Please please me

Because I guess it makes sense to talk about the whole People Pleaser thing.

Many years ago, when I was thinking about my desire to help other people get married, I was researching love. I was actually trying to find information on some studies I had read about previously, and was unsuccessful in that, but I ended up purchasing three books that I liked a lot, two of which seemed to have a lot of insight for me.

One was The Five Love Languages (Chapman), and I have referenced that before, and will probably reference it again. One was A General Theory of Love (Lewis, Amini, and Lannon), which focuses on the limbic system, and the things in our brain that allow us to feel love at all, not necessarily romantic. I thought it was really excellent, but it did not necessarily change my way of thinking, except for maybe explaining why the pet lizard never had the affection for me that the cats and dogs do.

The other one was The 9 Types of Lovers by Daphne Rose Kingma. Really it is about nine personality types, and I guess the intended focus was how that affects your relationships, but really, it was more about how you get that way. Yes, your personality issues affect your romantic relationships, but they affect everything else too. Her specialty seems to be relationships though, so I guess that’s just her filter.

The deal with a People Pleaser is they feel a sense of shame, and they do things for other people because they are trying to become worthy. In light of this, my thinking that I would have to lose weight before anyone could love me makes sense, but also my thinking that I needed to get everyone else matched up first would make sense. I was trying to earn magic.

I don’t hate that I came out this way. Nurturing others and serving others are great, and I would rather have accommodation be my coping mechanism than some of the other options out there, like hysteria or narcissism. That being said, it is easy to get out of balance with that, and it is better to serve others out of a pure love for them, as opposed to out of an effort to compensate for all-consuming shame. It’s more fun that way. Also, it’s better not to have all-encompassing shame.

This is actually one other key area where I know I have made improvement. I used to sometimes be overcome at times with this sense of there being something disgusting, and I wasn’t sure where it was coming from, or if I had done something wrong. When I read Sartre’s Nausea in my French Novel class, it resonated (though I believe his root causes were more existential in nature). Those spells don’t happen to me anymore.

It also goes into part of why I do the blogging, and the person I try to be. Shame isn’t really super-productive. If you are doing something that you shouldn’t do, and it makes you stop, that’s useful, and that’s about the full extent of its practical purposes. If you are embarrassed about things that are actually okay, that’s useless. And if you know something is wrong and then you keep doing it, well, you’ll probably get over feeling like it’s wrong eventually, but it won’t be progress.

So I analyze everything endlessly partly because it’s my nature, but also because I really do want to be better and do better, and I post these ramblings to the blogosphere because it de-stigmatizes them for me. Maybe only six people will read it, but I put it out there for everyone, with all of the risk that entails. And, I try to only worry about things based on their merits, and not on the opinions of others.

There is one area where I worry about giving the wrong impression a lot, perhaps because there seem to be multiple wrong impressions available, so I guess that’s what we cover next.