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I've already talked about my addiction to praise and ingrained habit of people pleasing. At this point in my journey, it's the biggest wound I need to heal. I have not only been trained - I have trained myself - to obey, but to be pleasing to those I hold up as figures of authority. I please them by molding myself into a person that is compatible with them and with their ideology. I soak up the characteristics of those I put in power over me like a sponge. I have seen this tendency play out most dramatically in my relationship to Devin. Before I met him in person, I was pretty gung ho on the idea of becoming a permaculturalist, starting my own garden, living on the edge of civilization. But only a very short time after I met him in person, I had reshaped my opinions on the subject to match his own - that permaculture is a dead-end and that becoming a hunter-gatherer was the way to go. Of course, Devin spoke of it solely in terms of the way that was right for him and was not pressuring me at all to change my thinking. I did that willingly, if a bit too quickly. It's not that, upon giving it more thought, that I even disagree with his opinions at all. It's that I took them upon myself as absolutes. In my mind, he was the teacher, and I was simply eating up the lessons like I've done for the past 13 years.
This trouble with blind acceptance of whatever I perceive as authority extends in an opposing way as well. Those that I hold up as authority have obviously changed a lot, and it's very hard for me to face those past authority figures who do not necessarily know how I've changed. I'm caught in an internal double bind of not wanting to pretend or wear a mask around them but also not wanting to deal with explaining and justifying myself to them and then feeling the psychic pain of their changed opinions about me, of my not pleasing them any more. So I end up just attempting to shut those former authority figures out of my life. It's true that I could just give up on maintaining the now false image that they have of me in order to begin relating to them more honestly, but honestly, without the motive of pleasing them, I have nothing drawing me to them, nothing that I feel I have in common with them to share in a friendship. I'm not talking about anyone in particular, just the general sense of weariness that I get when confronted with the conflict of my past and present selves. I really just want to walk away from that former life and have nothing more to do with it, but I don't know how that would work if I want to heal the wounds received during that time. I can never fully walk away from what made me who I am today, from what brought me to this point. But in another sense, I am always walking away from my former self as I change and evolve a little bit each day.
Fuck, I think I got off track. Let's try starting again at a different point.
I'm tempted to consider whether, since this habit of soaking up the opinions and goals of my authority is so ingrained, I could use it to my benefit by carefully choosing who it is that I put on that pedestal and so become the person I want to be... by... becoming other people? Shit, that's a really stupid way to behave. And it's what I've been doing. All my life. No, I need to kick this habit, and I need to do it by being an ass. Well, not necessarily being an ass, but I'll definitely be feeling like one. Instead of soaking authority figures up, I need to purposefully put them off. My mom describes my people pleasing behavior in terms of seeking peace at all costs. I avoid conflict by anticipating what those I would conflict with want and preemptively giving them that. So I simply need to get more comfortable with being in conflict with other people.
Simply. heh.
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