As a recovering people pleaser it’s taken me this long to learn that no is a complete sentence. I don’t always say no but I stopped offering to be of service to others when I really don’t want to. I don’t offer. I keep my mouth closed.
It’s taken me all these years to learn boundaries and why it’s important to have them. I learned that they aren’t a way to punish others but instead are to protect myself.
I’ve always been a very helpful, considerate, generous person with not only myself but with my resources as well. If I even heard that someone I know and care for was having a hard time, there I was offering up help to them. It never was any sweat off my back and as a child free person, I always had time to spare if that’s what was needed. And we’re not even going to talk about money. I always had it to give so I gave it, freely. Without any questions asked. I always felt like it’ll come back to me one way or another. Either by repayment or a blessing in another way. I also catastrophized a lot, imagining all the worst case scenarios that would happen if I didn’t at least try to help. I never wanted anyone to suffer if I could help it.
And that might’ve been where I messed up. Especially when there are people that may not always have the best intentions for you. Kindness and urgency to help is easy to exploit.
It’s taken all these years to learn that boundaries are important. It wasn’t something that was I taught to have. Being generous with my time, money and resources always felt rewarding and it was never any sweat off my back to show up in whatever capacity that I was needed to.
Flash forward to this year when I suddenly learned why it’s not such a good thing to not have personal limits on what you will do for people. I had to actually learn the word boundary, what it meant and how going forward I was going to apply it to my life.
Having boundaries for me has now meant that I have clear definitions of what is acceptable behavior and how to protect my emotional and physical space. I’ve learned that it’s no one’s responsibility to honor my boundaries but it’s up to me to put them in place and uphold them to reinforce their importance. And I can do so quietly. I don’t even have to explain myself.
For years I have compromised my well-being and values to make other people happy without knowing that people pleasing tendencies is what made it hard for me to say no to things I didn’t really want to do.
I learned that people pleasing comes with negative traits that can be perceived as having low-self esteem, anxiety, stress. It was a gut punch to know that doing what I thought was a good thing could be perceived as bad. Learning this has gathered me together quickly
I don’t know that I’m completely recovered but I do know that it’s felt so good to start small. People pleasing can go on forever with some people because to the outside;people pleasers are always good, it seems that way because if you aren’t good, you wouldn’t be showing up for others right? Well everything is good and fine because as a people pleaser I wasn’t listening to myself.
This year I’ve started listening to myself, taking notice of my own emotions and experiencing the full scope of them without being so hasty to disregard them and my intuition to give of myself to others.
I’ve started saying no
Introverted and anti-social 