Getting Comfortable Disappointing People
A decision-making chart for when to choose to disappoint people.
I was almost 30 years old the first time someone suggested to me that maybe everything in the whole entire world wasn't my fault, that I was (certainly!) capable of making mistakes, but that (perhaps!) I didn't have to take responsibility for everyone in my vague vicinity who ever frowned. It was a shocking thing to hear! In my house, growing up, healthy boundaries didn't simply go un-taught; they were actively discouraged, and often even punished. One of my dad's most often-repeated beliefs was: "You can be right, or you can be happy." That's a false binary, of course, but we were all dealing with my mother's abuse in the best way we knew how. And my dad wasn't wrong that you could either go along with everything she ever said or did or demanded — even if you knew it wasn't "right" — or she would make your life absolute hell. My mom was convinced, especially after she and my dad got divorced, that every negative thing she ever felt was, in some way, mine or my sister’s doing and our burden to fix.
It's no surprise that I grew up to be a hardcore people-pleaser, on cheerfully perpetual high alert to every mood around me, willing to do whatever it took to make everyone else happy, no matter what it cost me. And, to be completely honest, I'm not sure I would have ever actually broken out of it if I hadn't gotten walloped by Long Covid. I went from having 18 fully energized useful hours a day, recharged batteries at 100% every single morning — to having about eight upright hours a day, most of them weighed down by physical fatigue, cognitive dysfunction, or social bankruptcy.
And, unlike before I got sick, pushing myself past my limits has terrible consequences that eat up my already limited time out of bed. My choice became: stop people-pleasing, or spend every second of my very, very, very limited time and energy keeping the hamster wheel of other people's expectations running smoothly. If I was going to be happy as a chronically ill person, I realized I was going to have to disappoint a whole lot of people in my life. Most people in my life probably.
Getting comfortable with other people's disappointment isn't easy, but over the past four years I've crafted an evolving decision chart that does make it much more manageable. I've heard from so many people who struggle with this, and so I thought I’d share my process with you. It comes from a LOT of therapy. It remains a work in progress, but it’s helped me wade through a lot of bad feelings about myself based solely on other people’s bad feelings about me.
Let me know if this helps you, and if you’d like me to follow-up with more about HOW I am getting comfortable with other people’s disappointment. People-pleasing is a kind of addiction, my therapist says, so I know I’ll be in recovery for the rest of my life. But it gets easier and easier every time I let someone down.
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oh man oh man the past few months have been months of Real Boundary Setting for me for the first time, and this is bringing up so many red flags that I wouldn't have seen before
This is incredible, thanks for sharing. I've literally just started therapy for the first time, and one of the big reasons is that I'm a people pleaser. I find it extremely difficult to ask for my needs to be met or to disappoint someone who interacts with me. It's, as an understatement, a bummer. I will try and remember your flow chart. Thank you.