Love Yourself First: How People-Pleasing Is Affecting Your Relationship

How many hours out of every single day do you spend focusing on trying to please other people? This is the number one way that without meaning to, we lose ourselves in our relationships. Our relationships are not making or breaking us. Us pleasing anyone but ourselves is what's making us sick, tired, exhausted, and ready to light a match, blow it all up, and give ourselves permission to only focus on ourselves again. Okay, we're going. Okay. 2. 1. Welcome to the healing is possible experience where every week we support you in reclaiming and rediscovering you. You get to have 100% of the love you want. You get a life that's yours, and this show guides and supports you in achieving and experiencing that. If you like what you're seeing and if you want more than Please subscribe to the Rebecca Silence YouTube channel. Please hit the subscribe button and the notification bell, and please share with your friends anyone that you know would benefit from hearing this content, any of the episodes that speak to you and that call to you. I'm Rebecca Silence, national relationship coach and marriage and family specialist, and I want to teach you about this number one sign and way that we lose ourselves in the name of love. And then so often we're not meaning to place blame or point fingers, but we're really believing that it's our spouse or our kids or our team or our boss or our friends or our family that are the reasons why we're so unfulfilled and unfree. But really, we just stop prioritizing, knowing what it means to honor and respect and take care of us. And I want to talk about the three big reasons why, without meaning to, we focus on people pleasing. It really is an addiction. It really is a baseline, default coping strategy that's killing our spirit. That the good news is we have, you know, not just the responsibility, but the ability to turn around. We don't have to keep going this way. Okay, so we're going to talk about the top three reasons why we please not ourselves, but everyone but ourselves. Number one, it's what we saw modeled, right? So think about when you're the giver in your relationships, dealing with people that are very, very happy to take from you without reciprocation or my favorite word, reciprocity, being the key ingredient in the relationship when you've got this going on, right? Because chances are if you're here with me, you care. You care so much. You want to be your best for other people. That's not the same as people pleasing. Do you hear the distinction? So I want to to be my best for you. And I'm committed to being my best no matter what, no matter how you show up, no matter how life shows up. That's different than my job is to please you. Okay, so you're here because you care. You're here because you're a giver at heart. But likely what you saw modeled growing up was one parent doing all the work and the other parent not. Not holding their weight, not showing up, not doing their part, not nourishing or nurturing the parent that you saw giving the most. So one of the things that I teach is that as children, we innocently follow the parent that we think is surviving the best. Now, my work is about bringing the unconscious to light. So promise me you're not going to use anything I'm about to say here as ammunition against yourself. Please. Okay, but no. This is what happens. Children pick the parent to follow that they think is surviving the best period. Unconsciously and without some type of new awareness and some type of growth work, some catalyst that knocks the modeling that we saw growing up in a new, different direction. History repeats. So, so many of you are dissatisfied in your marriages because it's the same dynamics you grew up with with different character in a different costume. And you might not even have realized it's the same dynamics until this moment. But guaranteed, if you are dissatisfied as an adult in your marriage, you are experiencing marriage and family the exact same way you did as a kid growing up. Just let that one simmer for a second. Okay, so we saw people pleasing, being modeled. We saw a parent doing the pleasing and the other parent kind of lame. And we decided, I'm not going to be the lame one. But what that meant was, I'm not going to be the lame one, so I'm going to attract a lame one. Not saying you're married to a bad person. I want you to see that the person you're married to doesn't stand a chance without you seeing. What? I am painting a very clear picture for you to look at and to consider today. Right? We fight with ghosts. I'm not saying your spouse is lame. I am saying your programming says someone's good. Someone sucks. I'm not going to be the one that sucks. That means I'm going to experience my partner is sucking. Because my role is the role of the good spouse, the giver spouse, the one that cares more. You saw someone care more and someone care less, and you weren't going to be the one that cared less. But your subconscious brain knows there isn't reciprocity available to you because all you saw was this power differential. Okay, so that's the first one. Now what do we do about that? We look at our partner with fresh eyes today. We recognize that where there's a lack of reciprocity, where there's funkiness going on in the relationship dynamics because you're both still without meaning to be in your childhoods trying to survive and cope and please, at your own expense, let it simmer, let it percolate. Okay, the second reason we people please is to avoid feeling more trauma. Now, I don't ever want us comparing and contrasting how we grew up to someone else. I don't want to suggest that you are a trauma survivor and that that means less of a life. It's quite the contrary. Okay, so if you're just meeting me, I grew up in extremely abusive, toxic family dynamics which modeled for me. Love is toxic, love is abusive, love hurts. So many things. I could go on and on and on. Unconsciously, I hadn't woken up yet, I hadn't healed yet. My first marriage became a domestic violence marriage because on some level, unconsciously, I was a vibrational match for love and abuse going together like peanut butter and jelly. I got out with a two year old, did the work, came to life, healed through heartbreak, healed through trauma, reinvented myself, and after so much work, reclaimed and rediscovered the truth of who I wanted to be. The work will liberate you, and the work is letting go of who you became to survive love, who you became to survive family, who you became to avoid having to feel pain and heartbreak and re experiencing the trauma responses that you used as your security blanket without even realizing it to survive your childhood. So I say this with so, so much love. No one, no one is immune to trauma and no one wants to feel the heartbreak or the pain, the emotional pain in particular that they felt growing up in their family systems. But when we avoid it, when we run from it, when we won't lean in and go, wait a minute, it can be different now because I'm an adult. I. I have free will, I have agency, I have choice. I don't have to repeat history right? When we're not aware of that, it just plays out. And I just see it so often that people light a match, blow up their marriage, drop their spouse like a hot potato before they've reclaimed their independence while they're in the relationship, before they've grown into being the adult at choice in the relationship with modeling, healing and full self expression and freedom for their Kids being the cycle breaker. So the second one, it's a big, big conversation, and today I'm just planting some seeds with you. That, again, if you're people pleasing, you saw it modeled, and you're just being the parent you saw that you thought was doing a better job at love in family and in marriage. The second thing is you don't want to feel the heartbreak. You don't want to feel the emotional pain. You don't want to have to be in the trauma response and survival coping strategies that you were in growing up. So let's make a different choice. Let's look at our options. The options in front of us are, I get to experience love and family and marriage the way it was modeled to me, on repeat, and that's my destiny. Or I channel my inner Snoop Dogg, drop it like it's hot, and have a different option. I'm an adult with free will and agency, and I can create whatever type of experience of love, marriage, and family I want, regardless of how my spouse shows up, regardless if my spouse gets it. But I'm claiming, I'm declaring. Mm, mm. The cycle breaks with me. I'm the one raising my hand to say, I'm gonna model for my family, for my children, for every life I touch. That life can be healthy. Love can be healthy. Family and marriage can be delicious and glorious. And I'll tell you, my second marriage is beyond my wildest dreams come true. Your relationship, the one you have now, can feel better. You can feel better. You can experience you the way you want to. See, this is the third reason we people please. Okay, let's just get into it now. The third reason we people please is because we are wanting our partner to give us permission. We want our partner to be the source of us feeling safe enough to be who we really are. And this is a big problem for so many reasons. Number one, life will never be safe enough. No one will ever be safe enough for you to be brave enough to be real, authentic, and aligned with them. Now, most of us never saw real, aligned, authentic leadership in marriage and family. We saw sacrifice, compromise, codependence, misery without meaning to be. So many of us are modeling for our children that being an adult kind of sucks. That love, marriage, and family are difficult, hard. Our kids are going, why would I want to ever be an adult? It looks terrible, right? So if you're here again, please don't hear me is knocking you. I'm going. Thank you for being here. Thank you for understanding there has to be a better way. And I just wanted today to break down for you. The number one sign you've lost yourself in your marriage is your people pleasing. So let's look at why and let's talk about where we go from here. Okay? Just because this was your modeling doesn't mean it's all there is for you. I had a coach say to me early in my healing journey. There's 8 billion plus people on the planet, Rebecca. That means there's 8 billion plus ways of doing love, relationship and family. What you saw is not all there is, but what we limit ourselves to without awareness, support. Healing is what we saw growing up. And we don't want to feel the trauma and we want our partner to have us feel safe enough to finally be the truth of who we are. So we keep trying to please them in this unconsciously, weirdly manipulative way so that maybe they'll show up and we'll feel safe and then we can finally be ourselves in the relationship. Do we see any issues with anything I'm saying? Do we see it doesn't have to be this way. There is a better way. It can get better. I hope so. Okay, so here's my challenge to you from here. Just for today, I want you to take five minutes, set a timer on your phone and meditate on. I want silence, I want a five minute timer and I want you to meditate on. If I was focused on my soul, my spirit, my heart and myself, feeling pleased and free at home with life exactly the way it is, what would I do to honor, respect and take care of myself? What would be my next step? Maybe it would be taking yourself for a bike ride after work instead of focusing on caring for the children, making a meal for the family, doing what you think you need to do to please your spouse. Maybe it would be journaling, watching your favorite movie, taking a bath, writing, you know, a song, playing some music, singing, taking a drive and belting at the top of your lungs, lighting your favorite candle, popping your favorite bottle of champagne. I don't care what it is, but I want you to take five minutes and I want you to meditate. And I want you to find one thing, one step today that comes to you, that calls to you. Your inner spirit's guidance, divine guidance coming in you, coming through you. And go do it. Please visit rebeccasilence.com for a free masterclass. A spa day for your heart, mind and soul. And sometime this week, take it. This is a course I give all of my couples to help them kick start their self healing journey. Because again, we don't have to jump right into divorce. We have to do the self healing work to reclaim and rediscover the truth of who we are so that we can know the relationship either has a chance unexpectedly or it's not the right one. But don't make big decisions that impact your spouse, your children, your entire family before you've reclaimed you with life exactly as it is now. Now, of course, if you're in an abusive situation, call your local domestic violence shelter, get out, get support. But if we're just frustrated, feeling like I don't know how long I can take this, I've lost myself. I can't do this anymore. I'm exhausted. Listen to my voice. Nothing's wrong with you. You're not broken. You've been the one responsible for pleasing everybody but you. And it stops now. Go play. Drop it like it's hot. Set a five minute timer. Find the one thing you do if you weren't worried about or focused on pleasing everybody but you and go do it today and go to rebeccasilence.com spa day. Put in code self care and get your free spa day for your heart, mind and soul. And lock in block in time in your calendar and go take that class. I am so grateful you are here. I am honored to have shared this time and space with you. You caring, you committed to love, you desiring and valuing a beautiful experience of marriage and family. That's perfection. It's not. The people pleasing is the problem. And come back next week and I'll give you the second sign you've lost yourself in your relationship and what you can do about it. Thank you again so much for joining me. I'm Rebecca. Silence. Signing off for now, you get to have 100% of the love you want and that is a promise. Thank you again for joining us for the healing is possible experience. This is your moment. Thank you. This is your time to reclaim and rediscover you. I am here for it. I see you. I'm cheering you on. Join us again next week.