What I eventually figured out – not that it ever seems to get particularly easy – is that other people’s negative emotions are ultimately a problem that belongs to them. And you have to allow other people their problems.
People-pleasing tendencies develop for different specific reasons, but right at the core of all of them lies a fundamental denial of what it means to be a limited human being. When it comes to the challenge of building a meaningful life, it’s easy enough to see that our limited quantity of time is a major stumbling block. (A vast proportion of conventional productivity advice consists of techniques for maintaining the illusion that you might, one day, find a way to fit everything in.) But we’re saddled with many other limitations, too, including the one that makes people-pleasing such an absurd and fruitless endeavour – which is that we don’t have nearly as much control over other people or their emotions as we might wish.
Essentially, it’s a form of perfectionism, a felt need to perfectly curate what’s going on inside other people’s heads, if you’re ever to let yourself relax or feel secure. Like all flavours of perfectionism, it diverts energy and attention from what really matters most; and it encourages the sufferer to lead what the Swiss psychotherapist Marie-Louise von Franz called a “provisional life” – a life that somehow doesn’t quite count as the “real thing”, not just yet, because you haven’t yet developed the skills to keep everyone around you permanently happy with everything you’re doing….
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After the truth-shower 