Dear Soul,
Seems like I opened a Pandora’s Box of feelings on Monday when I wrote about noticing the people-pleasing-good-girl impulse to not risk being too much of myself because others might not like me. So let me go on record saying that wanting to be liked isn’t a problem - until and unless it is. And the truth is that we have to be really honest with ourselves in order to know the difference.
As human beings, we have a deep need for belonging; it’s a social trigger that operates in the unconscious parts of our minds and that influences our decisions everyday. It makes sense - we are social creatures who are hard-wired to travel through life in community and, whether we recognize it or not, our survival is supported by a web of entanglement and interdependence that extends far beyond the people we know, have met, or ever will meet in this lifetime.
It’s no big surprise, then, that we liked to be liked.
It’s considered advantageous in the deepest, darkest, most recessed corners of our psyche and, let’s face it, it feels pretty good to our conscious selves too.
So what’s the problem then? There is no problem with wanting to be liked.
The challenge for many of us is that we have learned that being liked - gaining and holding other people’s approval - is more valuable than being and liking ourselves.
As a result, we filter and parse ourselves so we fit better into someone else’s idea of who we should be; we dim our shine and dampen our voice in order to conform to someone else’s idea of how much space we should occupy; and, perhaps worst of all, we learn to loathe the things about ourselves that we have had to filter and parse and dampen and dim.
We trade who we are for who we’ve been told we should be in hopes of being liked, fitting in and having a place that feels safe.
But how safe are we really?
How liked are we really?
How well do we truly fit in if it requires us to don a costume of conformity?
We have learned to settle for fitting in to a group that cannot hold the fullness of our existence, that wishes we were different than we are, that tolerates us as long as we adhere to the rules and don’t color too far outside the lines and that threatens our sense of safety if we dare to be who we are fully.
But we crave belonging to a community of people who see us, who value us, who recognize our inherent worth as a human and Love us because of who we are.
Imagine how freeing it might feel to be your goofiest, most sincere, messiest, most complicated and enigmatic self and know that you are loved; know that you have a safe place to land; know that there are people who have the capacity to not just tolerate but value your unique blend of being.
And imagine how freeing it would feel if everyone else you know had the same thing in their lives.
There is no problem with wanting to be liked but I think that it important for us to be honest with ourselves about what we may have traded for it and whether that still feels like a fair exchange.
I’m not advocating for everyone to blow their lives up - quite the opposite. Give the people in your life the opportunity to get to know the real you; not the you that you’ve carefully curated and believe is what they want from a friend, co-worker, or partner. Risk the vulnerability of pulling back the curtain a little, of softening the armor, of shedding a layer of the costume of the character you’ve been portraying and see how it feels.
The question I started asking myself when I felt bogged down in the “what if’s” of this process was “how can someone truly like me if I never give them the chance to truly know me?”.
It’s something that I continue to remind myself to this day.
Here’s to normalizing wanting to be liked, loved and accepted for who we truly are (and wanting the same for everyone else).
Sending you Love,
Tawnia