Are You A People Pleaser?

I’d like to think that I can say what I need without concern, but the truth is that sometimes I keep quiet because I worry about how others will react. Am I a people pleaser? Sometimes!

Both men and women can be people pleasers but I think that, from an early age, women get subtle and not so subtle messages to put others’ needs first. That taking care of ourselves is selfish.

It’s okay to consider other people’s feelings when making decisions, but if your go-to response is to prioritize other people’s happiness over your own feelings, you’re not doing yourself any favors.

If your own needs weren’t valued or met when you were growing up, you internalize those messages. Maybe you were ignored when you cried or were hungry. Maybe you were told to be quiet or told that you complained too much. Maybe another family member’s needs were always a priority.

When family members struggle with mental health or substance use issues, the children in the family often end up taking care of the parent or sibling who’s struggling. Those kids learn very early that they must meet other people’s needs first in order to have peace and calm in the home. That message can become ingrained in the child’s psyche.

We then bring those early childhood messages into our adult relationships. We work hard at making sure everyone else is “happy” or taken care of and we ignore— or don’t even know—what we need.

What Happens When We
Always Care For Others First

Constantly caring for others’ needs can lead us to feel exhausted, unacknowledged, taken for granted, resentful and confused about why we struggle with anxiety or depression.

It can also create the feeling that we have to be perfect. There’s a part of us that feels if we can just get it all “right”—the house clean, others’ needs taken care of, the work done—then everyone will be happy. We might believe that if everyone is happy, then we can be happy, too.  The reality is we’re probably not very happy if we’re not listening to our own needs.

I definitely struggle with trying to keep everyone else happy.  I continue to work on recognizing when I’m ignoring what I need. The fear of making others angry or hurting their feelings drives my people-pleasing behaviors into high gear. And then the anxiety begins to bubble up….

The tension in my chest and constricted feeling in my throat are my body telling me that I have something that needs to be said. I have needs that parts of me really want me to share.

I know the feeling so well, and yet sometimes I still push it away. I busy myself to try to avoid feeling it until I can’t ignore it any longer because I’m lying awake at night when I’m exhausted and I should be sleeping.

What Happens When We’re Mindful Our Own Needs

I still worry about hurting others, making them angry or being ignored if I do share my feelings. But I’ve learned that tuning in to the parts of me that want to be heard, that need to be heard, helps me express my feelings.

When we give ourselves permission to be heard, we’re reinforcing that we can meet our own needs—that we don’t have to look to others to validate and voice our feelings. We learn that we can find joy, calm and contentment inside ourselves.

If you’ve struggled with figuring out what you need or trusting that you know what you need, therapy can help re-connect you with your Self. It provides a safe, non-judgmental place to look at the messages you internalized growing up. It gives you a space to hear your own voice and build the trust in your Self that might have gotten lost along the way.

Moms are often pushed to meet everyone else’s needs. This week on the Woman Worriers podcast I spoke with Doña Bumgarner, a life coach for moms, about how moms can learn how to meet their own needs while still meeting the needs of their family. You can find the interview here.

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If you enjoyed this blog post and would like more insights into living with anxiety, tune into the Woman Worriers podcast. In each weekly 30-minute episode, host Elizabeth Cush, LCPC, and her guests explore living with anxiety, relationships, parenting, surviving trauma and other topics and offer insights into mindfulness, meditation and other helpful resources.

Elizabeth Cush, LCPC is a therapist, blogger,  creator and host of the Woman Worriers podcast, and the owner of Progression Counseling in Annapolis, Md and she’s been featured in these major publications. Elizabeth helps busy, overwhelmed men and women manage their anxiety and stress so they can live their lives with more ease, contentment and purpose. If you'd like to know more about how individual, online and group therapy can help ease anxiety and stress, contact me!

Why Self Care Feels Selfish—And Why You Need To Do It Anyway

 On last week’s episode of the Woman Worriers podcast I talked about the practice of self-care and offered some small, simple ways to care for yourself. Even as I was writing up some notes for the recording, I was asking myself, “Am I the right person to tell others how they can better take care of themselves?”

Although today I’m much better at my own self-care, I didn’t always take great care of myself. There were times in my life that I drank too much, I wasn’t a very healthy eater and I was more concerned about taking care of others than paying attention to what I needed.

Our Past Can Shape Our Present Behaviors

When we’re stressed or anxious, we tend to fall back into old patterns of behaviors. Chances are, the old patterns are things we did for a very long time. Sometimes that means we forget or choose not to care for ourselves, even when we know it’s good for us.

We now know that when we practice new behaviors we can create new pathways in the brain. It’s called neuroplasticity. However, we can easily revert back to our old ways of doing things when we feel overwhelmed or triggered. Those old neural pathways are well established, like deep ruts in a road. When life makes us stressed or anxious, we can get stuck back in those old ways of doing —or not doing— things.

This past weekend I took some time away from work to spend with family. I noticed that I was really tired when I got home. I had planned to take a day off to do the usual weekend things that help me prepare for the week ahead, but, I filled that first day back home with business instead of using it to rest.  I was exhausted from travel but felt guilty when I thought about lying down, so I pushed myself until it was time for bed. Then —no surprise—it was hard for me to fall asleep! 

Why Self-Care Can Be So Hard

Does that scenario sound familiar to you? We have lots of reasons to put off taking care of ourselves. What I see so often in my psychotherapy practice is that the clients who have a hard time prioritizing self-care had caregivers who didn’t take care of themselves, or parents who were too strict or who didn’t enforce rules, boundaries and expectations for their kids.

We learn how to take care of our needs, create boundaries, and do things we don’t want to do from our parents. In her very informative blog on childhood emotional neglect, Dr. Jonice Webb writes :

“Most people don’t realize that we humans are not born with the ability to structure ourselves. Nor are we born with a natural ability to make ourselves do what we don’t want to do. In fact, quite the opposite.  We learn this skill from our parents. As a child, each time your parents called you in to dinner, interrupting your play with the neighbor kids, made you take a bath, clear the table, clean your room, brush your teeth, hang up your clothes, weed the garden or empty the dishwasher, they were teaching you the two most vital aspects of self-discipline:  how to make yourself do what you don’t want to do; and how to stop yourself from doing what you do want to do.”

So, if your parents didn’t teach you when to stop playing and get a drink of water, to have a snack or a meal, or to go to bed, it’s very hard to reinforce those self-care activities now that you’re an adult. Making those behaviors a habit takes conscious effort and reinforcement. Even then, when we’re stressed, we might fall back into old patterns.

Having a parent who is always spending their energy and time on others’ needs can also make it hard for us to prioritize our own needs as adults. If you had overly strict parents or parents with narcissistic tendencies, you might have been taught that having your own needs was selfish or self-centered. You might have been shamed or made to feel guilty when you tried to get your needs met, so you learned that caring for yourself shouldn’t be a priority. The shame and guilt you carry with you from childhood can also make you feel very anxious when you do try to meet your own needs in adulthood.

We Can Learn To Care For Ourselves

But we can make changes. We can choose to do things differently. It might feel really hard at first, because those old patterns of behavior get triggered and are very ingrained in us. But through mindful awareness, continued practice and reinforcement, we can learn to take good care of ourselves.

Mindful awareness in daily life helps bring a focused attention to the present moment and gives you some insight into how your thoughts, feelings and behaviors impact your body and your mind. For instance, if you take a moment a few times throughout the day to ask yourself what you need in that moment, you might find that your body is telling you it’s hungry or thirsty. You might find that you’re extremely stressed and you need to take a few slow deep breaths to calm yourself.

You might find that you know what you need but have come up with reasons for not taking care of yourself. Reflect on these moments with compassion. When you can listen to the part of you that believes that taking care of yourself isn’t important, and you recognize that self-care sometimes makes you feel uncomfortable, you can often recognize that those feelings and beliefs are rooted in your past. That’s a moment of mindful awareness. That’s the moment you can choose to do things differently.

If you live in the greater Annapolis, Maryland, area, consider joining one of my mindfulness groups for women. I’d love to have you be a part of our group!  You can find out more about the groups here.

You can also find more episodes of the Woman Worriers podcast here.

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If you enjoyed this blog post and would like more insights into living with anxiety, tune into the Woman Worriers podcast. In each weekly 30-minute episode, host Elizabeth Cush, LCPC, and her guests explore living with anxiety, relationships, parenting, surviving trauma and other topics and offer insights into mindfulness, meditation and other helpful resources.

Elizabeth Cush, LCPC is a therapist, blogger,  creator and host of the Woman Worriers podcast, and the owner of Progression Counseling in Annapolis, Md and she’s been featured in these major publications. Elizabeth helps busy, overwhelmed men and women manage their anxiety and stress so they can live their lives with more ease, contentment and purpose. If you'd like to know more about how individual, online and group therapy can help ease anxiety and stress, contact me!

Understanding Attachment And Finding Genuine Connection

Therapy is like peeling away the layers of an onion

Therapy is often like peeling an onion. As we peel away each layer, we’re offered new insights and understanding. Often my clients seek help initially for anxiety and stress, but as therapy progresses, it becomes evident that they’re not just stressed about what’s going on in their lives today. What triggers their anxiety is a feeling that they’re not living their lives as fully or consciously as they’d like. They describe feeling as though they don’t feel connected to themselves or the people in their lives.  

Feeling as if you don’t know yourself, or not being connected to your feelings, are usually the result of very early childhood experiences. From the moment we’re born, our relationship with our parents or caregivers affects our ability to feel at ease in the world as adults.

Feeling unconditionally loved and accepted gets reinforced as our parents respond to our cries and hold us when we’re distressed, feed us when we’re hungry and keep us warm and dry. When parents consistently provide us with unconditional love and caring, we learn as infants that our parents will always be there when we need comfort. We call this “secure attachment.”

Disrupted Attachment

Sometimes parents aren’t able to attend consistently to a child’s needs. This week on the Woman Worriers podcast, Marie Celeste shared her adoption story and her experience working with adoptive families and adoptees. She said that when children are adopted, they often feel an unconscious sense of loss and disconnection because they weren’t able to build that bond and connection with their birth mother.

Some other circumstances that can cause disruption in attachment are:

• The parents must focus much of their attention on a sibling with physical or emotional disabilities.

• The parent has mental health issues that limit their ability to be emotionally connected to the child.

• The parent is overwhelmed by the child’s needs and isn’t able to respond with love and affection.

• The parent wasn’t given what they needed growing up so they don’t have the internal resources to attach to the child.

• One or both parents struggle with addiction.

• Physical or sexual abuse by a parent or caregiver.

The list could go on, but the point is that even when a parent’s intentions are good—they want to have and build an emotionally secure environment for their child—they might be unable to provide it because they aren’t emotionally grounded themselves.

Why Secure Attachment Matters

Does attachment really matter? If the child was raised in a safe secure home and given food to eat, a home for shelter, clothes to wear and parents who loved them, isn’t that enough?

Unconditional love and acceptance is important for emotionally healthy kids

The answer is, it’s not just material needs that matter. If you didn’t feel loved, cared for, and accepted unconditionally, then that impacts how you feel about yourself. It’s more about what you didn’t receive.

When children don’t feel unconditionally loved and accepted—for whatever reason—they internalize the pain and blame themselves. When you’ve been raised in an environment where your emotional needs were neglected, ignored, criticized or shamed it can lead to feelings of disconnection, anxiety and depression in adulthood.

Here are some things I’ve heard clients say about the affect of being emotionally neglected and insecurely attached to parents or caregivers:

• I am not enough.

• I don’t know what I need most of the time.

• I don’t know how to ask for what I need.

• I want to have a close relationship but maybe I’m just not able to.

• There’s something about me that’s different from other people.

• I feel like no one knows the real me.

• There is this feeling that I’ll never be able to feel at ease in deeper connection. It’s something about me.

• When I see other people so at ease socially I wonder what is it about me that’s different.

• I know that if they knew the real me, they wouldn’t like me.

Healing Attachment Wounds

So how do we move forward and find true connection, love and acceptance? To feel grounded, safe and secure in the world?

We need to build, nurture and grow feelings of connection within ourselves. We need to re-parent ourselves, to learn to love and accept ourselves with compassion and understanding. We need to heal the wounded parts of us that weren’t given what they needed when we were children.

Recognizing that our childhood emotional needs weren’t met can open the door for healing. As we learn to love ourselves unconditionally and embrace our imperfectness we can start the process of healing our disrupted attachment and begin to identify, understand and express our emotional needs.

When we can fully connect with our self with love and compassion, it makes genuine connection with others so much easier. It eases feelings of anxiety and depression to help you feel more grounded and present in the world.

If you yearn to feel more grounded, at ease and present in your life, come join our exploration of mindfulness. Mindfulness groups are forming now in Annapolis. If you’re interested you can find out more here.

Here are some additional resources on Childhood Emotional Neglect:

Dr. Jonice Webb on Childhood Emotional Neglect (CEN)™

Agnes Wainman, PhD, on Expectations & Anxiety

How to Take Control of Your Fatal Flaw

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If you enjoyed this blog post and would like more insights into living with anxiety, tune into the Woman Worriers podcast. In each weekly 30-minute episode, host Elizabeth Cush, LCPC, and her guests explore living with anxiety, relationships, parenting, surviving trauma and other topics and offer insights into mindfulness, meditation and other helpful resources.

Elizabeth Cush, LCPC is a therapist, blogger,  creator and host of the Woman Worriers podcast, and the owner of Progression Counseling in Annapolis, Md and she’s been featured in these major publications. Elizabeth helps busy, overwhelmed men and women manage their anxiety and stress so they can live their lives with more ease, contentment and purpose. If you'd like to know more about how individual, online and group therapy can help ease anxiety and stress, contact me!