People-Pleaser or Self-Sabotage? How People-Pleasing Can Lead to Addiction

Addiction is often selfish on the surface, but people pleasing at its core. Today we're going to be talking about the duality of addiction. Just last week I was doing a family consultation and the guy I was talking to was telling me about how his wife was really struggling. And one of the questions I asked, tell me about your loved one as a person. Like besides the addiction, if we took all that out and I just met them, what are they like? The real person. So this fella started telling me about his wife. He was saying, she's kind, she's loving, she's compassionate, she' hardworking, she really is a lovely person. I have so much admiration and respect for her. But when she drinks, she's antagonistic, she starts fights, she follows me around the house, she argues with our children. It's like she's the complete opposite of who she really is. Unfortunately, the story that this guy was telling me is actually the norm. This is what I normally hear from family members. It's so hard to reconcile how on one hand someone can be so selfless, giving, understanding, compassionate, and on the other hand, be selfish and irritable and manipulative. It's really hard to pull those pieces together. Now you might think to yourself, well, really it's the people pleasing that's a mask. And these other behaviors, that's what's really there. You know, they. They show who they really are. But that's not exactly the truth. The truth of it is we all have all those characteristics inside of us. For those of you who are new here, my name is Amber Hollingsworth and you are watching the YouTube channel put the Shovel Down. That stands for you hit your bottom when you put the shovel down. We don't believe in waiting till you or your loved one hits bottom to try to do something about addiction. We're here to make sure you understand addiction inside and out so that you stay five steps ahead of it. If that's something you're interested in learning about, consider subscribing. Alright, now back to our topic. I would say in the majority of cases of people I work with who have addictions, I find them to be very kind, generous, charming, loving, considerate, selfless almost all of the time. However, because they have these wonderful traits in such large amount that often leads to a lot of self neglect. This is where the people pleasing behaviors come in. Of course we want to please other people and there is nothing wrong with compromising or trying to do something nice for someone, or even trying to make another person happy. But if we're Pathologically doing that to the point that we're always putting our needs on the back burner. It almost always leads to some sort of self sabotaging behavior in some regards. It seems like people with addictions really just don't care about how their addiction is impacting other people around them. Sometimes when you hear about the things that happen in families, you think to yourself, how can this person do this to themselves? Can't they see how this is affecting their children? Can't they see how they're ruining their life? But when you talk to the person, what they usually see is that they're constantly self sacrificing and they usually feel kind of resentful that the thing they have, that's their addiction, they see that as the one thing that they have for themselves. And then they feel resentful for people trying to take that one thing away from them. Because they usually feel like they give up everything for the other people, for their job, for their families, for their kids. They're constantly self sacrificing and they're usually not getting their needs met very productively. So they turn to some kind of addictive behavior. It kind of helps them to continue this pattern of suppressing their own needs so they can meet the needs of other people. And as you can imagine, this whole scenario backfires on people. It leads you to a point of resentment, of self soothing. And oftentimes when in your heart all you want to do is be helpful, kind, generous and loving, you ultimately end up undoing all of those wonderful things you're doing for the people around you because of your addiction. It can be easy to fall into the trap of saying, look, I'm not hurting anybody but myself. This is my one thing. For me, you're doing it to be able to continue to do for other people. Like if you're addicted to a stimulant or if you're addicted to an opioid, that is frequently the case, you may push yourself to such a degree you think it's not humanly possible. So you're bringing on these other substances in an effort to push yourself beyond normal human limits. And so you could imagine how easy it is to get stuck in this cycle. Now that we've talked about the first part of the cycle, let's move into the second part of the cycle. Because when you're in your addiction and you do those things that end up hurting the other people that you care about, you get full of shame and regret and you start to really dislike yourself, which can actually cause you to amp up your people pleasing behaviors, like you're trying to make up for it, which is in turn only fueling the addictive behaviors. It's like a self fueling loop that we can get stuck in. And then other people start to come at us and be aggravated at us and want us to change and want us to give up things. And then like I said before, we're resentful at them because we feel like, dude, I do everything for you and it's never enough. And this is my one thing, why don't you just leave me alone? And so people become more and more and more isolated and shameful at the same time. Resentful. And you're just full of all these mixed up emotions. You know earlier when I said it's hard sometimes to look at people from the outside and say, why can't you see this? This is why they can't see it. Because they're swarming with all of these emotions. So frequently in the wor that I do with people, what we end up having to work on is how to say no, how to ask for what you really need in a productive way. If you could see inside those sessions, you would see it sometimes looks crazy because I'll coach people through, okay, how are you going to set that boundary? How are you going to ask for that? How are you going to say that to your spouse? And the answer they give me usually go one of two ways. They usually either go more into the people pleasing and they sugarcoat it so much that their ask or boundary or request is like completely not even obvious. The other person would completely miss it. Or because they're not used to setting boundaries or asking for things, they go super harsh. And I'm like, whoa. So it can be really foreign if you're a people pleasing type of a person to find your middle ground and learn how to care about yourself while at the same time caring about others. I know deep down inside you are not doing this for selfish reasons. But at the same time, I have to acknowledge that it's causing you to undo all these wonderful things and all these wonderful gifts that you're giving to the world. Because trust me, one night of drunken lashing out and saying a bunch of really nasty things is gonna override the last 10 nice things you did. Because that's what other people are going to remember about you. And I know that that's not what you want. I know that's the opposite of what you really want. When I talk to people who are caught in this cycle and especially if the issue is drinking, it's even more common that they say, well, when I'm drinking or when I messed up, sometimes I just say the truth and they feel sort of self righteous and they say, oh, I just let them know how I really feel. But that's not really accurate. Maybe you're letting out some of these negative feelings that you're having, but you're doing it in a very hurtful, toxic, kind of magnified and skewed sort of way. It's not like you're all of a sudden healthily stepping up for yourself and asking for things and setting boundaries. Usually the person is saying mean, nasty things, being instigating, bringing up every bad thing the other person ever did. It is completely not productive. In order to deal with all that shame that we feel about it, the next day we tell ourselves, well, the person had it coming because we built up all these resentments. But we have to realize that we have done that to ourselves. We have to put the responsibility back on us and let go of that resentment that we have towards other people and realize, hey, we trained other people to treat us that way. We set the scenario up and we can't be lashing out and be being nasty to other people because we've let the situation go on that long. It's up to us to learn how to step up in our life in a real healthy way. Which can be hard because most of the time these people pleasing behaviors, they go way back, as in way back to childhood. Especially if you grew up and you were in some sort of parentified type role. Maybe you were the oldest sibling, maybe you had parents who had issues, drug issues, mental health issues or other issues. Or hey, maybe you came from a great family, but you always were like the helpful child and that was validated over and over and over in you. Somewhere in your childhood you learned this as a survival skill. But ultimately that has taken over and it's worked against you. Now the answer to that obviously is not to be ruthless or demanding, but it is to learn how to balance your needs with the needs of the people in your life. And there is a way to do that if you're relating to this. I would love to hear all about that in the comments. Not only does it help me to read your stories, but it helps the other people who are reading those comments to relate and connect. As always, there are additional resources for you in the description and I'll see you in the next video.