People-Pleasing: The Idolatry of Being Needed
Obviously, I’m not trying to win the approval of people, but of God. If pleasing people were my goal, I would not be Christ’s servant. (Gal 1:10, NLT)
People pleasing. Is there anyone among us who is not guilty of the onerous sin of people pleasing? Every time I hear someone proudly declare, “I don’t care what anyone thinks of me,” I wonder who they are speaking to—themselves or that person just within earshot?
I shake my head at the number of times I have seen people bend themselves backward to meet someone’s expectations; I include myself in the bending (hopefully, I am not one setting the exacting expectations, but I’m sure that has happened). It seems that there are two kinds of people: those who do the demanding and those who bend their knees and backs to them.
As with all illustrations, this is likely too simple for the complexities of human life and relationships. But indulge me for a minute.
We are all slaves to a master, whether it is the demanding voice of a parent inside your head, the inner voice that tells you that you are worthless unless you do X, or the pressures of societal norms and rules that insist that you are rude and unkind unless you follow each one exactly. Some of us command others in an attempt to control these voices; others empty themselves to the ones making the demand, hoping that this will give them some value in their otherwise monotonous existence.
The bottom line is that we all hear voices telling us what to do and how to behave so that we are accepted.
No, perhaps that is not the bottom line. The bottom line goes deeper than that. The bottom line is that we all want to be loved for who we are, and we each go about it in different ways, usually meeting the expectations and demands of others—essentially, people-pleasing.
We all have roles that we fill, parts that we play. We don our masks and costumes each morning: medic, firefighter, parent, accountant, health care aide, contractor, customer service rep… We greet each day with a smile and conform to the expectations laid upon us so that we can lay our heads down at the end of each day and feel like we’ve had something to offer the world.
Yes, we are all slaves to a master, and none greater in the Western world than the Master of Productivity. She demands that we do more so that we are worth more. To never stop. To ignore our soul crying out desperately for love. To bend over backwards to make sure everyone else is taken care of first before we ever pay attention to our withering selves. More. More.
“If I don’t do X or Y or be available to all people at all times just in case they need something from me, then am I even a loving Christian? Am I reflecting God’s love to them if I say no to them in their need?”
There’s the rub… by helping others or meeting their needs, I have set myself up as their God. I have made their encounter with God dependent on whether or not I show up to them, and while showing up to care for others can show God’s love to them, so does stepping back and allowing them to encounter God for themselves without my intervention blocking their way.
I don’t mean that we never step in to help others, not at all. But maybe our Christian call is not to rescue others wherever we see a need, but to hold that need before God and ask him to reveal himself to them, that he might encounter them powerfully and personally. If I step in his stead, I’ve made God into my own image. There’s a place for helping, and there’s a place for allowing others to meet God for themselves, and the difference is known by discernment.
Ah, discernment, that magical word that somehow means knowing the heart of God and his will for our lives. Okay, I’m being facetious here, but truly, that is what discernment felt like until I began to experience it for myself. There is a simple (but very difficult) key to discernment: You yourself need to experience God.
You have to know who God is in your own life and being before you can ever begin to discern his presence in the world, and this only happens by spending time with him, by having honest conversations with him, by delving into the corners of your soul with him. It requires giving up the parts of yourself that are rough and codependent on others to satisfy your needs. It requires surrendering the things you think you love (but are really just Band-Aids over your deeper pain). It requires a full reordering of your loves and priorities.
St. Ignatius says that the first step to knowing God is to know his love for you. This is the foundation: that God loves you. It’s a simple phrase, but I’ve been uncovering depths that I did not know were there, places where I realized that I did not truly believe that he loves me. His love confronts your misguided perceptions of your worth and rewrites them with his loving gaze.
I realized recently that I had placed the needs of others above my desperate need to meet God and be loved by him. The needs of others had become an idolatry, one that I thought only I could satisfy… and thus, I had become my own God and had made myself God to others.
Perhaps the secret to escaping a people-pleasing mentality isn’t just in changing our behaviours; it’s in changing our perception of our own value by accepting how deeply and desperately we are loved by God. Then, we may be settled in knowing how loved we are rather than in finding love from others. Our priorities shift from loving others first to loving God first and knowing just how much he loves us. From this love, love for others overflows, but now rightly ordered.
Photo by Marco Bianchetti on Unsplash
