Reply to My “needing to be liked” problem

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Reply to "My “needing to be liked” problem"

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]As PP said, getting older helped.

The other thing that helped was realizing that just as you are wired to want to be "liked", there are people wired to attract people-pleasers. These are often the difficult or outright toxic relationships that people pleasers find themselves in. If you have people in your life who keep moving the goal posts for their approval, and you keep trying to meet those metrics, it's less of a "you" problem and more of a perfect-storm type dynamic where both sets of pathologies feed each other.

Learning to spot that these people were bad for me (not bad people necessarily) was important for me. I learned that these types of friendships, relationships, or acquaintances were less likely to end well, and I had to align myself with people who modeled better boundaries. When I was around people like that, I was a better version of myself. Hope that helps.[/quote]

OP here and YES, this was a huge revelation for me a while back and led me to actually leave a job and an entire friend group where I realized this dynamic was in play and I was not going to be able to alter it. I had basically recreated my family of origin in my adult life and was reliving my childhood/adolescence and all the self-loathing and depression that went with it. That's when I realized that these feelings were caused by the lack of an accepting or loving family as a child.

Obviously I'm still struggling, but a whole lot of yes to everything you said here. Figuring this out has helped me be much more discerning in my friendships and avoid people how are going to create this kind of dynamic with me.[/quote]

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