In an effort to learn more about emotional health, a topic I teach on at CGA, the discipleship school at Adventures In Missions, and to improve my own understanding, appreciation, and management of my emotional life, I’ve been reading Brene Brown’s book, Daring Greatly. Side note, it’s uh-maz-ing. A big fat slap in the face at every flip of the page that brings up real issues I thought I’d already dealt with, it’s really helping me walk out my own healing process in regards to vulnerability and shame, two facets of our emotional health that desperately need to be understood and owned but are sadly and viciously avoided.
One of the topics she brought up in my readings this morning was on people-pleasing. She says, almost as an offhanded remark under the covering of a much larger point, “Everything shame needs to hijack and control is in place [when] you’ve handed over your self-worth to what people think. You’re officially a prisoner of ‘pleasing, performing, and perfecting’”.
Wow.
As a 30-year addict of people-pleasing and performing, I have decades worth of practice under my belt. As a Christian, I already know that God’s opinion is the only one that matters. When I went on the World Race, performing was a big issue I wanted and needed to work through. But the closest I got to healing from this deeply-ingrained habit (which for me was created out of survival instinct within my family of origin) was to simply remind myself over and over again that God’s opinion was the only one that mattered.
I have to be honest. I started to feel real shame and discouragement when, as time progressed, I felt further and further away from that truth, and I felt more and more lost in a sea of confusion and loneliness. Loneliness about who I was, where my identity lay, and why I could not seem to break this terrible habit of needing affirmation and approval, especially from authority.
I was lost.
I still am, to a certain degree.
And so the question I must ask now is: how do we encourage ourselves and others to live a life free from needing the affirmation of others to build our self-worth? How do we teach ourselves how to protect and grow our own value, without leaving us all alone to figure it out cold-turkey?
What I mean is this: when our only encouragement for someone is “because God says so” we create an inevitable vacuum of isolation that only leads to failure, self-deprecation, and shame.
“I know I’m supposed to be over this already. Why is this so hard? It’s impossible!”
“Why can’t I just get over it?”
“I’m such a failure. I can’t ever get this right. I’ll never get better.”
These are a few of the insidious thoughts that creep up when we expect people with no guidance, training, or support to transform, completely on their own, such an emotionally- and often traumatically- ingrained behavior. I absolutely believe that God can miraculously free people from addictions, illnesses, and pain. I believe He does. But in the instances where He chooses not to, what are we to say? How are we to move forward? We don’t expect alcoholics to address their addictions and heal their lives alone. Why should we expect any different from any other kind of addiction?
So here it is, the question I’m pondering, and one to which I would love to hear your thoughts and ideas. How do we move away from people-pleasing and performing in a progressive fashion? What are actual steps we can take to walk out this freedom in an emotionally healthy way? Tangible, practical, concrete steps we can create to encourage ourselves and those around us to cultivate new habits that remind them of their own inherent, valuable, necessary self-worth?
What do you think?
