Anxiety Support Group

Anxiety is a physical condition marked by intense and persistent feelings of distress, fear, angst or dread. General anxiety caused by routine day-to-day stresses usually passes quickly and is experienced by almost everyone at one time or another. However, such feelings that linger over time and are very difficult to cope with, and which lack a clear cause, may indicate...

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the personality trait of the pleaser

jeffstueber
jeffstueber
for a few weeks now, I have bantered about the idea of the type of abuse I got when I was young - being picked on and so forth and a bit of self esteem being cut down by my Dad - but never thought of myself as an abused person.
But recently I had thought about it in more detail and done some research and found some traits in common between me and abused people - particularly in my anxiety and obsessiveness this year. But just in the last week i looked up a book on abused women (yeah, that stuff can apply to us guys also) and found a personality of the "pleaser." I did some research today just googling that personality trait and found one site where it's profile and comparison with me is dead on, especially at work.

http://sfhelp.org/popif/pleaser.htm

Can anybody else say that something like this is the source of their anxiety?
AloneNaturally
AloneNaturally
Absolutely! I know that when I experience a 'trigger' associated with PTSD, it's my inner child self reliving (mentally, emotionally, physically, spiritually) the sadness, pain and loss of childhood in fear as a result of abuse. Today I prefer to be alone and will likely live alone for the rest of my life, and without support because my older siblings don't understand or even know the full extend of the abuse I endured that they never did. I am living today with less symptoms of both PTSD and GAD because every day is a new day for me to learn a new skill to deal with the strife of life and create a life for myself that is manageable. Great Share, Thank You.
SensitiveHoboLady
SensitiveHoboLady
Oh I can definitely identify with that. I'm a people-pleaser and a negotiator, and I often put self care on the back burner to make sure everything is running smoothly for the people around me first. Huge part of my anxiety.
JudyFZ
JudyFZ
This is me to a tee. I'm not sure how I ended up this way. I wasn't abused but my father was very strict and I was bullied in school, too. But even when I was very young, I was so eager to please all my teachers and I thought it was the end of the world if I ever got in trouble.

It is a really stressful way to live. I think it's interesting how it says that this part of you distrusts the true self. I think you have to work on strengthening and staying connected to who you really are, deep down inside. Then you are able to be more loyal to yourself and stop worrying about what other people think.
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