tension environment, the child is constantly focusing on other family members’ moods and always trying to correct course.

Performer,

He just wanted her to feel better. As an adult, he thinks he’s responsible for making people feel happy and struggles to be “himself” because it’s like he’s always onstage.

It’s both lonely and exhausting to live this way.

He’s sent into an anxiety spiral anytime he thinks someone’s in a bad mood,

He learned that when someone’s upset, he’d feel unsafe in some way, or he’d need to gue...

Confrontation makes him uncomfortable because he never witnessed it being handled i...

He’s been conditioned to assume something is wrong when nothing’s being said, so he’s always reading between the lines and overthinking his every move in relationships.

The Performer believes: I’m personally responsible for making other people happy. I need to butter people up to make sure they like me. It’s unsafe for me to relax. I’m always performing, and I need to “keep up” the version of myself that people expect me to be.

Caretaker

All any child wants is to feel loved and safe, and Sophie found these feelings by being helpful.

As an adult, Sophie overextends herself and then feels secretly resentful. She struggles to set boundaries and gets all her feeling of value from being nurturing and helpful.

hyperindependent adult: she feels like she has to do everything on her own and struggles to ask for help. She’s the therapist-friend, the person everyone goes to with their problems, but she feels like her problems and emotions are burdens. Sophie got the message that she could receive love and attention by alleviating other people’s stress. But now when she’s stressed or overwhelmed she feels like she needs to hide those feelings. No one ever thinks to check in on her because they assume she always is fine and has it together. She unconsciously seeks out romantic relationships in which she needs to mother her partner because that’s the dynamic that feels familiar to her, but it leaves her resentful and exhausted.

She also finds herself being critical of people who aren’t as self-sufficient as she is, in part because she’s envious that they didn’t have to grow up so quickly.

The Caretaker believes:

need to manage other people’s emotions so that I can feel okay.

Other people’s needs are more important than my own.

My value is in being helpful and taking c...

It felt like the only ways for her to connect with her family were complaining and gossiping.

When Alicia was feeling distressed and seeking comfort, she’d have to find it on her own.

After arguments with her parents, she’d cry in her room and secretly hope that they’d softly knock on her door and comfort her, but they never did.

and if I want to be loved, I need to work really hard for it.

When a child’s emotional needs are repeatedly unmet, they feel that they’re not worthy of receiving love, that they need to earn approval from others, since it won’t come naturally. With this belief there’s a deep fear of rejection or abandonment, because the child has learned that their needs don’t matter or are “too much.”

To avoid that rejection and the pain that goes with it, they’ll suppress their needs, brush them off, and constantly look externally for validation to boost their self-esteem.

Lone Wolf. She learned to rely on herself not out of desire b...

As an adult, Alicia isolates. Because she learned that her needs wouldn’t be met,

cultivate a sense of internal safety.

When relationships fluctuate, body language shifts, or life throws stressors at you, you have a place of inner stability to return to and to consciously reconnect with yourself, your needs, your body, and your emotions.

when she felt any sort of sadness, anger, or fear, her parents dismissed it, saying that it wasn’t “productive.” Consequently, Carter never learned how to deal with challenging emotions.

This lack of validation and acknowledgment made Carter feel invisible and unsupported.

She’s a charmer who morphs her personality to match that of whomever she’s with and wants to be liked by everyone—even if that means not always liking herself.

She feels crippled by any sort of negative feedback because being seen as anything but perfect has felt entirely unsafe.

She needs people to think she’s always productive, and if she hears someone walk through the door, she’ll quickly swap the TV remote for a book so they don’t think she was, gasp, relaxing. She’s very hard on herself and never feels like she’s doing enough; she walks around with a deep sense of shame for not being the perfect person she expects herself to be. She’s scared to try new things and stays within her comfort zone because she’s terrified of being a beginner. She often feels like she’s putting up a front so people won’t see the messiness underneath. As a result, she feels like people don’t know the “real” her. She learned: I need to be perfect to be loved.

The foundation for our inner sense of security is the emotional connection that we have with our caretakers. If you were criticized or dismissed for expressing emotions and didn’t have a caregiver who was there to help you work through them, you may have come to believe that there was something wrong with you but not understood what. When you’re constantly told as a child things along the lines of “Don’t cry!” “You’re so dramatic!” “You’re so sensitive!” or “What...

As an adult, she feels far from herself, out of touch with her own desires, preferences, and personality. She feels empty and lost, uncertain about who she is and what she wants. She struggles to speak up for herself and finds herself adjusting her opinions to match those of whomever she’s with, which leads to a large amount of self-loathing, thinking she’s an impostor faking her way through the world. She’s terrified of being seen, which leads her to hide her gifts and silence her dreams as a way to prevent herself from being perceived and then judged. …

chameleon—it can look like putting all your energy and attention into pleasing the abuser, spending more time with them, defending them, doing anything in your control to make them happy.

because they lead you to unconsciously start to believe that you’re causing the turmoil—that it’s your fault.

I can be safe only once I know that you’re pleased with me.

I’m not allowed to say no.

I don’t know who I am or what I want.

Being seen or perceived is...

When did I learn this was helpful or protective?

Constantly worrying what people think of you, if they like you, if they’re mad at you

Overextending yourself, not setting boundaries (and then ...

Avoiding conflict at ...

Constantly seeking external approval or validation

Silencing your needs for the comfort and happiness of everyone else

Feeling hypervigilant of people’s emot...