Just this past week I was totally inspired by words from a man I was working with that also made us both laugh. He was going on about his worries about the action of someone he cared about and all the ways that he, himself, was at fault. After listening for a bit, I asked how he knew their behavior was related to him. He reflected for a bit, and then said with a smile, “Because…it’s all about me.”
Anxiety has a way of making us self absorbed. Even if our obsessive thinking is about trying to please other people or do the right thing, our very process of spinning in our heads is very solitary. We try to read other people’s minds and assume we know what they feel. Or we project, assuming they feel or think as we do or as we fear. Of course it’s not possible, nor advisable, to be immune to other people’s opinions or actions. It’s healthy and valued to care about what people think, especially the ones we love. But there’ a difference between respecting what people think and assuming responsibility for it. When we make it about us, we often act to reduce our own discomfort rather than acting to address what is actually happening with the other person.
I often laugh when I step back from my people pleasing tendencies to see how selfish I’m actually being. I want to avoid conflict, I want the day to be pleasant, and most of all, I want people to like me. I go out of my way to assume what other people need and want, and then assume I can deliver it. If they aren’t happy, it’s because I did or didn’t do something. In essence, I make it all about me. And in doing so, I put pressure on the other person to show they’re happy or appreciative of what I’m doing. They sense that I need them to be happy for my sake. In fact, it may actually make it harder for them to express what they want or need, especially if they have to worry about hurting my feelings or feed into my anxiety about not being good enough.
Self absorbed thinking can also work the other way around. Rather than us being responsible for other people’s reactions, we instead assume others are intentionally responsible for ours. We blame them for how we feel. I often remember my mother telling me I should put a sweater on because it made her cold to see me without one. It seems funny, but we do this in bigger and more subtle ways all the time. Often we make our preferences someone else’s problem. For example, I get just a wee bit irritable when I’m hungry. Not wanting to ruin my appetite or overeat, I would stress my husband out about coming home for dinner at the time I wanted to eat. I’d get annoyed, and especially when he got home late, a wee bit snarky. I’d accuse him of causing me to be hungry and blame my bad mood on him. Rightly, he finally called me out on it. My preference and my reactions were not his problem. While he would try to be home at our usual dinner time, if he was forced to be late, it was up to me to either choose to eat without him or eat a bit to even out my blood sugar. I had to let go of the story I had built up in my head that he was disrespecting me and creating difficulty for me. The truth was, the time he left work was not about me.
To be clear, being a considerate and generous person is wonderful and being assertive about our needs is important. But people pleasing and obsessional thinking are different. Giving is about the other person, while people pleasing is an attachment to someone else’s reaction in order to avoid our own discomfort. And blaming other people for our own discomfort is a way of avoiding the burden of responsibility for our reactions. Either way, personalizing reactions leads to blurred boundaries and unhealthy communication. We can tie ourselves up in knots creating stories about what others do and why. Stepping back to remind yourself that “it’s not all about me” is a great way to detangle ourselves.