Self-Compromise Is Never a Win-Win Situation

“When you give up your own truth to win at someone else’s game, everyone loses.”
Stephen C. Paul, Illuminations

People-pleasing is how many of us give up our truth to win at someone else’s game. We may see self-compromise as a win-win situation. After all, we will most likely get what we want, but as Stephen C. Paul says, in reality, we lose and so does everyone else. 

We usually engage in the folly of people-pleasing for one of two reasons. Some of us people-please because our self-esteem is poor and we mistakenly believe that others will only like us if we bend over backwards to please them. Then there are those of us who people-please, or actually prostitute ourselves, simply to get what we want from others, or to ensure that we can keep on doing whatever we want without any interference. Either way people-pleasing is nothing more than manipulation of others at the expense of honesty and our personal integrity. It’s a game we never win.

People-pleasing spreads through many vile forms, though some of them may seem innocent enough on the surface: False compliments (insincere flattery, brown-nosing, sucking-up, or worse), misleading information (half-truths, taking credit where none is due), withholding information (failing to reveal how we really feel about something), lying (telling the other we like what he/she likes when in fact we don’t) inappropriate sex (sex-for-favors, sex-for-self-esteem or sex for retaining control over the other), care-taking (constantly doing for the other at the expense of depriving ourselves), and never being able to say “no” or set proper boundaries.

In order to break free of this disease, we need to first understand why we are people-pleasing. This requires honest self-evaluation. It’s not about the other, it’s about us. Do we look down on ourselves? Do we feel like we are less-than equal to others? Do we believe we have to earn love? Do we think no one could possibly like us for simply being us? If we answer “yes” to any of these questions, we have a self-love/self-esteem problem. A good solution would be to find a therapist we feel comfortable with, and to find spiritual guidance from people who have what we want: good feelings about themselves. We will also need direction from a Higher Power who sees only beauty in us, and we need to be open to seeing what our Higher Power sees when we look in the mirror.

If our need to people-please is less about self-esteem and more about feeling powerless, we need to understand that having everything we want at all costs isn’t to our benefit or anyone else’s. In other words, we need to acknowledge that life isn’t all about ME. Life is about US. We are all in this life together. Everyone counts and so we can’t always come first. Always getting what we want at the expense of all others is pure narcissism. So is manipulating people with pleasant personalities just to ensure that our rule-changing behavior goes unchallenged. We may fool the gullible for a while, but sooner or later they’ll see through us like everyone else has. No one respects a person who compromises themselves purely to get what they want. To break this behavior we also need to seek professional help and the assistance of God to tame our ego and restore our self-respect.

The day we stop people-pleasing is the day we honor ourselves by acknowledging that we are equal to all others, and that we don’t have to do anything to validate our God-given worth. It’s the day we take our lives back, smile and allow our souls to shine!