People Pleasing and Love Addiction
by George Hartwell M.Sc. of www.HealMyLife.com
People Pleasing is a powerful web of childhood experiences, beliefs, and painful feelings that result in this meta-strategy to gain love, secure belonging, a safe home base. With such a firm foundation in the experiences of childhood this choice, this compulsion, this mind-set of earning love becomes solid as rock and impossible to stop.
Based on this decision, belief, experience and perception of life that one’s caretakers are not going to provide unconditional love, a child devises people pleasing strategies to earn love. These earning love strategies might include: perfectionism, doing what is right, always being good, never giving offense, not expressing anger, working hard, and seeking measurable achievement including Type A behaviour pattern associated with heart attack.
Taken to extremes the child, and later the adult, becomes competative for love and begins to put down rivals for love which can solidify into the ugly habit of religious or non-religious self-righteousness. Do you know anyone who counters any good report about yourself or you children with an example from his or her life or family? Annoying, isn’t it? That is competative People Pleasing…
