I’m studying Exodus. Moses was a reluctant spokesman for God to the pharoah of Egypt. I suspect he may have started out as a people pleaser, as opposed to a God pleaser. I have been called a people pleaser, by others and by my inner voice, Weezer, who is a … bitch.
I have this issue. Here it is. God created us to need each other, to be relational. We need to give and receive love. So when does that become people pleasing?
First, I looked up what a people pleaser does. This is adapted from Psychology Today.
we disobey what God says, or our own moral code, to please a person
we never evaluate the availability of our time or inclination before we say yes
we’re unable to manage our health because we’re overcommitted to others
we make all the plans
we do all this because we live in anxiety from early relationships, and that causes fear of failure or rejection
So, I hit that list on all five points. Great, what do I do? Hebrews 11:27 says this about Moses: “By faith he left Egypt, not being afraid of the anger of the king, for he endured as seeing Him Who is invisible.” He kept checking in with God, again and again and again. And as he did, he became a God pleaser instead of a people pleaser.
So I made a longer list of how I can do this in practicality. Here you go:
Put time with God early in my day
Track my food
Exercise before I start my “to do” list
Speak up for myself, and remember, the outcome of speaking up is not the issue
Attend events less frequently and use the time to recharge
Identify one responsibility I can cancel to gain free time for myself
Teach people how to behave toward me by rejecting behavior I don’t want
Say no to something small
Express my opinion and learn from people who disagree
So there you go. Next is, practice, practice, practice. And tell your Weezer to shut the hell up.
Get ready, this one’s going to be long. I’ve been reading The Four Loves by C.S. Lewis and I came upon this section under affection that helps me deal with people in my life. I hope since I’m not getting paid I can share it with whatever public I have, and I hope it helps some of you, too. Get ready for a huge quote:
“It would be absurd to say that [King] Lear is lacking in Affection. In so far as Affection is need-love he is half-crazy with it. Unless, in his own way, he loved his daughtrs he would not so desperately desire their love. The most unlovable parent (or child) may be full of such ravenous love. But it works to their own misery and everyone’ else’s. The situation becomes suffocating. If people are already unlovable a continual demand on their part (as of right) to be loved – their manifest sense of injury, their reproaches, whether loud and clamorous or merely implicit in every look and gesture of resentful self-pity — produce in us a sense of guilt (they are intended to do so) for a fault we could not have avoided and cannot cease to commit. They seal up the very fountain for which they are thirsty. If ever, at some favoured moment, any germ of Affection for them stirs in us, their demand for more and still more, petrifies us again. And of course such people always desire the same proof of our love; we are to join their side, to hear and share their grievance against someone else. If my boy really loved me he would see how selfish his father is … if my brother loved me he woudl make a party with me against my sister … if you loved me you wouldn’t let me be treated like this …
And all the while they remain unaware of the real road. ‘If you would be loved, be lovable,’ said Ovid. That cheery old reprobate only meant, ‘If you want to attract the girls you must be attractive,’ but his maxim has a wider application. The amorist was wiser in his generation than Mr. Pontifex and King Lear.
The really surprising thing is not that these insatiable demands made by the unlovable are sometimes made in vain, but that they are so often met. Sometimes one sees a woman’s girlhood, youth, and long years of her maturity up to the verge of old age all spent in tending, obeying, caressing, and perhaps supporting, a maternal vampire who can never be caressed and obeyed enough. The sacrifice — but there are two opinions about that — may be beautiful; the old woman who exacts it is not.
The ‘built-in’ or unmerited character of Affection thus invites a hideous misinterpretation. So does its ease and informality.
We hear a great deal about the rudeness of the rising generation. I am an oldster myself and might be expected to take the oldsters’ side, but in fact I have been far more impressed by the bad manners of parents to children than by those of children to parents. Who has not been the embarrassed guest at family meals where the father or mother treated their grown-up offspring with an incivility which, offered to any other young people, would simpy have terminated the acquaintance? Dogmatic assertions on matters which the children understand and their eleders don’t, ruthless interruptions, flat contradictions, ridicule of things the young take seriously — sometimes of their religion — insulting references to their friends, all provide an easy answer to the question ‘Why are they always out? Why do they like every house better than their home?’ Who does not prefer civility to barbarism?
If you asked any of these insufferable people — they are not all parents of course — why they behaved that way at home, they woud reply, ‘Oh, hang it all, one comes home to relax. A chap can’t be always on his best behaviour. If a man can’t be himself in his own house, where can he? Of course we don’t want Company Manners at home. We’re a happy family. We can say anything to one another here. No one minds. We all understand.’
Once again it is so nearly true yet so fatally wrong. Affection is an affair of old clothes, and ease, of the unguarded moment, of liberties which would be ill-bred if we took them with strangers. But old clothes are one thing; to wear the same shirt till it stank would be another. There are proper clothes for a garden party; but the clothes for home must be proper too, in their own different way. Simlarly there is a distinction between public and domestic courtesy. The root princple of both is the same: ‘that no one give any kind of preference to himself.’ But the more public the occasion, the more our obedience to this principle has been ‘taped’ or formalised. There are ‘rules’ of good manners. The more intimate the occasion, the less the formalisation; but not therefore the less need of courtesy. On the contrary, Affection at its best practices a courtesy which is incomparably more subtle, sensitive, and deep than the public kind. In public a ritual would do. At home you must have the reality which that ritual represented, or else the deafening triumphs of the greatest egoist present. …
‘We can say anything to one another.’ The truth behind this is that Affection at its best can say whatever Affection at its best wishes to say, regardless of the rules that govern public courtesy; for Affection at its best wishes neither to wound nor to himiliate nor to domineer. You may address the wife of your bosom as ‘Pig!’ when she has inadvertently drunk your cocktail as well as her own. You may roar down the story which your father is telling once too often. You may tease and hoax and banter. You can say, “Shut up. I want to read.” You can do anything in the right tone and at the right moment — the tone and moment which are not intended to, and will not, hurt. The better the Affection the more unerringly it knows which these are (every love has its art of love). But the domestic Rudesby means something quite different when he claims liberty to say ‘anything’. Having a very imperfect sort of Affection himself, or perhaps at that moment none, he arrogates to himself the beautiful liberties which only the fullest Afffection has a right to or knows how to manage. He then uses them spitefully in obedience to his resentments; or ruthlessly in obedience to his egoism; or at best stupidly, lacking the art. And all the time he may have a clear conscience. He knows that Affection takes liberties. He is taking liberties. Therefore (he concludes) he is being affectionate. Resent anything and he will say that the defect of love is on your side. He is hurt. He has been misunderstood.
He then sometimes avenges himself by getting on his high horse and becoming elaboratley ‘polite’. The implication is of course, ‘Oh! So we are not to be intimate: We are to behave like mere acquaintaneces? I had hoped — but no matter. have it your way..’ ”
As you breathe a sigh of relief, I call a halt. Lewis doesn’t acutally say how to deal with someone like this in your life, but I think if we chew on it a while, that will become clear. Thinking this through should do me a world of good, and I hope that it will also do some of you a world of good. Have a nice, thoughtful day.
Where shall we go today? Perhaps the topic of standing up for yourself vs. doormatism would be nice. The trick is to balance between being a harridan (look it up) and Casper Milquetoast (look him up). However, I do not wish to go any further than this in principle or seriosity. I feel nuts today, so let’s be nuts.
Once upon a time there was a woman who made dresses out of material printed all over with “Kick me” signs. There were white, red and yellow ones, even bling signs across her chest and behind. When she went out, some people would give her a little ankle kick and others would rear back and kick her so hard she was three blocks down before she landed. (Sometimes when she was late for work, that was helpful.)
One day she was waiting for a red light to change so she could cross the street, when a little old lady with coke bottle glasses began reading her dress. “My dear, whatever posssessed you to make a dress of this nature?”
“I couldn’t say, exactly.”
“I believe you meant to say that you choose not to say.” The little old lady cocked her head, and smiled. “If you say, you may find that you want to replace your dress.”
The light changed, and the woman rushed ahead of the little old lady and hung a left. She arrived at the next corner, where the light was again red, and son of a gun if the old lady wasn’t standing there. “Feel like saying yet?”
“I thought if I suggested it, it wouldn’t feel so bad when someone chooses to kick me.”
“Hmmmm, interesting concept. What makes you think you deserve to be kicked?”
“That’s all the saying you get. Didn’t work. No more talking.” The woman turned around and hurried back the way she had come.
However, her world seemed to be full of red lights. At the corner she had to wait, and there was the old woman again.
“How do you do that?”
“Must be a God thing. He wants you to know no one deserves being kicked. You are His creation. He finds your dress very sad.”
“Why did He make me with a big butt and a hawk nose, and not very smart or creative. Why do I live in my crazy family if He thinks so much of me! People take every opportunity to put me down, my relatives and people I don’t even know.”
“Here’s your homework. The next time someone puts you down, say to them, ‘Funny, I don’t believe that.’ “
The old lady crossed the intersection and disappeared.
Just then, a young man tatooed with numbers and tear drops and a dragon shooting fire down his arm, whose pants hung under his butt, kicked her and said, “Hey loser, you’re ugly as a mud fence.”
“Funny, I don’t belileve that.” A feeling came over her, warm like a love song, and she hurried home. Tearing off her kick me dress, she looked at herself in the mirror. Her nose wasn’t so bad, and her big butt was kind of a giant heart. How come she hadn’t seen that before? She put on a pair of jeans and her favorite soft sweatshirt. Then she sat down at her computer and began to type, “I wonder if angels ever look like little old ladies.”
