If you find you are always the one to bend over backwards for everyone else, you might be disempowered in these two specific areas I’m about to talk about.
I’ve talked to quite a few people lately that seem to be living their life for someone else.
❌They are too afraid to rock the boat.
❌Too afraid to make others mad so they fight the losing battle of trying to make everyone happy.
❌Too afraid to have the experiences they want to have for fear it will offend someone else.
❌So they spend all their time trying to create ideal experiences for everyone else, usually at their own expense.
Bend Over Backwards: Shore Up These Areas
There are 7 personal power areas that affect how we attach in relationships.
If you find yourself trying really hard to make everyone else happy without considering what YOU want, you may be disempowered in the following two areas, which are:
I determine my own experience
I can stand up for myself
They go together because they empower you to create your internal and external experiences.
How One Becomes Disempowered In These Areas
These are the power pieces that could have become disempowered through:
- Childhood AND/OR later on with adult experiences.
- From family expectations and ‘responsibilities’.
- Having a narcissistic parent.
Or from any other situation where you were not allowed to choose what YOU wanted or had been forced into something you didn’t want (including abuse).
And/or you were made wrong for standing up for yourself.
Or perhaps you did stand up for yourself, but it didn’t do any good; nobody was listening to you or cared.
👉🏻Somewhere along the way you learned that what you wanted was not as important as what was expected of you.
And now you think you have to be the good little girl all the time and not upset anyone.
You may even feel like it’s your responsibility to save others.
💥Biggest telltale sign: you work your ass off in all of your relationships but see little return on that investment.
Therefore being disempowered in these areas is going to leave you open to toxic personalities that will try to direct your experiences for you.
So if you feel like you never get validated, you get walked over, you stay stuck for long periods of time, and stay way too long in bad relationships, you may need some shoring up in these areas.
Empowerment Looks Like:
When you are empowered in these areas you will be able to:
✅Include yourself in all of your decisions.
✅Know what you want.
✅Realize that you CANNOT make everyone happy.
AND
✅Lobby for that as anything else will feel inauthentic!
✅You will no longer be giving empty threats in an attempt to be heard.
✅You will back up your assertions with real self-honoring actions, no matter how hard a choice it is.
You won’t feel like you have to bend over backwards anymore to keep everyone else happy.
Therefore you will make decisions that include what is important to you.
How to Shift It
To shift into more empowerment in these two pieces requires a ‘broadening of your horizons’.
🧩It takes experimentation and trying new things. You must get to know yourself on a deep level. Begin a real relationship with yourself. Do some journaling on why you feel like you need to cater to everyone else and why you don’t feel your needs are just as important.
It will take some getting real with yourself and willingness to explore your current patterns.
🧩Practice starting with really small decisions to assert yourself and building up to larger, scarier ones.
🧩 Knowing how to have your own back and pull in strength and power when you need it.
This is called resourcing. There are several books, workshops, courses out that there can teach you some good internal resourcing techniques. Which can be found with a simple online search.
