Cutting the Approval or Acceptance Cord

The recovery from parental rejection and the defenses erected around that root can be a long process. Breaking down walls of coping mechanisms that we are using long after they are needed is tedious and takes time. The walls are so thick that you may not even realize they are not part of the real you.

One of the main responses to parental rejection is the need for approval and acceptance from others more than paying attention to what you actually need. A person operating in this mode will be very tuned into the needs of others. They may even try to meet the other’s need even before they ask for anything. Living this way causes a person to lose touch with their own needs and will often favor the needs of others over their own.

If you are craving approval and acceptance from others, you are at risk for losing a sense of yourself and your needs as well as your identity. Putting another ahead of you causes you to be out of touch with yourself and unable to experience true intimacy with others and God. It is not possible to make yourself vulnerable (which is required for true intimacy) if you are busy living outside yourself in relationships.

In addition, a focus on the needs of others over your own can become very manipulative. If you look at the motives behind this kind of behavior, it is really about making yourself look good so others will like you. You create a false person that always needs more of a “fix” to feel good about yourself. Consequently, the purpose of your willingness to do kind things for others or meet their needs is driven by your own selfish addiction to acceptance and approval.

Relationships like marriage then become very controlling and not authentic. It is impossible to be emotionally honest at the level needed in an intimate relationship if one or the other of the partners involved is practicing getting acceptance by doing what they feel the other wants. It may be a partner will feel smothered because they did not ask you to do anything to gain their approval. If you are the approval addict, you may resent all the things you are doing and not getting the credit you crave for all you do. It just becomes very scheming, confusing and not real, and, of course, painful.

Go back to the last blog and ask if you have some unresolved issues of rejection that are lurking within you. Then, ask yourself if you need to cut the cord of approval addiction.

Blessings,
Susan