Anxiety Disorder - Do Your Self Esteem Comes From Pleasing Others?

Here is a list of five questions to help you assess whether the particular trait applies to you. The remainder of the article describes the characteristic in more detail.

Answer true or false:

• What others think of me is very important.

• People won't like me if they see who I really am.

• I want everyone to like me.

• I should always be nice, not irritable or unpleasant.

• My self-worth comes from caring for and helping others.

Being overly concerned with approval arises from an inner, emotional sense of being flawed or unworthy. The underlying fear is that others won´t like you or will reject you. So you strive to go out of your way to please both strangers as well as those people you care about.

In social situations, you feel vulnerable and always try hard to maintain a good impression. You may constantly be on guard about saying or doing something embarrassing. In intimate and family relationships, you go out of your way to take care of everyone else´s needs at the expense of meeting your own.

You may have a difficult time setting boundaries or saying “no.” Since your self-esteem comes from pleasing others, you have a tendency to overextend yourself, often at your own expense.

An excessive need for approval often develops from having grown up with overly critical parents. If you were frequently criticized or punished, you probably learned to feel inadequate. Nothing you did was ever quite good enough. As a child you may have also learned to hide and discount your true impulses and needs so that you could live up to the image your parents wanted.

If you were once anxious about your mother or father´s approval, you may, as an adult, continue to be excessively concerned with getting others' approval. If you believed you had to go out of your way to receive your parents' acceptance, you may still try too hard to please others at the expense or your own feelings and needs.

Apart from your parents, shame and a fear of rejection could have started with your experiences at school or with your peer group. If, for any reason, you were singled out by other children as being "different," "weird," "too short," "too smart," or whatever, you may have acquired a tendency to feel vulnerable or ashamed.

The long-term consequence of always accommodating and pleasing others at the expense of yourself is that you end up with a lot of withheld frustration and resentment. Such frustration and resentment can form the unconscious foundation for a lot of chronic tension and anxiety.

There is another kind of response to being overly concerned with approval or fearing rejection. You tend to avoid closeness with other people in general. Instead of trying to please others to overcome your inner sense of shame, you simply withdraw from them.

Believing you´re unworthy to win others' acceptance anyway, you go your separate way. You find it hard to participate in groups or social situations because you´re preoccupied with being criticized or embarrassed. You also find it difficult to risk getting close to someone unless you´re certain of being liked.

The end result of this pattern of avoidance may be social phobia, either specific social fears or a generalized anxiety about all kinds of social situations.

Thus, there are two ways the excessive need for approval or fear of rejection can manifest: over-accommodating others at your own expense, or avoiding social interaction and/or closeness. If you have both characteristics, don't feel bad. This is a common and surmountable problem.

In my blog I discuss in a series of 6 articles the personality issues on anxiety. Each article begins with a list of five questions to help you assess whether the particular trait applies to you. The remainder of the section describes the characteristic in more detail and then suggests strategies to help you overcome it.