From People-Pleaser to Responsible Giver
Sometimes, people-pleasing can be a sign of identity dissonance. You dislike the version of yourself that hurts others, but you also dislike the version that cannot protect yourself.
Two core values conflict within your identity: Compassion for others and Responsibility to yourself. Choosing one while forsaking the other is, in essence, choosing between being a “cute” people-pleaser or an “ugly” selfish person, both of which harm your identity.
As a people-pleaser, you are fixated on showing your cuteness to others at the expense of protecting your own needs. But in the end, you lose both.
You know very well that people-pleasing is unhealthy and always results in a bad ending for everyone. But you just cannot resist because you cannot accept being viewed as ugly by others.
The World Made of Dualities
Compassion and Responsibility are qualities within the same duality. Like shadow and light, they cannot exist without each other.
Every suffering in this world is a form of fixation on one side of a duality. We insist on gaining without losing, which nature never allows.
We can inspect this phenomenon in higher dimensions when considering the direction in which we apply these qualities.
Just as you cannot leave your house’s door open and expect not to lose any of your belongings, you cannot maintain outward compassion and inward responsibility at the same time.
People-pleasers usually fixate on being cute, and wonder why they can never enforce their boundaries.
They are trying to open and shut the door at the same time!
This world is made of dualities. Excessive attempts to stay on one side only create a power that bounces back to the other side. When a people-pleaser fixates on being kind without accepting intrusion, they keep blaming others for crossing their boundaries and collecting resentment. In the end, they become forceful in enforcing their boundaries and then blame themselves as harshly as they blamed others, collecting self-hatred.
A Responsible Giver
When a people-pleaser switches to the violent mode, they feel hurt and regret deeply. That feeling only reinforces their belief that enforcing boundaries is bad. They condemn themselves, believing they are not allowed to protect themselves. They lack the literacy of responsible givings.
Responsible givers do not blame anyone for intrusions. When someone crosses their boundaries, they swallow the pain and give direct feedback in a way that does not attack the self-worth of the other party because they deem it their responsibility to let people know. They do not carelessly assume that people should already know.
Fixation on compassion alone is a fear of being viewed as ugly. Authentic compassion can only be achieved when combined with an equal degree of responsibility. When these two qualities balance, it creates personalities that form identity consonance over time.
A Genie of 3-times Kindness
Inward compassion can only come after outward responsibility
It is a prerequisite to go all the way as a giver before we can become a self-protector with no regrets. Responsible givers communicate not to change anyone, but to fulfill the equanimity in their perceptions of their identities.
As a rule of thumb, we can act as a Genie in a magic lamp, allowing people to mistreat us three times in the same context, each time doing our best to communicate with non-violent communication. After the three wishes are used up, the Genie goes back into the lamp and lives their life in privacy for a while.
Fixating on cuteness, or any virtue, may be just another form of selfishness where we don’t allow others the freedom to choose their own ways of interacting with us authentically. By keeping our personalities fair and consistent over time, we respect people and give them the freedom to be anyhow they like.
