Can you disappoint another to be true to yourself?

Notes from a (semi) reformed people pleaser

Image: Jon Tyson on Unsplash

There are some lines of a poem that stopped me in my tracks some years back. Perhaps you know the poem? It’s a well-circulated piece called ‘The Invitation’ by Oriah Mountain Dreamer and is a testament to whole-hearted living (if you don’t know it, I strongly recommend a Google search). The whole poem is beautiful, but I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that these few lines changed my life:

I want to know if you can disappoint another to be true to yourself;

if you can bear the accusation of betrayal and not betray your own soul;

if you can be faithless and therefore trustworthy

Wait, what?! My younger self did a double take, as I re-read and slowly allowed those words to sink in. Disappointing people is part of whole-hearted living? Disappointing people makes you trustworthy? These were radical notions to my people-pleasing self, who believed that the best currency in life was to work incredibly hard to make people like you, even if this was at your own expense.

Those words stayed with me and slowly filtered into my consciousness. These days I truly understand why these qualities make someone trustworthy. If a person can be trusted to say ‘no’, then their ‘yes’ is also trustworthy. They can be trusted to say what they mean and mean what they say. We know where we stand with that person. On the other hand, if someone says ‘yes’ when they mean ‘no’, there’s a strong likelihood they’ll end up feeling resentful and this will eat away at the relationship in other ways. It’s expressed and felt by the receiver in subtle, sometimes passive-aggressive ways.

If we can’t trust someone to give a straightforward and honest response, it makes it very hard to ask anything of them. We might lean towards avoiding asking in order not to be a burden. When we can trust their response, it feels OK to ask, knowing the other person has their boundaries in place and will not over-load themselves. Asking and responding become simple, unambiguous, honest, direct. We don’t have to read between lines or look for subtle undertones. How refreshing is that?

Psychology has a lot to say on this subject.

In the therapy world, the metaphor ‘put your own oxygen mask on first, before you help other people’ is often quoted. We cannot give from an empty tank and to conserve our resources requires boundaries. Boundaries sometimes mean saying ‘no’ to other people in order to say ‘yes’ to ourselves. It’s not a selfish act. When we take care of our own needs we have so much more to give to others. More energy, more presence, more compassion, more patience.

In trauma therapy, people-pleasing is recognised as part of the ‘fawn’ response - a hard-wired nervous system response where we learn to appease in an attempt to negotiate our safety. It may be a strategy we adopted in childhood, to protect our attachment to a caregiving figure our survival depended on. It may have been useful once, but we often continue to use it long after it’s needed, failing to recognise that as adults there are many more choices available to us. The perceived threat in our day-to-day lives might be rejection, abandonment or negative judgement, but sacrificing our own needs and wellbeing to try to avert this is too high a price to pay. And with no guarantee of success anyway – people can dislike or reject us no matter how ‘pleasing’ we may try to be, for reasons to do with their own story.

Physician and trauma expert Gabor Maté, who wrote the book ‘When the Body Says No,’ tells us that if you don’t voice your no, your body will often voice it for you. It may show up in the form of symptoms and illness. The body tends to whisper its ‘no’ at first, but if the whispers go unheard, they can turn into shouts. Eventually the body tends to stop us in our tracks. There was a phase in my life where whenever I said ‘yes’ to something I really wanted to say ‘no’ to, I would develop a crushing migraine. It took a while to join the dots of this pattern and to recognise what my body was communicating on my behalf, but I am learning to listen more closely, and migraines are much rarer these days.

So how do we begin to unwind these patterns and re-wire these behaviours?

Well, sometimes life teaches us this naturally as we age. There can come a point where the price of being accommodating becomes too high, the suppressed resentment becomes too great, and anger comes tumbling out. Mid-life can be one of those points. Interestingly mid-life is where a lot of women get in touch with their anger. Sadly, our culture is quick to dismiss this as a symptom of a hormonal imbalance, rather than looking more deeply at what might be needing to be expressed.

A key piece of re-learning these patterns is getting reacquainted with your body. The body is a source of intuitive wisdom and can become your inner guide. We might feel a ‘no’ as a subtle unease in the gut, while a full-bodied ‘yes’ might feel expansive or spacious. The question is, are we able to tune in and hear it?

Discerning your intuitive ‘yes’ or ‘no’ is the starting point. Communicating it to others is a whole skill-set in itself. It takes practice, and it can be useful to prepare your response in advance. You can buy yourself some time by responding first with a ‘maybe’, or a ‘can I get back to you?’ while you consider and prepare an answer, clarifying it later.

If you voice your ‘no’ and others are upset or disappointed, this does not necessarily make you wrong. We need to be willing to sit with the discomfort of this, to bear the other person’s response and to hold true to what we know. We need to give others the space to do the same, to honour their ‘yes’ and ‘no’, without trying to persuade, cajole or guilt-trip them into backing down. Then our relationships become cleaner, clearer and healthier all round.

So, I extend this invitation to you today - who do you need to disappoint in order to honour yourself? Try it out. You may find your fears of being disliked or rejected are unfounded (or not). You may gain whole new levels of trust and respect (or not). But you will put some much-needed juice back into your tank which can spill over as generosity and creativity. The world needs you to show up resourced and available, not burnt out and bitter. I’ll say it again - self-care is not selfish. It’s the midpoint on the continuum between self-less and self-ish where we can honour our own needs alongside those of others. Do it for yourself and in doing so, give other people permission to do the same.

---

If this post resonates with you, please share it with others to help grow my audience, and subscribe to The Therapy Room via the link below to receive all the latest musings direct to your inbox.

---

You may also like…..

Some articles I’ve been enjoying recently on the theme of saying ‘No’:

The secret super-power of middle age: Part 1 By

Cary J Hansson

Success requires saying no, here’s how the experts do it By

Robert Glazer

---

I’d love to hear your thoughts, comments and experiences on this subject. Thanks for reading.