Healing the Heart of a People Pleaser

Hello everyone, and welcome to this broadcast. Mark DeJesus here, bringing you insights for your healing and freedom journey. I am your brother from another mother, encouraging you to live in mental, emotional, and relationship health.

Today's subject is a great subject because we're going to get into healing the heart of a people pleaser. Now, this is part two in this series that I'm doing, and you may want to go back and first check out my episode on people-pleasing bondage, especially discerning it, discerning people-pleasing bondage. Because if we're going to experience healing and freedom, we're gonna have to learn and discern and see and gain some self-awareness in this issue.

This is a subject I think all of us can learn and grow in because there are many burdens God wants to set us free from, stuff that we don't have to carry. And one of the big ones is the need to please. So I pray that in the last episode, some discernment opened up in your life, not only what's going on but getting more to the root system of why do we please? Why do we fall into these traps and patterns? And a lot of times, it's we don't know. We don't know what we don't know. We kind of fall into patterns, we don't realize it, and we need some knowledge and understanding to help us through. Many of us don't know any other way of living, so we continue in the same pattern.

So I think discernment and self-awareness is very important in the healing process because then we can start picking up on patterns and learning new ways of relating that are healthier. So I want to be an encouragement to you in your journey. So please be sure to check out that other episode because that will set the foundation for today's broadcast.

Because today, what I want to do is I want to speak to the heart of a people pleaser. I want to speak as a brother walking alongside and in compassion, in grace, helping to bring perspective of what's going on and what's going to be some helpful things for your heart healing journey in this. Because it's going to be a journey, it's not going to be a quick fix. But if you'll allow yourself to be taught and learn and recognize what's needed, a great deal of freedom could happen, and your life could look a lot differently in how you relate.

So I'm going to give you some healing tips. The first one I'm going to break down a little bit. These are some healing tips I want to provide in getting to the heart of a people pleaser and helping you to experience healing and freedom. And this is the first one, and I'm going to take some time to walk through this a bit. And this is the first tip: We need to soberly count the cost of living as a people pleaser.

The pleaser has to come to terms with their pleasing and get sober about how it's affecting their life. Many times, I find we don't experience the change that's needed unless we come to terms with what will happen if I just stay in this behavior. Where am I heading? Where am I heading? Because a lot of times, we stay in our patterns because they're comfortable. We stay in our patterns because they're familiar, they're all we know. And making change can be scary. I was like, what's that going to even be like? What's, you know, what's on the other side of that?

And I found for me, it's helpful, not in shame, not shaming ourselves, but looking and recognizing, okay, what is life going to be looking like if I continue to live this way? And I'm going to give you some, these will be helpful to understand for sobriety, emotional sobriety.

The first one is, you're going to be, you're going to compulsively live by obligation and toxic guilt rather than being freely led by love. This is important to understand because God calls us to live in love, to love, to be led by His love, to be moved with compassion. Pleasers are moved by obligation. They're moved by, "I have to," and they're that, "I have to do this." And we have to sometimes challenge them, push back, well, wait, do I have to, or have I come under something that's told me I have to?

Are we compelled more by toxic guilt, which is the "I feel bad" syndrome? And Pleasers confuse guilt with the voice of love. So they constantly chase guilt when it rises up and they do things compulsively to alleviate their feelings of guilt. How many of you would recognize that many of your relationships are based on guilt? Raise your hand, right? How many of you have that? Now, let me ask a second question: Of those that raise your hand, how many of those relationships driven by guilt are just wonderful and flourishing? Not very much. Because relationships do not thrive under toxic guilt because it's always under this manipulative emotion of "I feel bad." So you'll get stuck in the confusion. You think it's love, but it's not. And Pleasers don't understand healthy love. And I'm going to get into that some more here in just a little bit.

They are always driven by the urgency of obligation and guilt trips. They take guilt trips every single day. They, um, they don't know how to put the boundaries up, and they kind of glaze over everything they're doing with saying, "Oh, no, no, it's because I love you. Oh, it's because I love them because I care." And really, their definition of loving care has been twisted. So it can often lead to number two. These are sober things to recognize.

You become codependent because people-pleasing crosses over with codependency very easily. Because codependency drives you to plug your self-esteem and peace into how someone else is doing, which will then make you a pleaser try to do stuff to keep everything happy. You become a peacekeeper, not a peacemaker. And many of you recognize you grew up under addictions like alcoholism or some kind of addictive behavior, or you grew up with narcissism, and it left you under the impact of that dysfunctional world. And within that world of addiction, within the world of narcissism, we pick up a codependency and we pick up pleasing as a way of relating, trying to please people, trying to please people, trying to keep people happy.

Third thing is, you're going to be very uncomfortable with receiving. You have a hard time receiving compliments, love when it comes your way. You won't be able to take it in. You'll struggle with affection, you struggle with any true love being pointed your way. You want people to love you, but when it happens, you don't receive it.

Fourth thing is that your needs and emotions will become neglected. You're going to burn out, you're going to fizzle out if it hasn't happened already. You're going to be headed for burnout because you focus on what everybody wants. You narrow in on it so much, it consumes you. So you ignore the signals in your own heart that need some tender loving nurture and care.

Number five is, you'll, you'll live not knowing what you want. A big sign of people pleasers when you ask them, "So, what is it you want?" "Oh, it doesn't matter. Whatever you guys want." And it's like, "Okay, yeah, but somebody asked you what do you want?" Well, since you're asking, it's okay to say, "Well, this is what I think," or "This is what I want." You lose sight of your own vision because you're always acclimating yourself to someone else's vision. You're always moving yourself to what somebody else wants of you.

And so what happens is number six: What God thinks gets lost in the sea of opinion. God loves you, and as believers, we're sons and daughters. He's got great potential for you. He's got amazing things in your journey, and He has a lot to say. It's very empowering, it's full of grace, it's full of compassion, full of love. But it's hard to hear when we're plugged in, where our speaker is plugged in completely to what someone else is saying or thinking.

Now, Paul, the Apostle, had this struggle. So we look up to him, what an example in the faith, right? But he struggled with this. And even in Galatians chapter 1, verse 10, he made the statement, "For do I now persuade men or God? Or do I seek to please men? For if I still please men, I would not be a bond servant of Christ." So you see this journey that he's had to go on. And look at that statement there. He says, "If I still pleased men." This means that at some point, Paul recognized he was a people pleaser. He says, "If I, if I'm still doing that," which reveals he's broken free from that. But at one time, he saw it as a major pattern in his life. And look what he said: He said it kept him from being a servant of Christ.

Now, um, interesting, many of us are stuck, and it's interfering with us just being able to serve people freely. Because if I'm trying to please you, I can't love you freely, you know that? I can't truly love you if, while at the same time, I'm trying to please you because I get the pleasing takes over. It's like, I can't love you. I'm also afraid of you, right? We could say this with a lot of things. I can't love you effectively if I hate you, right? And, and I can't serve you effectively if pleasing is taking over the narrative. Because there are times where love is not going to do that act that pleasing is telling you to do. Love will point you to patience where you need to wait instead of just doing something to try to make someone feel better, fix, or do all these codependent acts.

And so if Paul had the experience, some freedom, then you and I who are neck-deep in this stuff, we're all gonna be on a journey of having to learn this. So people-pleasing and codependency will not allow us to remain focused on the simplicity of what God is doing, what God is asking you to walk in. Today is very simple. He's not complicated, nor is He burdensome. As the Bible says, "What He commands, His commandments are not burdensome," which really, His commands point to love, relationship, walking in love, growing in love, learning to love. So pleasing adds burdens to your life.

So number seven: You're going to lose the blessing of just being yourself. Because in every situation, you bend around what people say and around what other people want, what other people do. You become a chameleon. And we build ourselves around others so much, we don't, we lose who we are. And I think many Pleasers, when they start to discern, they recognize this. And the beauty, the most beautiful you is when you're yourself. In fact, the most anointed you is actually when you're just yourself on your journey. It's not putting something on, trying to look cool, trying to put some spiritual presentation on. We're really big on that these days. When you minister, you gotta look the part, you gotta kind of have this presentation that you portray. And it keeps you from just being yourself. So we think, we think the anointing of God is in the mask, the fabrication, the presentation. So we keep doing that. That's work. That's where God moves, right? When I do that, when I say that. No, He moves when you're just yourself and a vessel, just let it flow through your life and be yourself. For that, that's a big step of change for a pleaser.

So you also don't stretch because you're always staying in the comfortable zone of your pleasing, reacting to things. So you don't stretch and work through guilt, work through your fears, work through your childhood wounds that are driving people-pleasing. We just don't deal with that stuff. We don't deal. So therefore, we don't stretch. And life becomes inauthentic because people-pleasing trains you to fabricate yourself, to be plastic with people, to not be yourself and have your own opinion, your own perspectives. And so your interactions with people become and have been, unfortunately, not real and authentic. Because people pleasers live to please, but they don't actually live. And what I want you to do is I want you to take your life back. I want you to begin living again. And I want you to begin to have beliefs and convictions and perspectives and live out of that, and know how to say no. And that's your yes, be yes, and your no, be no. Knowing that there are yeses in life and there are no's. People pleasers, they're stuck in their yes, and they don't know how to say no. Because we need both in life. We need to be able to know how to say them. And I want you to be able to be free in that. Otherwise, life becomes inauthentic, and joy just gets removed.

So what happens is, you live as a slave rather than as a servant. And it's important to understand the difference. Now, our identity is sons and daughters, but we serve one another, right? There's a big difference between a slave and a servant. Big, big difference. A servant has a choice in the matter. A servant chooses. I choose. I have the opportunity here. I click record today. I choose to serve your heart today and to share the things that have helped me and I've learned. And a slave has no choice because they're under the influence of something else that's kept them under bondage, and now they just respond to that. And Paul's told us, "We are no longer slaves." You can break free from that. So we can move. We don't have to remain under a bondage of slavery and carry that yoke in our life where we are looking at people in the way that we are. And it gets us lost in our journey.

So that's the first tip. I took a bit longer in that because that's going to take some reflection. That's going to sober us up, right? Because we realize, okay, that's not the life I want to live.

The second thing that I would bring out, healing tip number two, is to gain a healthy perspective as to what freedom looks like. What does it look like to be free from people-pleasing? It doesn't mean that you are just bulletproof and what people say just bounces off of you like you have a titanium shield around your whole heart and emotions. That's not realistic. That's not how life works. So what I'm not saying is that you just go around like, "Oh, that person hates me. Oh, they insulted me. Or that person said that. Oh, I just don't feel a thing." We're kind of talking about a robot here. And some of you, you have trouble thinking in black and white. So when you think of one set of bondage and you consider freedom, you think of the other side of bondage. If you think that way, you have black and white thinking in your view.

So it's like those who say they're under religious Phariseeism or legalism, right? And you talk about grace and freedom. Black and white thinkers go, "Well, I don't want to be lawless." And it's like, "Wait, no one says you're going to be lawless." Freedom from one doesn't mean you're automatically going to fall into the bondage of another. Now, in the freedom, you may find yourself like, kind of bouncing back and forth, maybe influenced from from some sides that could get into extremes. But in the journey, I found that I have to give myself, I have to give this even to other people, give ourselves permission that we're learning in the journey, right? We're learning in the process. That where we've fallen into a ditch of pleasing, there will be times where we say our "no" and maybe we didn't say it the nicest way. But because we're having to work hard at it, we're having to work hard at saying no. So sometimes it comes across a little more rude than we wanted to. Like, "Okay, I need to add grace to that." But it doesn't mean I go back into the ditch again. I'm learning. And that's, that's the grace and patience of God that He is, He is patient to work with us on our journey. That it's not this black and white, "Get free tomorrow, get free actually by yesterday, hurry it up, right?"

So don't get black and white and what freedom looks like. And I also don't want to convey this picture because Christianity does this. I mentioned this last time. We have this, we kind of walk around, "I don't care what people think. I care what God thinks." Right? It's, it's cute. It's like, it sounds nice. But we're conveying an inaccurate message. Because those same preachers that say that, go back to their email boxes and spin about stuff people say. And then you hear in their sermons them trying to defend themselves or them trying to, they do care what people think. It's just they're, I'm more concerned about them. Because they're not giving room for the processing. And I want to give you room to process.

Now, in popular culture, you may hear this kind of statement. You know, you hear people say, "Oh, you know, that him, he doesn't give up what people think. You know, he doesn't, he doesn't give up what people think." I didn't swear, I just, I hit the button, right? And we, and we have that saying, right? And we need to understand, A, that's not really true. Um, and B, if that is true, we're describing a sociopath. We're, we're just, or we're describing a robot, not a real person. What we're describing is a sociopath.

Now, um, you know, it'll start spinning, "Oh, maybe I'm a sociopath." No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. If you're here and you're wanting to learn, all right, many people want to spin. "I'm a sociopath because I struggle with feelings and emotions and stuff like that." And, and, and, and numb. No, no, that's not, that's not where I'm going here today, folks. That's not where I'm going. Relax, relax, relax. No one's calling you a sociopath, right? Um, but we, we portray something that doesn't help people's expectations. Because early on, when I was recognizing my pleasing issues, kind of saw like people on TV, maybe that like James Bond, you know, where it just seems like nothing bothers him, right? It's like, "Hey, that's not real." B, it is stuff is getting to him. It's going to show up. Uh, it's going to show up in many areas of his life. Um, so Hollywood has this way of like showing this bulletproof emotional kind of persona, and it's not giving people an accurate representation of what the journey's like.

So a couple thoughts I'll share with you. What freedom looks like. This is kind of a quick summary. Freedom's going to first involve discerning people-pleasing patterns. You see it, you notice it. Two is understanding, getting more to the why. Why do you live this way? And the only way you can get from number one to number two is compassionate grace. If you shame yourself, if you shove it down, if you deny it, if you defend it, all that stuff is going to keep you out of sobriety. You won't see what you need to see. So then number three is, you starve your compulsive behavior. And what I mean by that, the compulsive behavior to do something out of pleasing, you have to starve it. And then notice what's going on there. Because guilt will sometimes increase, anxiety will increase. You won't know what to do with yourself. But then you're going to start noticing the new areas that need healing. And then you start practicing new patterns. So that pleasing does not dictate your actions. So what somebody thinks may bug you, but it doesn't mean you have to serve it. So that gives kind of a quick summary.

Now let's get deeper. So here's healing tip number three: Is I want to encourage you, discover how a root of rejection influences your behavior. Why is this so important? And I constantly recommend this resource because this was pivotal in my journey because I realized most of my dysfunctional relationship interactions were rooted in rejection. And what makes rejection deadly is rejection fuels the sense of separation and disconnection. It does it with you and God. Tells you God is far, even though He's not. It creates a sense of separation from others. People don't like you, they don't love you. So you need to, to then feel loved, then feel accepted. And that goes into a whole list of things. It also creates a sense of separation from yourself. So then you start beating yourself up, you self-reject. And it keeps this fuel of disconnection going and drives you to then perform or do things to fix this perceived disconnection.

And Christians are notorious for this because we constantly feel disconnected from God. Maybe you have some sin you're struggling with, and you have shame over it. So you feel God left when that happened. He departed, as though He's so fragile that He just can't handle what you're going through and what's happening into your life. And so it's actually the opposite. In our struggle, He's very near. But our, our perception of what we're struggling with creates a sense of rejection. So then we develop this mindset, whether it's with God, ourselves, other people, "I won't feel safe and okay," which is really us talking about love, unless I keep, I got to keep God happy, I got to keep people happy, I just got to keep all, you know. And so now we have all these plates we're spinning, right?

Now, we're all born with a need for approval. God built it into you so your parents would establish it. Even Jesus Himself, when He was baptized, He heard the Father's love spoken. He had identity spoken over Him. "This is my beloved Son." And He, third, He heard approval, "in whom I am well pleased." Those are three needs we all carry. And we need to hear from God, and we need to process in relationship as parents, as brothers and sisters, to manifest that kind of love for each other. So we have those legitimate areas of needing to feel that love and approval. But those who struggle with people-pleasing, they lack that growing up, father, mother areas. So this wound takes over and how they relate. Their service is pushed out of brokenness because they fear rejection and abandonment. Because their serving is the only way of connecting to people.

And I've realized this in working in church ministry in various capacities. It has saddened me that when I was no longer serving in a certain position, the relationship connections I had with people disappeared. It's like they either didn't want it, or it just didn't happen, or it just, everything just fell apart. And it saddened my heart to think the basis of relating in a lot of church circles is we're doing things together. And if we're not doing that serving project, we're no longer in relationship. How many of you experienced that in your own life, in your journey? It's heartbreaking.

So, um, so, so culturally too, we feed this people-pleasing, and it doesn't allow people to recognize these rejection wounds. Well, we're doing stuff because we're, we're, we're, and it's not all black and white where you're doing it all out of love or all out of rejection. It's a mixture. But rejection contaminates the mix. And now we're doing things out of a fear of abandonment instead of just that freedom in God's family. When you receive Jesus Christ, He receives you, He approves you, He accepts you. Jesus experienced this, as I said, in the Father's words. And so in the kingdom of God, approval comes first. The Father sends approval your way, and you live from approval rather than living your life for approval. There's a difference. Pleasers live for approval, and it's a never-ending cycle. Sons and daughters live from approval. Our Dad already loves us. Our Father already loves us. He's with us. He's got our back, right?

Now, please note, healing from people-pleasing, and I think as Christians, we miscommunicate this. We communicate to people, "Stop pleasing. Stop considering what, being sucked into what people think. Only care about what God thinks." I think that does a disservice to people because a pleaser doesn't know how to hear God's approval. So we're like, "Just get approval from God. Just know who you are in Christ." And a pleaser is like, "I, I don't know. I know, uh." And they don't hear anything because they're, they've been so neglected, they don't even know how to tune into that frequency. So in that awkwardness, they just go back to serving. So it's not like, "Oh, just, you know, God loves you and that's it," and then pleasing won't bother you anymore. And you know, you're gonna have to deal with your history, what you learned, how you learned to relate. I'm just gonna need to be healing. And it's helpful if we have some vessels that encourage us, breaking out of those pleasing patterns. And we can encourage one another. Do you have friends that go, "Hey, you know, when you set that boundary, that was really good"? You know, I think it would be so helpful if people that even that, that are ministry friends or, you know, your counselors, you know, other counselors, a therapists, or whatever, or compassion workers, and we cheer each other on when you take time for yourself, when you take time to have boundaries, and we cheer that on. We tend to just focus on the results. "Oh, look, you're meeting with all those people. You're doing all these big numbers. You're making all this money," or whatever. And those metrics feed the pleaser. They don't starve the pleaser. I want to starve the pleaser so you can be free to be who you really are.

Healing tip number four is, we're gonna have to relearn what love is. And we're gonna have to learn what love is not. People pleasers have mistaken what love really looks like. People-pleasing is not loving. People-pleasing is not loving people. Because there are many times loving someone, really loving them, means saying no. There are times in my journey, and even in my ministry work, where I've had to tell somebody no. And I know in that moment, this could either make or break this relationship. Because I may be introducing to them an aspect of love they've never received. Because there are times where a loving parent says no and needs to say no. And in fact, children do not develop well when they haven't been told no. In fact, we have a whole generation of people that grow up with entitled kind of perspectives because they've not been told no. And I see in those moments, it can spiral somebody out because they hear "no" as me being unloving. But there are those who are overcomers who hear the "no" and they receive it.

I'm not talking about like me telling them what to do, like, but like, I'm establishing a boundary. Love establishes boundaries. It does. And I, I can tell a lot by someone when I establish a boundary expression and how they respond. You know, I get like these, these requests all the time. "Hey Mark, I need your help. I need you to answer this question right now. Mark, I need you to meet with me as soon as possible. Mark, I need you to help me, 911." If you have a 911 situation, I need you to call 911. I'm not 911. I'm just not. And, um, I don't have to say yes because you've brought something to me. And I had to develop my "no" muscle. And so that when I'm praying, perfectly considering things, I can be led by God, not be led by the angst of someone's demands. And when I, when they say, "I need to be with you right now, today," and I go, "It's not possible." I know in that moment what I'm dealing with. I'm dealing with somebody who responds to love well, or who respects the work of love. Because if so, great things could happen.

There are times where love says, "No, I'm not going to feed this behavior." I remember as a youth pastor, there were times where kids would make bad decisions and they'd end up in jail. And I remember there were times where a loving parent would say, "I'm not going to bail you out tonight. You need to stay overnight. I'll pick you up in the morning." And someone said, "Oh, that's terrible. You need to rescue your kids." The point being is, there are moments where we have to make tough decisions. And it's actually love. When you have an alcoholic or an addict in the family, you have to make tough decisions. And to the addict, "You don't love me, right?" People, people live out of self-pity. And when you don't feed their narrative, their pity rises up and gets angry at you. And, and the pleaser goes, "Oh, they don't want to rock the boat." Pleasers hate rocking the boat. They hate that feeling. They avoid the feeling of connecting to someone being upset with them. Love says, "Nope."

And, um, I believe that you can make that shift to say, "I'm no longer going to interpret this toxic behavior as love." Rest a pleaser's rescue when you shouldn't. Pleasers run to your house, make a phone call, pay money. They do things to avoid bad feelings. Avoiding bad feelings is not love. There's some weight on this. There's some good weight. I mean, in a good way. Speaking of weight, love is not carrying the weight of other people that they need to carry on your shoulders. That's not love. We call a lot of things that we do love, and it's not. Many Pleasers come to a place where they soberly admit, "I've done these things to please out of guilt, try to fix, to avoid my feelings." If I didn't do that, how many of you, even you, you think a love relationship with God is doing things to try to make God happy? And you've not considered the revelation of, "This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased." Jesus received approval before He did anything in ministry. This interaction at the baptism was not when He resurrected. This was at the beginning, before He healed the sick, before He raised the dead, before He went to the cross, before He did the healings, the miracle, all the stuff that we read about and learn so much from. Because before all that happened, and that's hard to comprehend in our performance-based world, why would somebody get approval? They haven't done anything yet. Because in the kingdom of God, approval comes first. He loves you. He's proud of you. You have what it takes to overcome. Because God knows when we give this at the beginning, it ignites faith in us to then grow in faith. Why do so many of us struggle with faith? Because our love tank has been broken, shattered, and we're trying to operate from faith, and we're just striving and earning and trying, and we're just exerting pure force to try to get things going. Because our broken heart, even feel that exhaustion, right? Trying to live out something because the tank is empty. And God, the Gospel of Jesus Christ, is here to heal your broken heart and reintroduce you to what love truly is.

So this is a big step. I've had to learn it. I'm continuing to learn it. And I love helping people to teach them about what love is and what love is not. And you may want to take advantage of that resource on my website. And go to MarkDeJesus.com/love. It's a whole series there on love. And I hope to, to continue to expand on what is love, what does it look like to continue to give language to it so we can grow.

Healing tip number five, and I mentioned this already, but we're going to park here for a second. We're going to starve the compulsive urge to please. The constant doing with no checks and balances, the saying yes without a consideration that maybe I need to say no. Constant doing, constant fixing, constant trying and trying and trying. This is actually detox time. We're going to detox the harmful to make way for healing and then to make way for the new. So to use the analogy, if you've ever, have you ever detoxed food? Like, have you ever detoxed caffeine and went on a caffeine fast, or have you ever fasted sugar, or you, you've removed, going without something, right? You detox it first. You start with drawing. But then you can recognize things that need to be addressed, and then you can establish new patterns moving forward. So this actually detoxes because Pleasers are compulsive. Compulsion. And I do a lot of teaching on obsessive-compulsive behavior. Compulsion is acting out in some kind of thought pattern or action to alleviate a disturbance you feel inside. Pleasers live compulsively. They serve to fix a disturbance they have within. When you starve the compulsion, that disturbance will at first increase because it's kicking back. It's withdrawing. "Oh, what if they don't love you?" Guilt and anxiety crank up. But then, if you don't feed it, it's like a drug addict coming off of a drug. You can actually start having space to heal. Because people-pleasing keeps you from dealing with yourself. You live in avoidance for dealing with your life and dealing with your issues. Now, we're going to let yourself heal.

Because healing tip six: Makes space to receive. In this, the writing of of the psalmist David said, "He leads me beside the still waters. He restores my soul." Pleasers, you cannot lead them beside still waters. You lead a pleaser beside the still waters, and they're going to go, "Get you a drink. They're going to go make your sandwich. They're going to go, they can't sit still. They want to make sure, do you like this water? Nice? Do you need me to do anything with the water to help?" They're just doers and fidgety. And the Lord is going, "No, no, no. I'm going to lead you beside the still waters because your soul needs restoration." As you starve your compulsion to please, it gives you space now to compassionately observe the healing your heart needs. The core issue that will need to be addressed is abandonment. Abandonment drives most of our dysfunctional behavior. Abandonment says, "If this doesn't happen, you'll reject me, and then I will be alone." Followed by, "I'm gonna die." All these pathways lead to, "I'm gonna be alone. I'm gonna die. I'm gonna be in hell." You know, so we're in jail or something like that. But it's, "I'm gonna be alone." And being left alone is something we avoid with great trepidation, fear. And so we do a lot in life to avoid touching those abandonment wounds.

There's also another wound that's important for a pleaser, and in many, even obsessors and many perfectionists, is there's a deep unworthiness that's there. And this is what I mean by this: They have ignored themselves so much because they've been neglected and they help others so much, they're not aware of their own issues and aware of what they need in their own heart. So when people actually love them, it is incredibly uncomfortable. The thought of God loving you, you disqualify yourself all the time. You love other people greatly, but you disqualify yourself all the time because you are uncomfortable with love. So unworthiness comes up. And Christians spiritualize unworthiness. We are, we are great at at manifesting a fake humility, which is really like a self-rejection. And this spiritualized kind of unworthiness, "Oh, only Jesus is worthy. Oh, no, I'm not. I'm not. He must increase, I must decrease." I'm going to give you translation: I don't like myself. I really hate myself. But I'm really uncomfortable right now. So I'm going to deflect, deflect, deflect. But I need a spiritual answer because I don't want to tell you all, "I can't stand myself."

This is where the rubber meets the road now. And how we are, we're going to really start addressing what's really going on. So in that receiving, now you're going to learn to receive God's love and grace and say yes to it. Let me give you a very practical healing tip. When someone, number seven, when someone extends love to you, when they extend love towards you in some form and fashion, stop fussing and just accept it. Very, very simple. When someone compliments you, say thank you. When they send you a gift, receive it. This area, I run into this so often. Some of the great manifestations of our brokenness, and we need to call it out. It's brokenness. We need to call it out. This is not spiritual. This is not Christ-like. This is not the fruit of the spirit of rejecting and deflecting love when it's giving your way. I remember when I get off the stage after leading worship, somebody said to me, "Hey Mark, I really appreciated your worship." And I looked down at my shoes. I'm like, "Yeah, but I don't know. It wasn't because I was thinking about all the reasons that it wasn't great and therefore what they're saying is disqualified." And we call that humility. When in reality, if we want to get really honest, it's actually a form of pride that says, "No, I can't receive that." Because my, my sins and struggles are, are bigger than the love of God that's being sent my way. And we stubbornly and pridefully hold on to our disqualifying perspective of how we see ourselves.

Do you want to see a demonic manifestation in a lot of people? [Laughter] Give them a really, really nice gift, bless them extravagantly, and you will see awkwardness to sometimes downright anger. "Why did you give me this?" They don't know how to receive a gift. Doesn't that often show too how hard it is for us to receive? Because the richest gift we've ever been given is the gift of eternal life through the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ. And to those who are Pleasers, unworthiness, and perfectionists, and OCD ears, and angsty, all these, we've been beat up and deeply wounded. We have trouble receiving it because we say, "It's too good to be, it's too good to be true. There's got to be a catch to this." Because they can't receive. You want to pray for them. They gotta, "Oh, they always gotta do something back." So you give them. I remember years ago, um, me and my wife brought this up to me. Some people helped me, um, with something that was very, very generous, had to do with, uh, when I was, when I was buying my first home. And I was trying to like, you know, I was trying to find a way to like, monetarily, like bless them back. And Melissa said to me, she's like, "You're doing this out of feeling bad and awkward of what they gave to you, aren't you?" I was like, "Yeah, you're right. You're right." The proper thing is gratitude. "Thank you." Because what I received in the help they gave, I see it as a grace from God. "Thank you, Father. And thank you, brethren." I'm telling you, you can make Christians squirm. What happened? I just gave him a nice gift. Unworthiness. I'm unloved. It's hitting their childhood wounds with a hammer. And you're not swinging anything. You're just, we want love, but when it arrives, we reject it.

Stop rejecting the simple moments of the day where love is being sent your way. Say yes and amen to it. Receive it for what it is. So from a practical standpoint, let me try to explain this because this is what I'm talking about. I'm not telling you go out and obsessively look for people to affirm you and love you. "I need you to love me." That's neediness. So a healthy pattern is, don't go out looking for people to love you because it's going to be a bad hook. Learn to be loving to yourself. Say yes to God's love for you. And when love shows up at your doorstep or crosses paths, acknowledge it. Because Pleasers will give, give, but then they become resentful that people aren't loving them back. And the problem is, you're trying too hard with your pleasing. You gotta throttle down your pleasing. It's too much. Get in the flow. Love people. And when love is given, and if love is not reciprocated, it's okay. Because you're still working on yourself, and you're still working on how you see yourself. You're having a better relationship with yourself and with God. You're balancing things out. But when love shows up, because see, many people who try too hard, when they let go of the trying too hard, what they actually want shows up. It's like when people, you know, people that are, you know, they're wanting to get married and they're trying so hard to date and they're trying. And sometimes they just go, "That's gonna let it be for a little bit." All of a sudden, somebody walks into their path. I'm not, I'm not trying to create magical solutions here. I'm just, I'm giving you the principle of healthy living. We put pressure on something, it doesn't seem to happen. When we let it be, and Pleasers have to let it be in their doing. But when love shows up, acknowledge it for what it is. Acknowledge it for what it is. Someone compliments you, take the compliment. "Thank you. I appreciate that." When people write to me, write me emails, I really appreciate it. When they encourage me, I re, that means a lot. If somebody took the time to write me an email, to send me a message, don't respond to love being shown to you with dismissal.

And last, hit this is really the, if you wanted the quick summary right here of how to work through people-pleasing, it's, it's through acceptance. Accept that there are people who will not be happy with you, who will not like you. They're not gonna like you, no matter how nice you are, how great you are. I learned even in doing heart healing emphasis, I was like, "Who wouldn't want this? Who wouldn't love this? This is like, just amazing. This isn't controversial, right?" And I had no idea what it would bring up. But what I had to learn is I had to actually face it, face and experience. Now, when I would experience the disapproval from people and people not being happy with me, it would bring up, it'd bring up the obsessive fixer. And I got to do something, and I gotta make things right. I gotta do something to change this and make it better, make this person be okay with me. Oh, man, there's some days it just choked me. I kept trying to make myself go, "I don't know why I care what they think. I gotta stop caring what they think." I got stuck here with you thing, and that didn't help. You know what's helped the most? By just lovingly embracing, "Okay, I accept they don't like me. Now what?" Now I'm gonna move forward with my life. I think you actually need to experience people not being happy with you. But when you let down the pleaser, you actually see what has been there all along. But you avoided it by your pleasing. Pleasing creates a lot of noise. We stop pleasing, the noise goes down. Like, "Wait." And we think it's like a new revelation. "This person didn't like us." Ah, that was always, always there. We just, by our busyness, kept this whirlwind of noise going on. Accept it. I think acceptance is a very, very powerful, misunderstood, and under-practiced experience. Accepting what is, so that then you can begin to move forward with your life. And for mass, you have to accept you're not going to change your family. You're not going to please your family. Not going to please that person. You can't do it. Why do you bother anyway? Let it go. And then it leads us to, "Now what?" Now maybe I can start focusing on what it is that I feel called to do or what I want to do. Maybe I can start actually stepping forward in areas of my life because I'm not letting that frequency dominate my decisions and choices.

Now, I gotta leave you with this because this is very important to say at the end. Be kind to yourself when what people think still bothers you. This is a journey. This is not a light switch experience. It's okay that you have days where what somebody thinks influences your emotions and it bugs you. It's okay to acknowledge that. It's how you respond that is important. It's how you respond that can change where you compulsively do something to try to make yourself and the other person feel better. Okay, I'm not gonna do that anymore. I'm gonna give myself space where this is going to be uncomfortable for a little bit. Let those emotions work their way through you. Because your Father in Heaven has great love and grace towards you. And we want to get this people-pleasing out of the way to let it flow.

If this has been a blessing, another next level for you would be exposing the rejection mindset. If you also feel like, "Hey, I think I think I got to work on even how I see myself," "God loves me and I love myself" is a fantastic resource that you can utilize. But if this video has been a blessing to your life, please like, subscribe. Go to MarkDeJesus.com. And if you subscribe to our email list, you can get a free download of "Experiencing God's Love as Your Father." You can do that today. You can begin your own healing journey in your life. So what did you get out of this? What spoke to you? What's been a help and a blessing? Please comment below, let me know. Write to me, Mark, markdejesus.com. But Lord willing and the creek don't rise, I'll be back with more insights for your healing journey. In the meantime, this is your brother from another mother saying, I'm out.