Why Approval Seeking Is Ruining Your Life

Think you don't do it? You'd be wrong.

Photo by Kinga Cichewicz

I’m not a trained psychotherapist, although I play one in real life. I must have one of those faces that says, “Tell me all your darkest secrets,” because people do. This has led to one inescapable conclusion: everything that makes us miserable, that prompts us to make crappy decisions, that involves us in the wrong lives with the wrong people stems back to our desperate need for approval.

The first drink that my alcoholic friend, “Ron,” took was at the behest of a buddy he looked up to. “Be a man,” the buddy said when Ron winced at the harsh taste of the whiskey. And Ron did everything he could to gain attention and approval from his friend, downing drink after drink until his incoherence grew so alarming, someone took him to the ER.

Alternately, my friend Lisa (all names have been changed) drank to impress a girl she secretly considered to be her social inferior. “I was flexing, just for the ego trip. She was a freshman, I was a senior. I wanted to show her how cool I was.” Even though the faces have changed over the years, Lisa’s drinking has not. “I wouldn’t say I’m an alcoholic, but yeah, I drink too much.”

In college, we major in subjects that are not particularly interesting in a desperate bid to gain our parents’ approval—or to avoid their wrath. We shamelessly toady ourselves in the vain hope of advancement at work, of making partner at the law firm. of not being last. And maybe some of that is a dollars-and-cents issue. More money flows to those who learn to kiss the ring. But that’s not the only reason we turn ourselves inside out trying to people please. We do it because we’re terrified of people not liking us. That terror is baked into our DNA.

Back when we were hunter-gatherers and traveled in small bands of equally defenseless humans, learning how to please others meant not being expelled from the tribe. Expulsion almost assuredly meant death. No one survived on their own. You did what you could to make yourself useful. You smiled, you danced, you gutted the Mastodon.

Unfortunately, our brains make no distinction between the savannahs of yore and the office politics of now. It’s Darwinism in reverse.

Photo by Ayo Ogunseinde

In love, all of our worst people pleasing instincts are whetted to a razor-sharp point. They get all mixed up with the narcissistic wounds of childhood, times when we didn’t measure up and were found wanting. My father, for instance, made it perfectly clear where his priorities lay: drugs and music. He bailed when I came home from the hospital as a newborn. But try telling that to my twenty-year-old self who kept looking for a man who told her she was beautiful and special, who could fill in the craters from the past, who could show her who she was. I saw loving fathers on television. If I didn’t have one, didn’t that mean I wasn’t enough? Wasn’t there something wrong with me?

Needing someone to fix you is not the same thing as loving them, by the way. Falling in love with how someone makes you feel about yourself isn’t love. Being someone you’re not in order to “make” someone love you is nothing short of self-inflicted violence. But what if you have no clue who you really are? What if you’ve been so busy making yourself likable all the time that you’ve lost your own inner compass?

And so we’re miserable. We’re rats on the popularity wheel. No matter how fast we spin, we never get where we want to go. Why? Because the people you’re trying to please feel just as inadequate. They have people they want to please. Or impress. Or make jealous. It’s all the same thing. Someone make me feel beautiful, special, desirable, perfect. Someone take this pain away.

We see it all the time in the celebrity world. Beautiful, talented actress with a crummy childhood hits it big—movies, product endorsements, fame, money, adoration—and then goes down in flames. The minute she realizes that all the love in the world can’t make up for the psychic scars left behind when her mom told her she was worthless or her dad called her fat, it’s straight to the pill bottle.

Photo by Xan Griffin

So, what’s the secret then to not needing everyone’s approval? There actually isn’t one, but there are some steps you can take.

1. Recognize when you’re doing it. The energy of people pleasing can rise up at any time during your day. When you’re strap-hanging on the subway, letting some rando talk your ear off while you do nothing to protect yourself, your time, and your attention. Pretending to be happy about your friend’s engagement, even when you know the guy is wrong for her. Trying so hard to be the “good” one in the family because your brother is constantly in and out of rehab. Getting cosmetic procedures done—”just for yourself,” of course—when you’re actually weaponizing your sexuality in a pointless attempt to get somebody to love you.

2. When you feel that you’re doing an unnecessary amount of people pleasing, ask yourself: what do I want to do? Being able to answer that question is half the battle. You are reclaiming yourself. You are rediscovering who you are without the need for making everybody like you. The irony is, the more congruent you are with yourself, the more people will like you. We admire people who aren’t afraid to be themselves. Haters might say they’re selfish, but that’s a Maginot line that’s in constant motion. When the Buddha abandoned his wife and daughter and went out to seek the truth, was he selfish? Yeah, probably. Did it make him wrong? Well, you answer that.

3. With time and practice—and in my case, age—you really will become an unstoppable badass. Knowing who you are is a superpower. I didn’t get there until I was in my forties. Prior to that, I wasted a lot of time making myself “acceptable.” I don’t do that anymore. More importantly, I do my best to avoid situations where I might need to be acceptable. Even as a novelist whose agent is submitting her work, I am far from hung up on an editor’s opinion of me. It’s strictly a “can we do business or not” kind of dynamic these days. I don’t read my reviews. I don’t compare my work to other writers’ work. My work is my work. You can like it or hate it or feel perfectly indifferent, and that’s okay. The Buddha himself said, “Fingers pointing at the moon are not the moon.”

Can you identify at least three areas where you seek other people’s approval? I would love to hear your comments below.