Why it is totally okay to want things for yourself
And on learning how to use the words 'no' and 'yes' in ways that work for you
“No, not this one, that one.
To the right…the dark one.
Yes, that one!”
I breathed deeply as I tried to navigate my way through an arrangement of baked goods with strategic precision, my gloved hand weaving deftly around items to avoid smearing soft icing. I couldn’t reach the one the man was indicating by tapping on the glass, so I had to start a game of bakery-tetris, moving items around quickly to squeeze out the desired product. Meanwhile, the line of customers grew.
I saw no difference between the product I wrangled out from the cabinet to the one I originally grabbed for the customer. Indignation swelled in my chest, but I continued to plaster a smile on my face and maintain my cheerful demeanour.
The customer is the priority. The customer is always the priority.
There was no thank you at the end of the exchange. The man tapped his card, grabbed his goods, and walked off as I was halfway through my ‘have a nice day!’
No worries.
Reset. Refresh. Re-engage.
“Hi there! What can I help you with you with today?”
My patience with customers has improved a lot over the years. However, I’m only human, so I sometimes get riled up. That day, I was riled up. My thoughts were raging. How dare he tap on the glass like that.
So arrogant! So rude!
Can’t he see we’re busy!
This is so self-indulgent. And not even so much as a thank you!
Perhaps I was justified in thinking all of these things. But, frustratingly, I’m in the business now of trying to get to the root of what is fuelling the blaring alarms in my head whenever an intense emotion is triggered.
So what exactly was going on here?
The customer had assertively requested something specific. He didn’t seem to care how much his request might inconvenience others. Although it may have been unintentional, he appeared to have little awareness of the growing number of people behind him. Perhaps he simply didn’t care. Either way, he wanted what he wanted and I was there to ensure that he got it.
When I really dug down into it, my anger in these situation wasn’t with the bluntness of customers, or how much they inconvenienced me in the moment, it was that they had the utmost confidence in asking for what they wanted and sticking to their guns, no matter how others might feel about it.
And once the anger subsided, there was another emotion that lingered. One I was all too familiar with and had always hated feeling.
Envy.
I was envious of this man for having no qualms about shamelessly asking for what he wanted.
Ah. There it was.
I had my belief I needed to tackle.
💭 A belief I’m challenging….
It’s okay to want things, even if it inconveniences others.
Do you know what you want?
This can be a tricky question to answer. It also took me quite a while to realise that not everyone found this question difficult. The confidence some people have in knowing what they want, and then to work single-mindedly towards it, has always evaded me. Surely, I’d think, it cannot be that easy to just know these things.
If you have a tendency towards people-pleasing (🙋🏼♀️🙋🏼♀️🙋🏼♀️), you probably have a hard time understanding what it is you want. Usually it’s because you’ve been too busy doing what everyone else wants to have given your own desires much thought.
This can be in small ways, like carefully planning everything you say so as not to upset anyone, or in larger ones, like making life-altering decisions that fulfil someone else’s wishes rather than your own. Living your life like this means your needs and desires become buried so deeply, and for so long, that trying to dig them up again is like trying to find that receipt you knew you had to keep for something important, but it was put in the ‘TO FILE’ pile that hasn’t been touched in years.
Where do you even start?
A big part of any growth is getting clearer on what you want for your life, as you can’t get break free of mental and behavioural loops if you have no idea what you’re changing them for. Knowing what you want, and making a commitment to work towards it, is akin to plugging a destination in to your GPS. This way you can take the roads you need to get there. Once you know your destination, a GPS can tell you not only what roads to take to get there, but also the most efficient way. The hard part about life (pardon the cliché, but it fits the analogy) is that, unfortunately, even if we can figure out where we want to go, we aren’t given a flashy, updated-in-real-time roadmap.
This is where people-pleasing can be an adaptive strategy. If your goal is to please others, then the path you need to follow is quite easy. You follow the roads that seem to make other people happy, and avoid the ones that don’t. Anger, hatred, disappointment- wrong way, go back! Admiration, excitement, love- green light, keep going! It’s no wonder so many of us fall back on it as our main way of being. Sure, it’s hard doing what other people want all the time, but it is so much easier than setting out alone with no idea where you’re going, what you’re doing, and if the destination will be any better than where you currently are.
That is, until it isn’t so easy anymore.
There are many people in health spaces who believe that people-pleasing and chronic illness are inextricably linked. In ‘The Myth of Normal’, Gabor Maté theorises that chronic illness can arise due to a conflict between two things: our need for attachment to others, and our need for authenticity. When we are young, our need for attachment outweighs our need to be authentic, as we are too helpless and vulnerable to survive without caregivers. We need attachment to our caregivers more than anything else. We participate in a delicate, mostly subconscious dance, continually assessing which of our behaviours get our needs met, and which don’t, and we adjust them accordingly. And often, being the child others wish you to be is the only way forward.
If your caregivers are stressed, you may figure out that becoming the perfectly obedient child who does everything they’re expected to is the best way to get the positive attention you need1. If your caregivers are sad, you might learn to lean on humour to lighten the air, suppressing your own negative emotions along the way because there simply isn’t room for yours as well. You adapt yourself to the environment, regardless of whether you wish to or not, or whether it has negative impacts in the long term, because not doing so is life threatening- if your caregivers refuse to feed, house or connect with you in any way, you simply won’t survive.
According to this theory, the process of growing up is about learning how to move towards a more authentic version of yourself. Having unconditional love and support from our caregivers provides a safety net when the flexing of our authenticity muscle goes awry- like being bullied at school, or making a poor decision that ends up costing us- because we know we always have somewhere to go where we can be just as we are and cared for regardless, where our attachment isn’t impacted by our authenticity.
Unfortunately, many of us don’t have this experience. Instead, we come to believe that us being ourselves is a threat to our safety. Maybe we learn that we are severely punished for voicing an opinion at home. Or we’re rejected by our ‘friends’ when we act in a way that strays from the perceived norm. We become beholden to the same beliefs that those around us have been shackled by, never questioning.
And we can get stuck here. Unfortunately, children like to seek out what is familiar. People-pleasers might inadvertently attract peers who are going to place even more demands on them, and they’ll feel compelled to comply. They might attract romantic partners who dictate who and what they should be. Gradually, any alternative way of being becomes a pipe-dream. The problem grows and the cycle cements itself further.
Those of us that develop OCD (or are born with a heightened fear response) have a much harder time breaking out of this cycle than others. Moving away from learned behaviours seems a whole lot more threatening, as our brain are wired to react very strongly to change. Why? Because change is perceived as dangerous. My current theory is that change requires energy, and as we are already using most of our energy to deal with baseline high stress-levels, our brain senses danger when we’re asking it to divert some of that energy to changing things up. It is MUCH more energy efficient in the short-term for our brains to stick to familiar paths, despite the fact it may make things a whole lot worse in the long run. Survival in the moment will always win out over helpful growth.
Most humans share the same fears. OCD simply jacks these up. At the core of many OCD themes is the fear of rejection. And it makes complete sense if Maté’s theory is to be believed. Our intense fear of rejection, of moving away from the perceived safety attachment provides, is what keeps many of us people pleasing for as long as we do. Perhaps due to me theory above (the one about energy preservation), OCD sufferers live by the rule ‘better the devil you know’. It seems easier to keep living this way, even if it is making us sick and miserable, than risk changing something and potentially making the situation worse. It stops us from trying to become the people we might really like to be.
What inevitably ends up happening over time is that the ways in which we need to please people grow. No longer are we only trying to please our friends and family- we’re trying to please society in general. In our desperate attempts to be good and well-liked, we take on responsibility for all of the world’s problems- climate change, economic inequality, the exorbitant amount of waste we create, unethical farming practices, genocides ….the list goes on. Suddenly, we find it difficult to make decisions about how to dress ourselves in the morning, or what to eat for lunch, because inevitably we’re going to do something that harms someone else in some way. Maybe we really need a warmer jacket, but we can’t find one that is sustainable, ethically-sourced, non-toxic, locally made, suits us and is within budget. We waste hours going around and around in our head trying to find a way that we can buy the jacket without hurting anyone else. When we realise we can’t, we feel a crushing sense of defeat. We don’t buy the jacket and spend our days filled with a bubbling rage about how unfair the world is to put us into this position, silently cursing all those people who are wearing jumpers we would love to wear if only we were more carefree and the world wasn’t such a terrible place!
Our needs and the needs of others collide again, and we lose.
We are perpetually the victim.
I am not going to boldly claim that all chronic illness is the result of a lifetime of people pleasing and failing to advocate for ourselves. Life is far too nuanced for that. However, I think it is fair to say that consistently failing to have your needs met is highly stressful, and that chronic stress is linked to chronic illness2. Maté and others theorise illness may be our bodies final attempt to let us know that we need to take our own needs more seriously. Illness often forces us to do so, as we might be physically unable to do anything for ourselves anymore.
There might be people who read this and find the jumper scenario above foreign and a little kooky. These are the people who, like that gentleman who wanted his very specific pastry, don’t feel guilty about wanting things. If so, this post isn’t for you. Those people don’t need any more incentive to go after what they want (arguably a lot of the problems the world is currently facing are due to people who take more than their fair share).
But I know that there are many people out there just like me, who find themselves in the above scenario on a daily basis- sometimes multiple times a day. You feel trapped by your own mind and the demands that it places on you, and you can’t quite seem to find your way out of it.
I just want to buy a bloody jacket!!! you might scream. I know, I get it. I want the jacket too. So let’s try and work this out together.
The key is simple.
We need to accept that we cannot do the right thing by everyone.
I know, duh! So simple! But this is very, very difficult in practice, especially when you’re prone to spiralling simply at the thought of hearing or saying the word ‘NO’.
This is why we need start small. We start by acknowledging those faint voices that express a need or desire, and we do our best to listen. It’s all about that exposure therapy!
🥡 TAKEAWAY: People-pleasing, and an intense fear of rejection, gets in the way of knowing what you want. It’s not your fault, but it is your responsibility to change those patterns.
⬆️ I’m overachieving at….
Saying yes to the small things (I think) I want
It is a part of the human experience to have needs and desires. Wanting things means we move towards them, and this keeps us alive. Otherwise we would have just stayed in our caves and rotted.
It is okay to have needs and desire. Truly it is. You are not a robot.3.
The hard part? Convincing your inner people-pleaser that it is okay to do so.
In the jumper scenario above, the problem at the core of all that stress is the unwavering belief that you aren’t worthy of being here. That sounds really dark, but there’s so much truth to it. You inherently believe that you are unworthy of the things that keep you alive- warmth, shelter, food, connection. Your brain will look for reasons to justify why you don’t deserve these things, and thanks to the age of information, finding reasons to deprive yourself is only a quick internet search away.
In my case, many of my challenges with saying yes have been around food. Our cultural obsession with dieting and longevity lead to me developing a whole host of rigid ideas about food that I need to challenge on a daily basis, including that we are always better off eating less food and being smaller. No snack or meal is had anymore without that annoying voice smuggly asking ‘should you really be eating that?’
When I was at my lowest and surviving on a small amount of ‘safe’ foods, I felt an intense rage whenever I witnessed anyone else eating. I was furious at the ease in which they ate food, seeming not to care about what they might be doing to their bodies. I judged them for what I perceived as their lack of self-control. I had that control, and I thought it made me superior to others. I judged other instead of doing what would have been the more helpful thing to do: reflect on why I felt the need to punish myself so much.
I needed to recognise that I fundamentally believed I didn’t deserve to take up space. To use up resources. To live.
The first step I have taken towards clawing my way out of this pit-of-nothingness has been to say yes to any food desire that pops into my head. If I’m out and I see a big, fat, chocolatey cookie sitting in a cafe window that looks utterly delicious, I’m going in and buying it. I eat through the voices screaming at me to stop. If I don’t, the thought of that cookie will nag at me for way longer than it should. And I’ll probably say something spiteful to a loved-one at a later stage who happens to be innocently enjoying a sweet-treat.4
Perhaps I’m filling my body full of chemicals and junk. Perhaps I’ll end up addicted to sugar and will spiral out of control. Perhaps. Perhaps. Perhaps. I’m tired of caring so much.
I’m trying to rediscover and sense of fun around food. I’ve taken to going to a market I love each Sunday morning and it’s becoming a soothing ritual. I walk through a beautiful park to get there, I peruse food stalls without the irritation of supermarket sounds and lights, and I just soak up the atmosphere.
I hated those voices in my head screaming at me about my food choices for a long time (I still don’t love them, but I’m working on it).5 However, they serve a purpose. Remember how I spoke about the difficulty people-pleasers have in determining what it is they want?
Those voices, and the intense emotions that come along with them, have been my clue.
Emotions can be scary, especially if, in your effort to appease others, you’ve suppressed them for a really long time. You may have been told you were ungrateful for expressing envy, or received the message that it was unladylike to be angry. Your sadness may have scared people and so they talked you out of feeling it.
The rage, despair and envy I felt when watching someone eat something delicious was a very clear sign that I desperately wanted that food. I would actually argue that it was more than a want, it was a need. I was so malnourished at that point that my body was doing whatever it could to signal that it needed more energy to function.
My emotions were trying to help me.
All of them were in an intense battle with fear for control. Fear has been in charge of for most of my life, and so every other emotion has to battle hard for my attention (joy barely gets a go, but we’re working on that also!).
In order to figure out what you want, you’re going to need to lean into these emotions a little more. Don’t try to get rid of them. Figure out what they’re trying to say!
Do you find yourself raging at that woman on Instagram with the enviable relationship and the adorable kids? After we’ve acknowledged the obvious fact that yes, the perfect life she presents online is definitely fake, we can start to ask questions about what underlies our rage. Are we envious of her having a good relationship because that is what we desperately want? Do we wish we had children but it doesn’t look it will happen for us? Or is it not the kids or partner we’re wishing we had, but simply her contentedness with life? Are we envious of her confidence in showing the world what makes her happy, because we continuously deny ourselves any joy?
Whatever your answer, that is going to be a clue as to what it is you actually want!
The harder part is standing up to fear and no longer allowing it to bully you into ignoring your needs, scared that trying something other than doing what everyone else wants you to do is going to lead you to an even worse existence. You have to practice saying:
Maybe. And so what?
Start small. Say yes to the cookie. Buy the bright jumper from the fast-fashion brand if fear has kept you from buying clothes for years. Say yes to a date. Say yes to joining everyone on the dance floor at the next party you go to.
Just say yes.
🥡 TAKEAWAY: Practice saying ‘yes’ to small things you want first, so you can build up capacity to deal with your protective emotions.
⬇️ I’m underachieving at…
Saying no to things I don’t want to do
When you start saying yes to things you do want to do, you inevitably must start saying no to things you don’t. As Oliver Burkeman likes to point out, the average person only gets 4000 weeks on this planet, so we need to use them wisely. A particularly sticky problem for me has been overcommitting and having very little awareness of my limited energy and time. As such, I’ve had to practice tuning in to my emotions in order to tell the difference between a ‘yes’ said out of fear, and a ‘yes’ said out of genuine desire.
In the past, whenever anyone asked anything of me, I would say yes before critically thinking about whether this was something I either wanted to do, or had the capacity to do. I hated disappointing people, so this played a big part in tripping all over myself to acquiesce. Upon reflection, I’ve discovered that it goes a little deeper than simply fearing disappointing others. It also comes from a fear that I’m only worth anything to people if I’m doing things for them.
This fear isn’t completely unfounded. Experience has taught me that when you do stop endlessly giving yourself to others, that they may indeed stop seeing you as someone worth having in their life. Understandably, this used to really upset me. Yet I’ve come to realise that it’s just an unfortunate consequences of living in a world where endlessly taking gets your further, whether it’s taking from the planet itself, or from the people who inhabit it.
Before challenging myself to become more comfortable with the idea of saying no to people, I had to accept that my social circle may temporarily become smaller. That people might not be interested in Louise the person, but instead on what I might be able to do for them. I don’t think the sting of that kind of rejection ever fully fades, but it does get easier to bare the more you practice.
There have been two levels of emotional practice involved in building my capacity to say no, with tuning in to difficult emotions the foundation of both. First, I get curious about what is happening inside when I’m initially asked about something. I’ve discovered there is a very active toddler inside of me who bellows a defiant and wailing NOOOOOOO! when I’m asked to do something I really don’t want to do. This toddler used to scare me. She made me feel immature and silly. I understand now that she is doing the only thing she knows how- kicking up such a fuss that there are absolutely no doubts about what she needs. Other times, the tantruming toddler is absent, and a seething teenager is in her place. She clenches her teeth and balls her fists and tightly crosses her arms, speaking harsh words out of the corner of her mouth. She is terrified of disappointing people, so she hides the angry show better than the toddler. She is resentment, and she usually shows up when I’ve already said yes and the regretted it. She is trying to tell me that I haven’t been respecting my limits and might need to reconsider the commitment I’ve made.
The second part of the process is learning to sit with the emotions that come after the ‘no’ has been delivered (if I get to that point). I try to really feel the shame and guilt that inevitably bubble to the surface when I let people down. I try not to be scared of it. The more I do this, the quicker these icky feelings pass, much more quickly than when I ran away from them screaming and waving my hands in the air. And the pride I’ve felt in actually doing what I want for once has been a pleasant new experience. It still doesn’t outshine the guilt and shame, but it does lessen the blow.
In case you’re interested (which I assume you are if you’ve read this far!), here’s some examples of things I’ve said ‘no’ to recently:
Diet culture- Obviously. I’ve gone all in on trying to tackle my disordered eating tendencies, and this means working against any restrictive thoughts around food. This stuff deserves a few posts of its own, because it’s nuanced. But it roughly looks like completely ignoring all the health advice regarding ‘good’ and ‘bad’ foods. It means sugary breakfasts, extra scoops of ice-cream and prioritising all the food I didn’t allow myself to have for years. It means eating the cookies, finding joy in food and taking back the time all the planning, prepping and obsessing about food took away from my life.
Working extra hours- I stepped back from the management role I put my hand up for at work. I could feel it creeping into every corner of my life and providing a lot of fuel for my perfectionism. The pay cut wasn’t ideal, but the time I got back to figure out what’s next for me has been well worth it.
Productivity- some days, I set my alarm for an hour and then literally lie there and do nothing. I just watch the trees and practice stillness. It’s equally terrifying and liberating
Offering to do things outside my skill set- I think it’s been well established at this point that food is a something I struggle with. There’s a lot of fear around food, but also I find cooking rather exhausting and supermarkets somewhere I’d only like to be should society collapse and I need to be somewhere with a steady food supply. Yet because I’m a woman who has been socialised to believe that I should not only be great at cooking, but that the meals I provide are a reflection of my success as a woman, I always feel obliged to offer to make food for people whenever things are tough. And then I spiral into stress and ruin entire days trying to figure out how to feed someone else in a way that reflects well on me, when really I’d just be better off offering to do something that is more within my current skill-set, like look after children, bring leftovers from work, or lend a listening ear. So that’s what I’m offering to do now.
Social media- After over a year’s hiatus, I dipped my toes back in, and was reminded why I stopped in the first place. I never feel good after using it and I have trouble stopping once I start. It’s baked into the design, so trying to fight against it is energy wasted that could be better spent elsewhere. I’ve deleted the apps off my phone for now because I was only using it when I was bored, sad or feeling agitated. If it’s not adding anything positive to my life, it’s not for me.
🥡 TAKEAWAY: Say no, and practice building capacity to feel all the big feelings that come with it.
✨ What I’ve been enjoying lately
📺 Because We Have Each Other (SBS On-Demand)
Browsing through SBS’s Melbourne International Film Festival catalogue saw me come across the film ‘Because We Have Each Other’. Its website describes it as ‘a story of tenderness and turbulence, fragility and family, love and loss’. It was all those things and more. The story centres around a blended neurodiverse family living in the working-class suburb of Logan, Queensland, and was filmed over five years. The cinematography is incredibly, and brings an element of magic and wonder to what many would see as mundane and bleak. I’ve been mostly uninspired and uninterested in film of late, but this gem really restored my faith in the power of this medium. I was so moved by it. I hope the family is doing okay and that their openness to sharing their story has brought only positive things to their life. Definitely worth a watch!
📺 The Assembly (ABC iView)
A heart-warming program about a group of people who are taking part in Australia’s first autism-friendly journalism degree. Mentored by the much-loved Leigh Sales, each episode the group interview a different person of influence. I found myself smiling the whole way through this, which I don’t do very often. I was especially moved by watching the students grow in confidence each week. Mostly, I loved seeing what they would wear each week (so much colour!) and who would ask the question that would make the guest blush the most.
📖 Here one Moment- Liane Moriarty
Like many fiction readers, I love Liane Moriarty. Her characters are interesting and complex, and you can just imagine running into a version of each of them in your everyday life. She is a master of the page-turner. I couldn’t put this one down.
If you knew when you were going to die, what would you do differently?
It all begins on a flight from Hobart to Sydney. The flight will be smooth. It will land safely. Everyone who gets on the place will get off the plane.
But almost all of them will be changed forever.
Because on this ordinary flight, something extraordinary happens. ‘A lady’, unremarkable until she isn’t, predicts how and when many of the passengers are going to die. For some, death is far in the future; for others, it is very close.
The novel also features a character with OCD (very clever move for a story that’s main theme is how characters attempt to maintain a sense of control over something entirely out of their control) and it is one of the better characterisations of the disorder I have come across. Highly recommend!
I think this why a lot of people pleasers do well at school- the instructions for how to be ‘good’ and do ‘well’ are usually very clear.
Please not that I have no said it is the cause. Regardless, being in a chronic stress state does nothing to help matters.
Robots may yet have desires. This has yet to be determined
Tabitha Farrar’s book ‘Rehabilitate, Rewire, Recover’ has been very helpful in getting me to understand why my brain might react the way it does to food, and why eating whenever a food thought comes up is the best way forward.
In eating disorder circles, these might be referred to as your ‘ED voice’
Holy smokes this is so relevant to where I am at the moment. After finding out I can’t have kids I’ve had a kind of break down and I’m now rebuilding a better version of myself. I’ve been shedding the people pleasing and trying to figure out who I actually am. I highly relate to buying the jacket and I had never linked it to the people pleasing and the not feeling deserving. This has been a real wow read for me, and a real moment of connection thank you 💚