Self-Abandonment: People Pleasing versus Helping People

True story time. In 2014, I shared my dirty little secret with my therapist. “I don’t like helping people.” Yes, I – who considers myself a servant to my Complex-PTSD community and gets much satisfaction from doing so – once said and fully believed my own words. That’s how severe my self-abandonment programming once was. I had no idea there was a difference between people pleasing and helping people. I also had a lifetime of experiences “confirming” that when I helped people, they kept needing more from me.

In other words, I was feeding a vicious cycle due to my childhood programming. Not knowing any other way of helping others than by abandoning myself to attend their needs. So, naturally if people were in need of help, they went to me, the girl who never said no. And I chose to isolate as my only means of protection from a world of people who “needed me too much”.

It’s been quite the journey to overcome my self-abandonment programming. And now that I am at last on the other side of it, where my life is enriched from helping others, I believe I can help you, dear reader, make sense of your own.

Hopefully, the process of breaking your own chains will not include a year of daily rage flashbacks (That story is here.) when I saw my enabler father a little too clearly. Unfortunately, that’s what it took to break mine and I wouldn’t wish that on anyone.

Self-Abandonment as a Cognitive Distortion

I have said this before and I will keep saying it. All the abuses our Cluster B disordered (Trauma Glossary 1) parents inflicted on us has taught us to perpetuate those same abuses on ourselves. Self-abandonment is one of the ways we learn how to self-abuse. In fact, if you struggle with this one, I guarantee that these were your childhood experiences.

• Emotionally abandoned. Your caretakers made you feel like your needs didn’t matter.
• Scapegoated. Your caretakers projected their negative character traits on you. You were consistently accused of being selfish and other character assassinations.
• Parentified. Your caretakers played role-reversal. They put their needs above yours and made you feel obligated to attend to theirs.
• Survival hinged on developing an emotional “sixth sense” of others. You spent your childhood walking on eggshells. Sensing the energy, mood, and other non-verbal cues of your caretakers was crucial for surviving their attacks.
• Never allowed to be yourself or know yourself. You were consistently told who you should be instead of accepting you for who you are.
• No boundaries or privacy. Your caretakers demanded to know every aspect of your life and they were not above snooping to gain that information. You were likely not allowed to lock your bedroom door and your caretakers had a habit of barging in without the courtesy of knocking first.

All these childhood experiences create new adult experiences that keep “confirming” our childhood programming. And so, as a result, we learn to hold ourselves accountable for other people’s behaviors (scapegoating ourselves). We tend to be hyper-sensitive to other people’s suffering (the emotional “sixth sense” we developed) at a great cost to our own (abandoning ourselves).

Other problems you may have and why

• Impostor Syndrome dismisses other people’s positive feedback. If someone tells you that you’re a good person, do you internalize the compliment? Or do you think, “They don’t know the real me”?
• You isolate yourself. Not knowing how to assert or set boundaries without triggering the toxic shame, isolating might feel like your only chance at freedom.
• Social Anxiety because you don’t know how to take up space and express yourself. It’s hard to do that when we don’t know ourselves. You may also fear ridicule because that’s what happened in your childhood.
• You over-apologize because you keep expecting to be blamed for something.
• Negative Noticing. When we believe that our needs don’t matter, it impacts our brain chemistry. It’s always scanning for ways to “confirm” whatever it is we believe. And so, we only notice those who don’t care while overlooking those who do.
• Trust Issues either with yourself or other people. The longer we live in our self-abandonment programming, the more experiences we have of people taking advantage of us. This tends to create a slew of “I can’t” thinking when we view our world and try and gauge our place in it.

A Vicious Cycle That Feeds Other Trauma Responses

Behind every self-abandonment behavior is a shame or fear based belief. Whether it’s a fear of consequences or a fear of “confirming” we’re bad people. Just ask Ulysses S. Grant, who, despite becoming army general and eighteenth president of the United States, was a walking target for swindlers. It’s worth noting that he had a narcissistic father and so, Grant spent a lifetime blaming himself for the reason others were taking advantage of him. When all along, it was his self-abandonment programming.

In the CPTSD community, we have what’s known as Toxic Shame. We were programmed to believe many negative things about ourselves. It’s very painful and we will do anything to relieve ourselves of it. This is why we develop the Super-Conscience. Believing if we’re “extra good” we might escape those shameful feelings. We also developed a Vicious Critic that’s trying to protect us from the threat of even more shame. So, it’s reminding us to keep toeing the line or else. These three problems are feeding each other in one continuous loop. That’s how it’s activated in real time and creates the same actionable behavior. Our 4^th problem: Self-Abandonment. Forget the Self and please others.

Ulysses S. Grant: The Amazing General Who Was a Fawn Type

Toxic Shame, Super-Conscience, and Critic are in in Trauma Glossary 2, just in case you’re unfamiliar with these terms. When toxic shame activates in real time, it’s an emotional flashback to all those childhood experiences. And so, we respond the way we had to as children.

Self-Abandonment & Projection

What is projection? It’s when we assume that the other person has the same traits and intentions that we have. And it tends to come from a place within that we aren’t seeing clearly enough. When the Cluster B disorders project, they are accusing others of the same behaviors they are guilty of doing. They are also projecting because they don’t want to hold themselves accountable. This is the type of projection and accountability we usually think about when we hear these terms. But there’s another side that isn’t often talked about.

Validation is how we hold ourselves accountable for our goodness and our abilities. However, if our parents taught us to only see ourselves as bad and useless, we are unsure how to validate ourselves. So, unable to see ourselves clearly, we tend to project our goodness and unprocessed pain onto others. For example, Ulysses S. Grant had a strong moral code. Because he never took the time to validate his unique gift, he projected his best intentions onto others, much to his detriment.

My unprocessed pain was projected onto others. Disappointing others was my worst trigger. The slightest frown in response to my saying I couldn’t do whatever it was they wanted had the power to send me into a shame spiral. I wasn’t just disappointing them – my shame spiral would say to me – I was destroying their life. Not wanting to be that person, my self-abandonment programming would roar to life. And I would go out of my way to make up for my perceived “selfishness”.

People Pleasing vs. Helping People

When raised by those who make us feel as though no amount of “helping” them is ever enough and mysteriously, we are always “selfish” no matter what we do, we end up like the person I was describing in this article’s opening. No understanding of the difference between people pleasing and what it means to simply help people. But the trick is to check in with ourselves emotionally. Because our emotions will always reveal what’s going on.

People Pleasing means we are feeling drained. If it feels self-sacrificing, it means we are people pleasing. We feel like we are losing ourselves on someone else’s behalf. After all, self-abandonment literally means abandoning the self. People pleasing tends to come from a dreaded sense of obligation. We don’t want to do this but if we don’t, it will mean we are a bad person. And how can we live with ourselves if we feel like the villain?

Some examples of people pleasing include maintaining a relationship with someone who only wants to go to places they know you don’t like and they never stop to consider what you would like to do. Or perhaps you have that one friend who is consistently dumping their problems on you and you drop everything you’re doing to attend them.

Helping People on the other hand, is fulfilling. Contrary to popular belief, we do get something back when we are helping people. Not in the financial sense or that someone now owes us a favor. We feel empowered by making a difference for someone else in some small way.

Helping people means listening and sharing. In other words, true connection. It’s starting and ending the help while our cup stays full. It’s helping someone because we want to, not because we have to.

The Most Difficult Programming to Fight

Learning how to set boundaries is the end goal for escaping our self-abandonment programming. But it’s difficult when we first start practicing them because shame spirals tend to be the side-effect. Believe me, the first time I held my own, I suffered an eleven-hour shame spiral all because I told my programming: Not today! But after that, it became easier. Learning how to set boundaries is such an important topic -especially in our Complex-PTSD community – it needs to be its own article. So, stay tuned for that one next week.

But in the meantime, there are other things we can do. For one thing, we tend to do a better job fighting for others than for ourselves. That’s because when we aren’t the ones personally involved, we see the situation clearly without the toxic shame clouding our judgement. So, one thing we can practice is imagining someone else in our situation. What sort of advice would we give them? Now practice following it.

Clarity is always the foundation for problem-solving. Review what happened to you and then ask in what ways are you perpetuating their same abuses on yourself? Self-reflection is key to self-discovery; and self-discovery is key to building confidence and self-esteem. This is how we learn to validate ourselves and break the chains of our programming.

Setting Boundaries and Holding Your Position