Forgiveness For Recovering People Pleasers
Forgiveness can be challenging for those recovering from people-pleasing since it's almost like going back on the boundaries you've worked so hard to set. To set boundaries is to say, "I don't like this, and I won't let people do this to me anymore." To give forgiveness is acknowledging the trespassing of your boundaries and accepting it, letting it go. I will admit that I am a recovering people-pleaser who doesn't understand forgiveness enough to practice it. I struggle with forgiveness because I am mortified about being wrong and getting hurt. Like most things that influence our adult lives, my fears of being wrong and getting hurt stem from growing up with a lot of responsibility and the expectation to be perfect. As I look back on my childhood, my people-pleasing stemmed from believing that's how security and perfection are acquired.
The way I've understood and experienced people pleasing it's playing by everyone else's rules despite their rules not being what you want or feel comfortable with. As I learn to stop being a people pleaser, playing by everyone else's rules, I've also learned that I have virtually no rules. So the first step to being able to forgive others without feeling scared or guilty that you're slipping into old habits is to make your own rules. What are your boundaries? What are the things you're willing and unwilling to compromise on? I am learning to be more forgiving about some lies and misunderstandings. Still, I'm firm on not forgiving unfaithful significant others or people who purposefully hone in on the things I'm most insecure about or impacted by. These may be totally different from the things you're willing and unwilling to compromise on, and that's completely fine. What a person chooses to forgive is so personal that it won’t be the same for everyone. Another challenging part was figuring out if my boundaries and standards are "right," and as long as they feel right at the moment, then that's all that matters. Just like everything else in life, they can change as I and the circumstances do.
As I thought about what forgiveness means for people-pleasers like myself and how to share it with you, I realized turning it over on my own wasn't enough. I started outsourcing, researching how others have interpreted forgiveness and its practices. I've combined that advice with my experiences as a people-pleaser to start putting together some of my rules and boundaries towards forgiveness. The most important thing I learned from Rowan Abdelmeguid's article, "You Can Forgive Someone And Still Choose to Walk Away," was their definition of forgiveness. Abdelmeguid defined forgiveness as "genuinely and truly letting go of any negative feelings you hold about someone else" and points out that forgiveness is also about the person who has been wronged. As a former people-pleaser, forgiving someone felt like I would lose the right or any reason to be upset. I would often forgive to just keep others happy, but now I know that forgiveness takes however long I need to be able to fully let go of those negative feelings. This definition of forgiveness gives me the power back that I can forgive by working through my own process and no one else's. Another critical piece of advice from this article was that forgiving does not mean staying or sameness. I've always understood forgiving as letting go and moving on like it never happened, making forgiving challenging while trying to establish my boundaries and rules. So knowing that I can forgive but still leave or create different dynamics in my relationships makes learning to forgive more of an attainable goal for me.
I'm not sure if it's because I am a recovering people pleaser, have many earth sign placements or a combination of the two, but being wrong is so challenging for me. While that is an entirely different aspect of myself worth its own healing process, it influences my ability to forgive and my understanding of forgiveness. I always appreciate having a set-out thought process or formula for problems, and that's what Kristen Peoples offers in her article, "Second Chances: When to Forgive Them & When to Forget Them." She has outlined three essential questions while debating whether to forgive someone: Am I safe? Is it true? Who is the second chance for? As I considered these questions, if the answer is not "yes" for the first two, then that's a clear sign of forgetting and forgiving quietly later. Based on what I've adopted from Abdelmeguid's article, forgiveness is personal, and I can approach it at the pace I need and the way that works best for me. Sometimes that means forgiving in silence and with distance, forgiving someone else to clear my conscious and not for someone else's relief. Concerning Peoples' article, if this relationship does not offer me safety and a space to be my true self, it's not worth pursuing. The final question of who the second chance is for, I believe it would need to be for myself and the other person in the relationship. Peoples writes, "Authentic second chances give us room to be fully human with each other as we evolve." If the evolution isn't occurring for both of us, it's a challenge to pursue. I would encourage all readers, especially my fellow recovering people-pleasers, to check out Peoples' article, get a sense of your answers to these questions, and find your voice and boundaries.
Finally, one last article really caused a revelation in how I understand forgiveness and go about incorporating it into my life as a recovering people-pleaser. Robert Enright has a book and article called "8 Keys to Forgiveness," and two of these deeply resonated with me and my growth to adopting genuine forgiveness practices in my life. The primary two "keys" that stood out to me and that I am still working on are the third, addressing your inner pain, and the seventh, forgive yourself. Neither of these concepts crossed my mind while thinking of forgiveness and its role in my life. I believe that addressing my inner pain is crucial to working on any part of myself that I'm struggling with understanding or improving. So I've contemplated what forgiveness has meant to me throughout my life when I've been hurt. Like so many of us, we experienced pain and trauma from our parents and family, and we don't often forgive them since we're too young to grasp it or still angry at them. Growing up was tough for me, and sometimes my family did not make it any easier, which caused many internal conflicts, such as my fear of being wrong and people-pleasing habits. Understanding the role of forgiveness in my life helps me address those deep-seated issues of anxiety and people-pleasing. Taking ownership of my rules, voice, and decisions makes the fear of being wrong less intense, and I can see the world more beautifully while living for myself. Addressing my inner pain has many positive outcomes, but as Enright notes, acknowledging my inner pain clarifies who may need forgiveness in my life and a start to practicing forgiveness.
By far, the hardest thing to do in my journey of adopting forgiveness into my life as a recovering people-pleaser is to forgive myself. Forgiving myself means facing the things that make me scared, the mistakes and decisions I've made. I can't say I've completed this, but I am starting, and it is challenging. I realized that I hold myself to extremely high standards because that's what others have expected from me (another source of inner pain). To forgive myself, I have to acknowledge that I'm not perfect but still have value as a person despite the flaws I have. That's hard to do because it goes against what I've thought and felt I needed to be. It's another source of being wrong and redirecting myself to what feels right, which is a complicated process. From Enright's advice, I need to have self-compassion, to look at myself in a gentler light. I need to apologize to myself out loud because I deserve to be forgiven and experience that relief. It's essential to know the feeling of being forgiven, by myself or someone I've wronged, to understand what it means to forgive someone else. Forgiveness can be freeing and transformative, and we all deserve to experience that in some way or another. Please read Enright's "8 Keys" and consider which keys resonate the most with you or which ones you can be proud of already excelling in.
I can't provide a step-by-step guide on forgiveness and overcoming the fears of slipping back into old habits. But I can tell you to follow what feels right and take back control. Please make your own rules, use your own voice, and change with the flow of your life. As recovering people-pleasers, boundaries are difficult to establish and maintain, but there are ways to keep that and work around them when forgiving others. To my recovering people-pleasers, I hope this is a starting place for you, so you can explore what role forgiveness will play in your life and how you make it work for you. I wish you all the best in your journey to adopting forgiveness and ditching people-pleasing.
Illustration by Valerie Letts
