Content warning: Mental health, depression, identity, heavy talk about self-harm, miscarriage, and staying in a mental health ward. Continue with care, friends.
I didn’t realize how much of myself I’d rewritten just to feel safe — until I started grieving a version of me I’d never met. We’re not just ‘making people happy.’ Or just really kind and thoughtful. We literally rewrite ourselves to keep up with the demands of those around us. Once you begin to recognize this, and you start the unwinding process and the healing, then you begin to experience grief. You grieve what could have been, what you really wanted, and the life you’ll never know.
I can follow the exact steps of explaining away – intellectualizing instead of feeling – emotions that counteract the needs I have in a situation almost simultaneously, without even thinking about it. It’s an automated response that’s been written in from a young age.
No one talks about the child that grows up with so many constraints on their personality, their tongue, their thoughts, that they can barely breathe without ever knowing why they feel that way. Spoiler alert: People pleasing is a trauma response. At least, it was for me.
Those words have been thrown around a lot these days, so let me clarify their meaning in this context: a trauma response is the automatic response that your brain uses when it perceives danger. You do not control this; it is as automated as breathing.
When I say that ‘people pleasing’ is a trauma response for me, I am saying that my brain registered danger when I was very young, and it learned that it could protect little Del by complying with the perceived threat (or authority figure) at that time.
It’s not just choosing passivity over confrontation; it’s not selflessness, it’s a full violation of one’s identity, and erasing of self, a constant response to judgment that calls it dangerous.
Nobody talks about the person that you would have grown into if your mind had been yours all along. They don’t talk about the person you grieve when you start to rewrite this response and build up to standing your ground and being your true self. No one talks about the different life you would be living if those big life decisions were made by you, instead of your need for someone to tell you what’s safe.
Hell, even once I started to become aware of my own people pleasing, when I started to heal and I thought I was under my own control for once. . . I still discovered more layers of it that I hadn’t even thought of.
I was actively seeking a point of authority outside myself. I needed a person to tell me what to think, and then I moulded my opinions based on the safety of using that person as a litmus test. I even did this with my faith. I needed a deity to be spiritual because believing in my own internal intuition hadn’t even registered as an option.
I had to test my own faith because I feared that it was based on my family’s beliefs and the fear of having to justify myself if I strayed. It took me almost a year of avoiding my bible to realize that it was taking more effort not to pick it up than to just do so, and that was the only way I could tell that my faith was rooted in me and not just in fear for what my family would think.
My favourite colour is my mom’s favourite colour.
I grew up with long hair that I was always dying wild colours, and my family was quite proud of my long hair, especially my dad. We both had our hair grow out together.
Yet. . . the first thing that I did when I was 18 and starting to crack this shell open for some healthy rebellion? I chopped it all off.
I did still grow it out a few more times. (Once due to a relationship that was controlling and abusive, and the other due to the plague while being pregnant with my son.) I realized that I preferred shorter hair, and then had to wait for the revelation to sink in that I didn’t need anyone’s permission if I wanted to keep it short. I feel more confident, I feel more authentic, more me.
Now, let me be clear, my family never made a big deal about my hair. They wanted me to take care of it, sure, but despite my dad’s pride in the length and beauty of it, he never forced me to keep my hair grown out.
However, I was conditioned to prefer it for the safety of my caregiver’s approval.
See where I’m going with this?
I was pre-programmed by something or many things that happened when my brain was developing, which later became solidified with experiences, and this programming told my brain that disagreement was equivalent to being locked in a room with a tiger.
Now that I’ve been thinking about this through the lens of what this coping mechanism did to me, I can even say that my self-harm struggles were based on people-pleasing as well. The pressures were too goddamn strong, and I didn’t have any other way to breathe other than the snapshot I could get with the sting of the blade. I think that’s why I never went too deep.
Even admitting that is a sensitive point. It’s funny (it’s really not), but even now, I spend a lot of time thinking about how my self-harm scars and my struggles with it don’t actually ‘count’ because they don’t live up to what I’ve perceived as the way others have struggled with it. Mainly because I don’t have thick noticeable scars.
I am actually the only one who even notices my scars. They’re all just thin lines that criss-cross over my left thigh. I even had to ask a tattoo artist what she deemed as “qualifying” because she had a service for free self-harm scar cover-up tattoos. I had felt the need to explain to her that I had only done shallow cuts, so the scarring is very faint. She had said, “If you did it to yourself, it qualifies.”
That’s it.
Mind blown.
Even during the deepest part of the addiction, when I hid razor blades all over my body in my phone case, my bracelet, or the bottom of my shoe, I berated myself for never going deeper. I only ever cut just enough to feel that sting. It only ever bled enough to smear it but never to drip, never to need a lot of work to clean them up, never needing a bandage. But I wasn’t even ‘good enough’ at the self-harm because it didn’t fit the way everyone else struggled with it.
I had an accidental obsession with the singer of a rock band. Classic. It appeared overnight. I’d heard the band’s music before and had it in some playlists, but it wasn’t until I watched a music video that my brain clicked and latched onto the lead singer.
Six months later, I’m having a conversation with my therapist about how I’ve been triggered for the last four days, and I don’t know why, but also, I’m having really intimate dreams of that singer – but instead of that being enjoyable, it was even more triggering and making me feel even more sad and depressed!
She wasn’t even surprised. The therapist had me back up for a moment and consider why I’m attached to this person. What draws me to them – other than the obvious fact of being a hot rockstar in leather.
I started to explain that he was everything my inner child had dreamt of growing into. Not the rockstar or the famous bits – but his attitude and his confidence. He didn’t care about how others saw him; he was doing what he loved, and he would continue to do it his own way, and if others thought he was silly or stupid or if they hated him for it, then fuck them. I kept saying that the music video that started this lived rent-free in my head because “his level of sass and lack of caring is an attitude I strive to be capable of reaching.”
Then she very casually said, “okay, so, he’s your ideal self. And you want your ideal self to take care of you, but you also don’t think you deserve their kindness and compassion. Why is that?”
Mind blown, part two.
Still, I’m sitting here three years after that, and I’ve only just figured out: Del, you have to stop people-pleasing.
I was talked into an abortion that I didn’t want because my mind couldn’t fathom disagreeing with this person that I loved. I give no fault to that partner, as he stated what he felt at the time was best, and was open to talk about it. However, my brain did its autocorrecting thing, and before I had any intentional thoughts about the situation, I was explaining all my own feelings away and forcing myself to agree with him. Six months later, I was pregnant again, and once again being forced to schedule an abortion. I miscarried it before the appointment, but none of the doctors in my city wanted to do the tests to prove that it was a miscarriage because they didn’t want to deal with it.
And then.
That partner left.
Now, on the one hand, it’s fine because I’m better off without him. On the other hand, though, I now had to process my entire world crashing down despite all my hard work to be submissive, to agree, and to please him.
I ended up having a two-week stay in the Mental Health Ward of my hospital.
I could no longer handle everything.
Real Del was finally pissed off enough that she wasn’t going to lie low and let us be overwhelmed by the needs and wants of every person who had any form of contact with us.
The only person that mattered then was Del., and Del’s son, but he was being taken care of by both my mom and his paternal grandma, so he was fine.
It was there that I realized the full impact of this trauma response.
It was there that I realized I had no clue who I actually was without someone else telling me.
The irony of this revelation is that I’ve lived my entire life up until this point promoting independence and individual expression and not caring about what other people felt about me!
I literally went to an ex’s family reunion while we dated just for the sake of making some of them feel uncomfortable because his mom thought it would be hilarious if I showed up with rainbow hair, and I loved the idea!
Yet, there I was, figuring out that I wasn’t entirely sure if my faith in God was mine, and I didn’t think the healthcare system was a conspiracy trying to get us all addicted to drugs, and I didn’t ever want to lose those two babies.
And man.
That fucking hurt.
I had to sit with a nurse one evening on my sixth day in there because I wanted to hurt myself again. The thing about that is, the self-harm had become an addiction before I was able to stop. So, even though I had been a month away from nine years clean, I couldn’t be trusted with myself at that point.
The nurse had asked me, “What were you thinking about?”
And I had to explain, “you see, that’s the thing. I don’t have active thoughts of it. I’m not sitting here with my brain saying ‘cut yourself, cut yourself, cut yourself…’ I feel it in my body. I’m drawing on my skin and keeping my hands busy because if I don’t, I’ll unconsciously just start running my nails across my skin until I draw blood. It’s a compulsion more than a thought. I’ll even hold a perfectly jovial conversation while I do it.”
So, we sat together and I clung to my notebook like it was my lifeline, and we talked. She didn’t let me go until I was able to confirm that the feeling had passed.
All of this agony and struggle. . . just because my brain somewhere along the way equated ‘disagreeing’ to dangerous.
Funnily enough, that revelation came because I was working on a module about setting boundaries, and it had an exercise that wanted me to write a mission statement: a declaration that would outline who you are and what you stand for. This was to be the anchor for which you could remember when you’re setting healthy boundaries.
Well, that took me three days to figure out, and some dramatic soul-searching. It literally felt like I had to tear ME out from the machinations of everyone else in my entire life.
Before I left the hospital, I made myself tell my family about these revelations, and explained that I needed them to stop overburdening me with their messages and thoughts and needs.
Now I have work to do. I have to get to know Del. And I have to figure out what she needs for growth and strength and how I can cultivate her without the pressures of fitting anybody else’s standards.
I literally have to learn how to be okay with being perceived just as I am.
People-pleasing is much more than just not saying no to people and being kind and being a pushover. Those are simple, surface-level attributes.
I’m 30 years old writing this, and my entire 30 years of life are compiled of little monumental personal choices that I can’t take back and do over, and they weren’t decided by ME.
I live with a lot more fear now as I try to fight this instinct to seek out my one person who can tell me what to think. However, I am also far stronger now than I’ve ever been. I’ve spent the last year having to repeat to myself over and over again that I am safe and strong and I can do xyz things. Never thought I’d be a positive affirmations girl, but here I am, reaping the benefits, because those affirmations are what allow me to soothe that terror when I stand my ground, and no one will steal any more of my choices from me. Del is finally here. And she is loud. And she will not be silenced again.
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