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

by Meg Josephson

There are so many ways to tell someone you’re thinking of them, and because of that, there are also so many opportunities to feel forgotten.

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 caretakers. Nurturers. Peacekeepers. We’re taught to be good girls, cool girls, to agree with everything and everyone, and to give Uncle Richard a big hug, for goodness’ sake, even if he makes us wildly uncomfortable. 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.

I could be a chameleon in social circles that I didn’t even want to be a part of and adjust my personality to be palatable to whomever I was trying to please.

Am I even real? Or am I just a medley of other people’s personalities and preferences? Who am I when I’m not trying to please everyone else?

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.

As a teenager and as a young adult, I feared that I was a chronically angry person, but I began to see how not chronically angry I was since I’d been living on my own. To my surprise, I was quite happy a lot of the time. It was the environment and the situations I was put in that elicited so much anger within me.

Constantly intellectualizing and analyzing our emotions is a way of keeping ourselves from really feeling them. It’s a protective mechanism: if we’re always thinking about our emotions and analyzing them, we won’t need to physically feel the pain or discomfort that’s behind the rationale. When we find ourselves getting lost in the headiness of an emotion and stuck in the story, it’s an invitation to return to the bodily experience of that emotion, from the neck down, if it feels safe and accessible to do so. Not everything we feel has to be explained or rationalized. It can just be what we’re feeling—without the story. It can just be experienced.

We learned to rely on external validation to tell us that we’re safe and loved, and to then feel worthless when that external validation is taken away, causing us to crave more of it. We internalized others’ bad moods as proof that something is wrong with us, using self-blame as an effective coping mechanism to make sense of criticism, neglect, or chaos.

You are not responsible for the version of you that exists in other people’s minds. You can’t control how others perceive you, but you can manage how much mental space you give their perceptions. You can’t control other people’s behaviors, but you can control your decision to tolerate them or not.

The greatest result of realizing that nothing is personal is that it frees us from the belief that we’re unworthy of love because someone isn’t able to give it to us.

When we practice clear, direct, open, and honest communication, the other person is going to respond or react in their own way, dependent on their ability to handle discomfort. All we can ever control is our own words and actions and how we respond to other people. As you practice communicating more clearly, it’s not your job to manage other people’s discomfort.

Being a clear, direct communicator is a practice of self-trust, a balance between knowing when to bring something up because it needs to be addressed and knowing when to surrender control and lean back in the relationship. Bringing something up doesn’t come from a place of control; it comes from a place of connection. The more we try to manage or control someone else’s behavior, the more suffering we’re creating for ourselves.

One of the most important and challenging practices I want you to take away from this book is this: Take their word for it. Get comfortable with the discomfort of taking what people say at face value without imagining what else it could mean or what they could secretly be feeling.

If someone is being passive-aggressive in their communication and not bringing something to you directly, there’s nothing for you to fix.

Direct communication supports drama-free relationships because it cuts through assumptions. It erases the need to read minds, play games, or read between the lines.

The worst-case scenario is clarity. Or rather, more realistically, it’s discomfort and clarity. Yes, it’s hard to have certain conversations and to look at the reality of the relationship that’s right in front of you, but when you do, then you know, and you can use your precious energy to accept what’s happening, accept that you can’t control the other person or change them, and move forward. Then you’re closer to the truth and have the information you need to make the next best decision.

True intimacy means never having to wonder if someone is mad at you, because the standard for the relationship is honesty. Having boundaries doesn’t mean turning into a flaky, unreliable friend. It’s striking a balance between showing up for the people you want in your life and for yourself.

Boundaries are bridges, not walls, and they create space for sustainable connections to thrive. Boundaries aren’t attempts to change the other person but ways to feel rooted in yourself while being in relationship to others.