People-Pleasing is Not Kindness; It is Avoidance

Many adults suffer from chronic anxiety because they are trapped in a self-inflicted prison of people-pleasing. They walk into therapy exhausted, claiming that they are "empaths" who simply care too much about others. They believe their anxiety is a byproduct of their own kindness.

This is a comforting lie. People-pleasing is not kindness. It is a defense mechanism rooted in self-preservation and manipulation. If your anxiety stems from constantly trying to keep everyone around you happy, you do not have a problem with caring too much; you have a problem with avoiding conflict.

The Manipulation of "Being Nice"

When you agree to a commitment you despise, nod along with an opinion you vehemently disagree with, or refuse to correct a partner who is treating you poorly, you are not being "nice." You are actively deceiving the people around you. You are withholding your true thoughts and boundaries because you are terrified of their reaction.

At its core, people-pleasing is about controlling how others perceive you. You are trading your own authenticity for the guarantee that someone else won't be angry with you. This creates a baseline of relentless anxiety, because you must constantly monitor the emotional temperature of the room to ensure your mask hasn't slipped.

The Exhaustion of the Chameleon

If you alter your personality, your opinions, and your boundaries depending on who is in front of you, you will inevitably experience profound psychological exhaustion. Anxiety is the natural result of living a fractured life where your internal reality never matches your external actions.

You cannot build a stable, calm life if your foundation is entirely dependent on the approval of your spouse, your boss, your parents, or your peer group. When you live this way, you are a hostage. Every minor shift in someone else's mood registers to your nervous system as a catastrophic threat.

Tolerating the Guilt of Disappointment

The solution to this anxiety is not a generic self-esteem workbook. The solution is action, and that action is going to feel terrible at first. To break the cycle of people-pleasing, the therapeutic work involves:

• Speaking the Truth: Stating what you actually want, think, and refuse to tolerate, without softening the blow with endless apologies.

• Letting People Be Angry: You must learn to tolerate the discomfort of someone else's disappointment. If setting a reasonable boundary makes someone angry, that is their problem to manage, not yours.

• Sitting with the Guilt: When you start prioritizing reality over other people's feelings, you will feel guilty. The goal of therapy is not to eliminate that guilt, but to teach you to decide from a grounded place whether that guilt pushes you toward or farther away from what you truly need.

The Bottom Line

Your anxiety will not disappear as long as your primary goal in life is to avoid making waves. You have to choose between the discomfort of conflict and the agony of chronic anxiety. You cannot avoid both.

Powers Psychotherapy LLC in Loveland, CO, is built for clients who are ready to stop hiding behind "niceness" and start living honestly. When you are ready to face the friction, contact us to get started.

Mental Health Concerns and the Role of Labels

Is There a Name for What is Going on With Me?

If you are going through a significant period of struggle, and you don’t have quite the words to describe it, you have likely wondered some version of this question in the recent past. And it makes perfect sense. Imagine a time before people understood where the chicken pox came from. Imagine even further if you were the first person in your entire community to develop a case. The number of conclusions that you might draw about such a thing could be endless. It would certainly feel scary and isolating, and you might even start to wonder how people saw you differently.

Maybe a day or two into your ailment, a stranger comes through town and sees you in your fear and agony. Maybe this stranger then shrugs and tells you that it’s “just the chicken pox,” before leaving town again.

There are a few elements to this example that make it both comforting and unsettling. For one, the stranger gives you a name for it. While the name might make you think that your exposure to poultry had something to do with it, at least it lets you know that other people have gone through the same thing.

Next, the stranger shrugs it off, which could mean you don’t have anything to worry about. It also makes sense, though, that without more explanation your swirling thoughts would still run away from you.

In the Realm of Mental Health

At this point, so many people have had so many different mental health concerns arise, that there are volumes of different versions of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Health Disorders (DSM). The DSM puts into black and white letters the criteria for every one of those mental health concerns, which allows mental health workers a framework for helping you through them. And of course with the advent of the internet, almost anybody can find some copy of the DSM online somewhere. This is a wonderful development in the pursuit of relieving the sense of otherness and isolation that accompany a lack of awareness of certain ailments.

On the other hand, though, it has also awarded an opportunity for other anomalies to arise. For example, many of the disorders in the DSM have comorbidity with others. In other words, the presence of one increases the risk for another. For example, many of them share comorbidity with both anxiety and depression.

The reason that this is concerning is that much of the information that is readily available only provides part of the picture. To illustrate this, lets go back to the chicken pox story.

The stranger has provided a name for the ailment and displayed a general lack of concern. However, he has not explained his lack of concern or given any information at all about where it comes from, how communicable it is, or what the timeline for recovery is. Leaving these questions unanswered naturally stirs up a level of anxiety about what the next few days, weeks, or years has in store. And this example is about a condition that does not necessarily increase the risk of anxiety.

Now imagine you are increasingly burdened with feelings that you can’t quite put into words (maybe this is something you are dealing with now). A brief internet search might very well point you in the direction of narrowing down your possibilities to one of a few different ailments. However, if the road to healing and recovery is not laid out as well, it only makes sense that other worries and anxieties might start creeping up.

What it All Means

None of this is to say that you shouldn’t go looking for answers when you can. It is always, at the very least, a place to start. Maybe you are even wired to where having a name for your condition relieves enough of the stress that you are comfortable again. That is fantastic.

If, on the other hand, you find incomplete answers still unsatisfying, there is additional help out there. The biggest point in this post is this: You do not have to go through this by yourself.

If you feel like you are struggling and can’t quite navigate it on your own, you absolutely have every opportunity to find a professional who will work with you based on your needs and your values. It seems that one of the major obstacles to getting help is a belief that you will have to adopt a different set of core values altogether. And if you do feel that way, it is perfectly okay for you to look for other options. There are many to be found.