A simple filter for recovering people-pleasers: when to ask for help and when to say no (without the guilt or resentment)
If you're a recovering people-pleaser, you probably know the particular exhaustion of never quite knowing where you stand with others, especially when it comes to “helping.” You might swing from over-depending on others to being anti-dependent or needless and wantless.
I really get it.
I just finished a coaching training from Healing Our Core Issues that was deeply informed by the work of one of my favorite thinkers/teachers, Pia Mellody. Pia passed away this past May, but her model for healing codependence and developmental relational trauma continues to live on and has been life-changing for me and many of my clients.
A section in the training on needs and wants and interdependence really caught my attention because of its simple approach to this very complex (to me!) topic.
Pia taught three important guidelines for interdependence:
1. Avoid asking for help when you can take care of the need or want yourself— this keeps you from being too dependent (Of course, this means that you DO ask for help when you can’t take of the need or want yourself.)
2. Decline helping if you think you are going to wind up feeling resentful (victim anger)—this avoids overextending yourself
3. Decline helping if you will enable the person asking for help to be dependent
She makes it sound so obvious, ha! But this is an issue that baffled me for so many years and I can see how it baffles my clients as well. For good reason—most of us were never taught how to do this.
And while of course there will always be nuances, I love how tangible and concise these guidelines are, and I appreciate how they explain the “why” behind each idea, too, because this helps anchor into the reasoning and the impact.
The three guidelines also address people across the spectrum of being needless and wantless or anti-dependent to overly dependent. And by the way, we can be needless and wantless in some areas of our life and then overly dependent in other areas of our lives. The goal is to learn how to take care our ourselves and how to connect with others in a functional way, moving out of the extremes and into the middle.
What do you think? Do you want to run your “helping” through this simple filter?
With care,
Brianna
photo by @ahmetkoc