Enduring Emotions

A micro-strategy for people pleasers, shared in story form

You are at a gathering.

You are holding court, monologuing about a current topic involving a website where husbands posted videos of themselves s*xually assaulting their drugged wives.

As you rail and rant, someone else speaks up, requesting clearly and calmly that you stop.

It’s triggering to them.

You stop, mid-sentence. You stammer.

They stand up to leave the room.

“Wait. I’m not going to talk about it anymore…” you say.

They go.

You’re left with your mouth hanging open and your mind racing.

They take some time. Another kind human at the gathering goes and checks on them.

The group hears them laughing and chatting in the next room.

It blows over. The subject is changed.

The gathering is not ruined.

And you are left with…feelings.

You feel your mind going to self-defense and justifications.

You figured everyone has heard about this. It was big news a couple of weeks ago.

What, are you living under a rock? your mind says.

Your mind says things like buck up, buttercup.

Your mind corrects itself.

You know that person has every right to say what they said. To make the request they made. To take space. To protect their peace. Good for them!

Nothing is wrong here.

And yet…oh my goodness, you are having feelings!

You have been practicing noticing difficult feelings and tolerating them instead of reacting to and avoiding them.

As a therapist, you guide clients to do this. You believe this practice is key to better relationships. To being whole, to acknowledging and embracing your shadow stuff, to letting yourself fail forward into growth.

So much of your choicemaking—both micro (what to say next in a conversation) and macro (what career path to take, what commitments to say ‘yes’ or ‘no’ to, whether to speak up or otherwise take a risk in relationship or swallow that urge)—has been predicated upon avoiding these kinds of feelings.

There is a kind of relational perfectionism you are trying to turn away from here.

The kind where your absolute #1 top priority is to please and to be liked.

In this frame, hurting, annoying, or letting down another person equals disaster and must be avoided at all costs.

Of course, this means swallowing Your Truth, which (you have reasoned, not exactly consciously) can’t ever possibly be more important than preserving relational harmony.

You have noticed how even the flash of a displeased expression on the face of another causes a panicky trembling along the whole front of your body.

It doesn’t even have to be in response to something you said.

It could just be someone with whom you are sharing a space.

What did I do? your mind screeches as soon as you see it. It must be something I did.

This feeling is like nails dragged across a blackboard.

It makes your mind scream “ABORT! ABORT” and flip to full how-can-I-make-sure-this-person-is-not-displeased-with-me? mode. Must. Fix. Soothe. Solve. Now!!!

At this gathering where someone was triggered by a topic you were expounding upon, the feelings you are feeling light up your body like a shot of freeways at night, from high up in the sky.

Your arms tingle. Your face burns, hot. Your stomach turns, tightens.

You certainly cannot, in this state, make a reasoned response that comes from your deepest knowing. You are in full lizard brain. You are in fight/flight.

What is it? Shame? Yes. Probably.

So you do what you have learned is the way out of fight/flight:

You breathe into it.

You breathe space around it. You relax your body around it. You are quiet and let yourself feel the uncomfortable feeling. You choose not to call it bad or wrong, but to focus entirely on the body sensations you are experiencing. You choose to let the thoughts come and go like the screechy flying monkeys they are.

You know you will have higher-quality thoughts after you calm the heck down. Best not to attach to any of these panicky ones.

You let it be. You choose, probably ten times in that first few minutes after the thing happens, to not justify, defend, fawn, or apologize.

As you all leave the gathering, you hug the person who was harmed by your words.

You stop yourself (for the twenty-sixth time) from apologizing into her ear. You consciously let your defended body relax and feel the love that has not been ruined by the words you have spoken.

You go to the beach. It’s low tide. You walk.

You giggle at toddlers toddling up the sand toward their siblings. You scritch the heads of dogs that come up to say hello. You flip a big shovel over next to a hole that contains a happy little boy who used it to dig that hole.

“Thank you!” he says. He understands that you have remediated a hazard in his vicinity. (You are always looking for hazards to remediate, like the one where a person steps on a shovel and it rears up and hits them. You believe this makes you a Good Person.)

Over the course of the day, the feelings shift and change, making way for other feelings.

They come up like wavelets at the beach, rattling the rocks, depositing bits of colorful seaweed, pulling back. And in the end, you feel…cleansed.

You get that for some folks, recovering people pleasers like you, this is a small but vitally important task: sitting with feelings that are hard to feel.

If you can’t do that, you’ll never get past the people-pleasing impulse and to a truer version of your singularly unique self and its expression in the world.

Shame is probably the hardest. Shame can feel like being set on fire.

And the things people will do to avoid that feeling…well…

you wonder whether that is at the root of so much of the horrible shit that is happening in the world right now.

If one can recognize one’s own wrongdoing and sit with the way it feels to know one has done harm…

Sit with it until it washes through, until we are out of reactivity and defensiveness…

at the level of individuals like you, of groups, of communities, of cultures…

What else then might be possible?