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misstrashchan · 3 years

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Since @im-the-king-of-the-ocean did a post about what TMA fear entities the RWBY characters are aligned/avatars of, I’ve been itching to do one myself because as a result of overlapping hyper fixations I think about this A LOT

The basic concept is that avatars in TMA become what they fear most or embrace a fear they have developed the most complex relationship with that plays into their motivations and drive as a character. What negative impulses they have to constantly fight themselves on, the shape of the monster that lives in their heart.

To quote the RWBY song Fear, “But our greatest fear will be realised, if we fall and lose ourselves to fear, we’ll become what we’ve feared all our lives” yeah that’s a very loose definition of what becoming an avatar is.

Since MAG s5 has proven that you can be an avatar of more than one fear, (Like Martin serving both the Eye and the Lonely) some of the RWBY characters might have more than one, but I’ll try to limit it to two to avoid getting complicated, but at the end of the day it’s all fear soup, we might categorise them according to Robert Smirke’s 14, but they all bleed into one another, like Gerard’s colour analogy in 111:

GERARD

I always think it helps to imagine them like colours. The edges bleed together, and you can talk about little differences: “oh, that’s indigo, that’s more lilac”, but they’re both purple. I mean, I guess there are technically infinite colours, but you group them together into a few big ones. A lot of it’s kind of arbitrary. I mean, why are navy blue and sky blue both called blue, when pink’s an entirely different colour from red? Y’know? I don’t know, that’s just how it works.

And like colours, some of these powers, they feed into or balance each other. Some really clash, and you just can’t put them together. I mean, you could see them all as just one thing, I guess, but it would be pretty much meaningless, y’know, like… like trying to describe a… shirt by talking about the concept of colour.

O-Of course, with these things it’s not a simple spectrum, y’know, it’s more like –

ARCHIVIST

An infinite amorphous blob of terror bleeding out in every direction at once.

GERARD

Now you’re getting it.

ARCHIVIST

Like colours, but if colours hated me. Got it.

Ruby Rose: The End. The fear of death itself, uncaring and unstoppable. Man this was hard to think about but I have a lot of Big Feelings about this one. Initially I really, really wanted to give Ruby the Eye simply because “can laser beam monsters with their eyeballs once they become powerful enough” and there is a fascinating overlap in how the Beholding powers and Silver Eyes function in the same way, (especially in how Cinder being exposed to the Silver Eyes fills her with an overpowering fear and reopens old wounds from trauma that have never properly healed; which is VERY similar in the psychological affect Jon’s has on his victims when he Beholds them) they’re both direct enemies/opposites to the Dark that expose their enemies/victims true nature and destroying them in the process at times. Only one feeds on fear and the trauma of others while the other feeds off of hope and love (Gerard says there’s no such thing as an avatar of hope and love, clearly he’s never heard of Ruby).

But nope! The fear and nature of the Beholding just doesn’t really match with Ruby at all. She isn’t driven by a need of knowledge, nor does she fear being watched, followed or having her secrets exposed. The End though? Death itself? Ruby outright states that’s her biggest fear in volume 5 to Oscar “It doesn’t matter if you’re standing in Salem’s way or not. She’ll kill anyone. And that, scares me most of all” to me Ruby’s fear of death itself is projected onto Salem here, I think. It’s uncaring, unstoppable, it doesn’t discriminate, and it could come for the people she cares about at any time. What matters though is the context she says this is in explaining her motives to Oscar. Her whole life has been shaped by her inability to process death, her relationship with grief, all starting with the tragic and abrupt death of her mother Summer as a child. She’s also surrounded by a lot of death motif too, the hooded cape, mostly wearing black, the giant grim reaper scythe. She’s the End.

Of course, her being an Avatar of the End means having to imagine the worst version of Ruby, one that is fully consumed by that fear. Avatars of the End are not malicious or destructive in nature but instead are… very apathetic. They don’t need to seek out victims to feed off of, nor do they have a ritual, because the End comes for all. And that fits with what Ruby would be like if that fear fully consumed her. It’s more or less established in vol6 during the apathy arc when she tries so hard to fight against their influence and how horrified she is when everyone around her falls prey to it. Giving up, not caring, accepting the inevitable demise of everyone and yourself? Ruby was terrified of that. And when looking at the vol8 opening where we see Ruby being dragged down by what looks like the arms of the apathy? She fights the hardest against it because it’s what she’s most afraid of, but because of her inability to process her grief properly is ultimately what will make her the most vulnerable to it when she’s pushed to her limit. All Salem needs to do to break Ruby is to remind her of Summer’s death. Not even what actually happened to her or how she died, just the death itself. Hell, the first time we see Ruby in the Red trailer, she’s at her mother’s grave, the first verse in Red like Roses that’s about Ruby “Red like Roses fills my dreams and brings me to the place you rest” in which we come to understand that the “Red like roses” lyrics in both part one and two of the song is referring to Summer’s abrupt death which Ruby apparently dreams about, which brings to mind Oliver Banks, our most prominent Avatar of the End, whose first statement to The Magnus Institute in 011 (underneath the fake alias of “Antonio Blake”) is concerning how he started dreaming about the deaths of others, which he didn’t begin to take seriously- until it was his father that he saw in his dream. Upon which Oliver realised how terrifying death really was and that fear began to consume him.

Okay I’ve probably gone off long enough about this but yeah. Ruby is the End. I mean, she also just got a song in the v7 soundtrack called Until the End

Weiss Schnee: The Lonely. The fear of isolation, of being completely cut off and alone or disconnected from the rest of society. I don’t really have to go too deeply into this one. It’s pretty cut and dry. “The loneliest of all”? And the Schnees basically are the Lukas family. Actually thinking about it the Lukas’ are actually somewhat better? They were the only ones in the whole of TMA that understood to raise a child to be an heir/avatar of their fear they needed room to reject it or actively choose it, even if that had an 80% success rate. Both are still awful though. (Damn, I can’t believe Jaques is an actively worse parent than an eldritch fear avatar)

When Weiss comes back to Atlas in v4 she’s more aware of her loneliness than ever, feels more aware of how she and atlas high society as a whole is disconnected from the rest of the world and its struggles. Whitley commenting on her being in her room for months implies she’s purposefully been isolating herself during this time as well, in order to avoid her family members “A pleasure to see you out of your room for a change” (sidenote; the fact that whenever Whitley shows up it always catches Weiss off guard, like she didn’t even notice his presence until he wanted her too. That’s. That’s a BIG Lonely thing. Given Peter’s siblings eventually ran away and he was the only heir I can imagine Peter being what Whitley would end up like if no one intervenes)

I’d say they might also be an possibility of the Stranger due to her struggling to find her own identity and inability to recognise oneself, but that can be an aspect of the Lonely too, as we see when Martin is in a house that is a domain of the Lonely in s5, and is unable to recognise himself in the mirror or recall who he is.

What I do have to say about this is it’s pretty interesting considering at this point in the show Weiss’ relationship with loneliness is actually somewhat healthy and something she can use to relate to and help others. She understands other people’s loneliness, that Blake in v5 needed space and in time she’d come back, and Weiss would be ready to be there for her when she did. And she also understands Yang’s loneliness in the same volume and that she needed someone there to support her.

“But you’re right. I don’t know loneliness like you do. I have my own version. And I bet Blake has her own version too.”

Speaking of Blake…

Blake Belladonna: The Stranger, I Do Not Know You. The fear that you cannot trust the perception of yourself or of others. The creeping sense that something isn’t right. I considered the Spiral, but the Stranger and the Spiral overlap more than any other two entities so I’m just gonna go with the Stranger. Especially with her semblance being a metaphor for disassociation, a coping mechanism for the abuse and gaslighting from her relationship with Adam being kind of the biggest thing here, since the Stranger and Spiral deal with that a lot. She literally creates false copies of herself, shadow clones which she uses to feint, distract and evade. As well as statues/mannequins when dust is involved, which the Stranger is known for manifesting. Her fighting style centres around misdirection, stealth and fooling people’s senses. She also used to be part of the White Fang, known within Sienna and Adam’s faction to wear the masks of monsters, appearing anonymous. And she literally disguises her identity as a Faunus in order to escape the White Fang and enroll at Beacon. Blake at first was hesitant to trust and rely on the others in the earlier volumes, to let her guard down, and when she finally did, the worst happened and her fears were proven right. In s2 Jonathan becomes more paranoid due to being marked and in close daily proximity to the Stranger (as Not-Sasha), much like how Blake in v2 becomes far more paranoid and less trusting of her team. She also does seek knowledge or answers even at the cost of her wellbeing, which is an Eye thing, but Blake’s desire for knowledge and answers isn’t really consistent or important enough with her character and motives beyond vol2 for me personally to consider her an Avatar of it, but I do think she is Eye aligned.

Yang Xiao Long- The Eye. The Ceaseless Watcher, It Knows You, as well as The Hunt. For the Eye, the first time we see Yang is her trying to find information on her mother, and we see Raven in bird form at the beginning too, as she has followed Yang her whole life, never actually interacting or doing anything for her, just… watching her. We learn in vol2 that her search for answers surrounding her mother has been a part of her entire life, almost overwhelmingly so to the point where in her childhood she and Ruby nearly lost their lives to the Grimm when she decided to journey to a shack in the woods she thought would lead to clues in finding her mother. She is adamant because of that experience to never let her need for the truth and answers control her, but it is a need that is always there. When she finally meets Raven, she’s encouraged to “start questioning everything she knows” which, she does. Questioning and knowledge is a big part of Yang’s character, even now. She’s the one who questions Ozpin the most, as well as Raven herself, and in the recent volumes is the one who challenges and questions Ruby’s leadership the most. There’s also a moment in vol7 of her drawing parallels between herself and Robyn and relating to her when she says “I won’t stop until I find out the truth” Her being the one to take the relic of knowledge is hugely significant in this too, especially given the context that she acquires it right after confronting her mother, getting the answers she’s searched for her whole life, holding an artefact possessing infinite knowledge, and she sinks to her knees and cries because there is no sense of closure, that anything is better because of her knowing who and what her mother is, and that her choosing this path might have cost her ever having a relationship with Raven (which is more Raven’s fault of course, and Yang knows that, but that’s not how she’s feeling at that exact moment).

For the Hunt, this one’s a bit simpler. The thrill seeker aspect to Yang’s character and motives in becoming a huntress and enjoying the chase and fighting in of itself. There’s another element in that as most Avatars of the Hunt start out as monster hunters who then develop the need to hunt and kill monsters, and gradually what qualifies as “monster” starts to blur more and more as they become consumed by the need and thrill of the chase and hunt itself. I bring this up because in vol3 Blake draws parallels between Yang and Adam after she is disqualified for attacking and injuring Mercury, worries with how familiar this all feels and that Yang might turn out the same as him (and just for the record Adam is a full blown Avatar of the Hunt, and the Slaughter too most like)

“I had someone very dear to me change. It wasn’t in an instant, it was gradual. Little choices that began to pile up. He told me not to worry. At first they were accidents, then it was self-defence. Before long, even I began to think he was right. This is all just… very familiar.” What Blake describes is… kind of similar to Basira’s relationship with Daisy with how Daisy, an Avatar of the Hunt, would justify to Basira and explain away how the violence and murders she committed as being for the greater good.

Also just one more, because I have to

Pyrrha Nikos: WebwebWEBWEB. Hoo boi Pyrrha is the Webbiest of Web Avatars as they come. Her whole character’s themes surrounding destiny, control and agency, feeling like her whole life had been decided for her, the fact she’d been blessed with incredible talents and opportunities meant she was supposed to be a huntress, the fact her talent as a world champion meant she was placed on a pedestal without her realising, becoming separate from the people who placed her there in the first place, that Ozpin and his inner circle tell her she has been chosen as the next Fall Maiden, but the method in which she must become so might result in the loss of her identity, that though they ultimately leave the choice to her do pressure and manipulate her into it. The idea of destiny being a predetermined fate you can’t escape is Pyrrha’s greatest fear, and rejects that idea in that she will not let her life be manipulated but will be the one to take control it instead, which is manifested in her having a semblance that she uses to subtly control and manipulate her surroundings. As Cinder puts it, “People assume she’s fated for victory when really she’s really taken fate into her own hands”.

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awildpoliticalnerd · 5 years

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Book Review: The Moral Animal: Why We Are the Way We Are: The New Science of Evolutionary Psychology. By Robert Wright. (1994).

Robert Wright’s The Moral Animal is a look through the field of evolutionary psychology--at least as it stood at the book's writing in 1994. It's a promising work with a lot of insight. However, it can best be analogized to the peacock: If it survives, it does so despite the massive disadvantage of some obvious maladaptions. In the case of the peacock, the adaption is its oversized tail (or "train" as it's often referred to). In the case of The Moral Animal, it's Wright’s own unexamined moral and ideological biases presented as fact that lowered its potential.

The big sell of the book is actually a rather interesting premise: Take the most famous proponent of the theory of evolution (Charles “the Chuck” Darwin) and use his life to demonstrate the principles of evolutionary psychology. Want to illustrate the theory that men are less biologically inclined towards lifelong monogamy thanks to our disproportionately small part in the baby-making process? Highlight the fact that Darwin literally sketched out a cost/benefit analysis of getting married in his notebook. Want to argue that young siblings should be both predisposed towards rivalry and cooperation thanks to kin selection? Give some (admittedly adorable) examples of Darwin’s many, many children. Because of this, the book was part popular-science exploration of a then-burgeoning topic and accessible biography on one of the most important scientific minds to ever emerge from the primordial ooze. When done well, this was the book at its best. It was discursive, informative, and enjoyable. It kept me engaged over much of the book’s nearly 400-pages.

(Lest someone use the opening example as evidence that I have no idea what the hell I’m talking about later in the review, let it be known that I know that the mystery of the peacock’s train was solved with the insights of sexual selection--that peahens select males with large trains because possessing one shows that the males have got to be pretty dang "fit" to survive with such a glaringly obvious disadvantage. Writing thematically consistent introductions is hard; I claim some artistic liberties here).

There are two core ways that this plays out throughout the book. The first is the odd insistence that every possible point that Wright could conceive of making in this vast subject was exemplified by good ol’ Chuck. And there were times that this was very clearly a stretch. The way he pursued his eventual wife, Emma, is described through a very genetic lens instead of primarily cultural terms (part of a supposed genetic predisposition towards the “Madonna-Whore” dichotomy for those of us with that infernal y chromosome). His differential patterns of grief for the loss of two of his children (he reportedly mourned the death of his ten year old daughter far longer, and far more intensely, then that of his infant son) are couched as being primarily due to their proximity to prime fertility age. His intense anxiety about publishing what would be his scientific legacy (you know, apart from being the 19th century’s foremost barnacle expert)? It’s the genes! It’s genes, genes, genes all the way down.

I’d like to say that the book was always like this. Or, apparently, my desire to want to say this, my inability to do so, and the considerable amount of sarcasm required to pen these last two sentences are because of my genes. At least that’s the culprit if we were to take Wright literally. At times, he is positively (and ironically) evangelical about the power of our genetics in dictating our behavior. And it is to the rest of the work’s detriment.

I’m not some biological denialist. I believe whole-heartedly in evolutionary theory. And, of course, the potential for any and all physical actions have to ultimately originate in the code that facilitates every biological process we undertake. But, first off, since natural selection works probabilistically, what do you think the odds are that, of the billions of humans to walk the Earth, the theory’s first popular progenitor is an acceptable exemplar of all of these processes? It’s laughably small. Literally smaller than the first common ancestor of all life on this planet compared to the sun. I don’t think that this means that Wright had to abandon the mission of using Darwin as an illustration--again, that’s part of what made this book so interesting--but it would be far better served if, instead, Wright said something to the effect of “we can see an imperfect analogy to these processes in Darwin’s life.” A small change but, as Wright knows, small changes can have a large impact.

I suspect that Wright’s self-admitted zealousy on the subject was partially spurred on by the fact that this book was written before epigenetics (the process through which different parts of the genome are activated/deactivated in response to environmental changes, changing the genes’ expression) was more rigorously demonstrated. I recall him adamantly insisting, once or twice, that genes “can’t be changed” once we’ve been conceived. At the time, that was the belief commensurate with the best available evidence. Although epigenetics do not disprove this, the truth is that our genes are far more flexible than originally thought. If genetic fixedness is what you’re arguing, it’s pretty tough to say anything other than “everything Darwin did ever is totally explainable through evolutionary psychology.” Even if it's not true. So I’ve decided to chalk this up to scientific progress and its inevitable, unenviable ability to reveal certain pronouncements as utterly wrong. It’ll undoubtedly happen to me; it happens to any practicing scientist.

The second theme, though, is less able to be chalked up to the inexorable march of progress. That is the distinct, but related, assertion interwoven throughout the text that literally everything can be explained by evolutionary psychology. Moral codes? Evolutionary psychology. Selective memory of our own moral failings? Evolutionary psychology. Western social structures and the necessity of political and economic inequality? Survey says: Evolutionary psychology.

These assertions are often manifest through what I call “cover your ass” language. We all know it; we all, regrettably, deploy it. It comes when the authors use absolute terms for the vast preponderance of the work and then say “now, do I really think that this explains everything? Of course not! But…” and then proceeds to make the exact same points, just with a couple of words interjected to signal intellectual humility. A few careful words do not erase the other 98% and the frames they collectively construct. Wright is arguing that evolutionary psychology alone can explain just about every social phenomenon, from the simple to profound. But the fact of the matter is that evolutionary psychology would be hard-pressed to understand why people on vacation with their families would bother to leave tips at restaurants despite the fact that they do, more often than not. (Seriously. Reciprocal altruism’s out since you’ll never see that server again. Odds are they weren’t related, so kin selection’s out too. Peacocking wealth contrasts with women’s supposed preference for mates who don’t needlessly divert resources away from her children. Tipping is a tough nut to crack for rational-choice-esque theoried like evolutionary psych). If it can’t explain something so banal as this, I have strong doubts of the deterministic account Wright explicates here. He will, almost begrudgingly, admit that social and environmental forces play a part in genetic expression. But he does not seem prepared to admit that it plays as big of a role as even the available evidence at the time did.

The more I read it, the more I felt that this book was symbolic of a lot of evolutionary science at the time: It contains real, interesting insight on genetic processes and their role (however expansive or limited) in complex interpersonal phenomena. These shouldn’t be undersold or ignored; I learned a great deal reading this book. The problem is that these insights come paired with uninterrogated moralizing, steeped in contemporaneous social events, passed off as timeless, objective Truth. The most obvious example (because of how often Wright returns to it) comes in the aforementioned asymmetry in male parental investment. Or, rather, the seemingly inevitable end-result: Divorce. This was often curiously paired with hand-wavey discussions of the Madonna-Whore dichotomy. Apparently, men who manage to have sex with women earlier in the relationship feel less inclined to see her as a viable marriage partner. Should a quickly-pairing couple (referring to the speed in which they decide to do the act and not, hopefully, the duration of the act itself) wind-up married, men are more likely to ditch the women--and ditch them for similar "kinds" of women. This discussion would often lead to Wright lamenting how women are engaging in sex earlier and earlier in romantic relationships. Things were better decades before this promiscuity was socially acceptable. Like back in Victorian England when Charles wed his beloved Emma. And the evidentiary linchpin, at times explicitly mentioned while only obliquely inferred at others, is the sky-high divorce rates that, Wright argues, came as a consequence of social structures being poorly designed considering our inherent genetic predispositions.

Of course, we now know that the high divorce rates of the 90s were a temporary thing. First-marriages are lasting far longer than they did (on average) in the 80’s, 90’s, and early 00’s but divorces are just as easy (if not easier) than ever before. If it was entirely because of early sex and our baser nature, the pattern should continue. The fact that it doesn’t is both evidence that evolutionary psychology is more limited than Wright suggests and that the urgency imbued in his analysis was shaped by his own moral sensibilities rather than those seen in society as a whole, inculcated by natural selection.

This wasn’t all of the social critique Wright was inclined to wade in. All fields and theories have their critics. Good authors often anticipate common objections and address them in the text. He saw his most likely critics as less scientifically driven as ideologically so. Lofty prose to the contrary, he was on the attack far more than on the defense; Darwin found himself a new bull dog. His target: Those dastardly post-modernists. He often panned “post-modernism” for their critiques of evolutionary psychology, often claiming (without much evidence) that it stemmed from the post-modernists’ universal and fundamental ignorance about biology. Honestly, the way Wright so derisively talked about them, I was surprised that he didn’t bust out a couple of verbose “yo mamma” jokes.

What makes his vituperative swipes so ironic 25 years later is that the post-structuralists were right. Many evolutionary scientists were predisposed towards advancing biologically deterministic theories of human behavior. Any practicing geneticist worth their salt today would tell you that human behavior is so dependent on genes' interactions with the social and physical environment that even things we take for granted as “hard-wired” (such as one’s sexual preference) has been persuasively shown to not be the consequence of singular genes--or even wholly the consequence of complex genetic interactions. This is a far, far cry from Wright’s portrayal in the book; I honestly think he would be aghast at this suggestion, as if it surrenders precious ground to heretical forces in the battle for all of science’s soul. And the post-modernists are consequently vindicated in questioning what kind of power is made manifest, and towards whom is it ultimately directed, when these assertions are given the pop-science stamp of total veracity. (Actually, despite it being basically their entire deal, I can’t recall a moment when Wright discussed power when issuing his disses of post-modernism. Instead, he discussed them in the same kind of shifting, ephemeral manner that paints them as boogeymen with accusations that were often equally grounded in reality. I think he would find his own intellectual horizons broadened if he allotted the same serious attention to their intellectual contributions as he demands for his subject).

To shoehorn in a personal complaint that I had, the book was heavy in evolutionary theory but very, very sparse in social-psychological insight. Spare a chapter where Wright tried to rehabilitate Freud’s reputation (as successful attempt as one’s going to have considering how uphill that battle is), most of the psychology was relegated to sexual pairing preferences and over-general suggestions on morality and social bonding. The former was interesting and insightful; the rest woefully underdeveloped. I may be spoiled by books like Behave and How Emotions Are Made (part of these phenomenal works both touched on how evolution may bring around specific cognitive processes), but I think Wright could have comfortably fit interesting, more specific insights if he shed the weird moralism and extensive post-modernist vendetta.

I hate closing reviews with negatives, no matter how well deserved. Presumably that’s in my genes as well. So I’d actually like to conclude by saying that I well and truly learned a lot from this book. Some of it was less novel so much as it was a refresher (I have read a number of prominent books on evolutionary theory, including the oft-referenced Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins), but some insights were well and truly new to me and illuminating. The one that stands out the most at the moment is the game theoretic accounts claiming that monogamy ultimately serves men (while institutional polygyny would be better for women) and the argument that people are more rude in spaces with fewer permanent interpersonal ties. I also thought the point that adherence to cultural values are an expedient for environmentally contingent reproductive success was well argued. I don’t buy these arguments entirely, but I think they and other points are worth mulling over to extract the useful bits. But in order to get to these bits, you have to be attentive and willing to parse through a lot of things that, in the rat-race of ideas, deserve to be thoroughly out-competed.

#reviews #book review #evolutionary psychology #books #psychology #nonfiction

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sarahburness · 6 years

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Feeling Anxious? People-Pleasing Could Be to Blame

“Living with anxiety is like being followed by a voice. It knows all your insecurities and uses them against you. It gets to the point when it’s the loudest voice in the room. The only one you can hear.” ~Unknown

White lights flutter before your eyes. Your chest tightens, as if under the weight of a hundred ten-pound bricks. You wonder if your next breath will be your last. Emotions rip through you: fear, glooming dread, hopelessness. Without warning or clear cause, these feelings consume you.

You start to wonder if you’re going crazy. It’s like you no longer have control over your own body, your own thoughts.

This is the experience of chronic anxiety. And if you’ve ever encountered it, you know that the presence of it—and the absence of answers or solutions—can make you feel like you’re losing it. It can make everything that was once enjoyable feel like a struggle.

I know this feeling all too well.

I used to suffer from periodic anxiety attacks in my early twenties. They left me perplexed and afraid. I felt like I was being possessed. I felt out of control and believed I was dying all the time, with no evidence of a real illness.

Anxiety stole parts of my life from me, until I decided I wouldn’t let it take away my hope for a better future. One day, embarrassed after having to pull over onto the side of the road in order to breathe, I decided to get help for my anxiety attacks.

I realized then that people pleasing was causing me anxiety in two ways.

First, I felt anxiety about being imperfect, making mistakes, and making choices that others didn’t approve of, especially in my family relationships. Then I felt more anxiety because I thought I shouldn’t feel this way. I thought if people knew I was suffering from anxiety that they would reject me.

Life can be messy, strange, and hard sometimes. And it gets even harder when the faith you once had in yourself is bulldozed by your inability to take a deep breath and calm yourself down.

It’s hard not to blame yourself. It’s hard to avoid feeling inadequate, like your issues are all your fault. It’s especially hard when you’re a people-pleaser.

Chronic people-pleasers want to look presentable all the time, like we have it all together and our lives are perfect. Anxiety doesn’t fit into the perfect lives we’ve established for ourselves. So when it hits, we become our harshest and cruelest critics.

We fail to realize that when we don’t accept our symptoms, we only exacerbate them. We forget that judging things never makes them better. We can’t help but get angry with ourselves.

Stop Playing Pretend

Anxiety had its most crippling effects on me when I was in college. I believed I needed to get all A’s on my report card in order to be a good student. I also believed that if I had to study to get good grades, I was somehow intellectually inferior.

I studied a lot for tests—more than what I thought should be necessary. But when I talked to other people, I pretended like I’d barely studied at all. And whenever I received the occasional B, I beat myself up pretty harshly.

I didn’t want anyone to know that I didn’t have the best report card. Little did I know at the time it made me appear pretentious and stuck up.

After graduation, I interned at a university clinic, where I started to see clients. With each client, I was assigned a therapy room. This one time, I accidently used a room that wasn’t assigned to me. When the therapy was over, the clinical supervisor was not very happy with me and did not have trouble showing it.

Not knowing how to handle disappointing someone, I cried to her and ran off because I could feel a panic attack coming on. Later I felt like a baby, and couldn’t understand why I had such a strong reaction to making a mistake.

Later I realized I was always anxiously trying to please people because it was difficult for me to deal with disappointing others. I thought somehow making a mistake devalued me as a person, and that made me anxious to think about.

I would assess my worth on how much I could do right, instead of realizing I had intrinsic worth regardless. This experience helped me understand that my urge to please was based on anxiety and fear more than anything else.

I spent that time of my life hiding who I was and putting a fake smile on my face.

In trying to appear perfect, I became rigid and lost my edge and my humor. I resisted my outgoing personality because I thought I would interrupt people too much. I thought I should always let others take center stage while I didn’t ruffle any feathers in the background.

I pretended everything was great, but it wasn’t. I was suffering from crippling anxiety, feeling disconnected, and often misunderstood. I was hiding my pain, and my frustration with people who were acting rude and selfish.

I gave advice and ran to the rescue of anyone in despair, and partook in activities that I didn’t necessarily enjoy. I hid my true self by hiding behind other people’s problems. I convinced myself that there was no room for me.

Through my own experience, I learned that the greatest changes begin when we look at our problems with interest and respect, instead of judgment and denial. When we allow our true thoughts and feelings into awareness, we have the opportunity to learn from them instead of unconsciously reacting to them without knowing why.

We keep our negative feelings relaxed by not ignoring them, and we increase our awareness of reality by being willing to encounter our personal truths.

After therapy, I learned that my panic attacks were a reminder that I was a human, not a perfect being. I needed to be acknowledged for who I was, instead of always putting others first or forcing myself to have it all together.

I needed to know that my worth didn’t depend on what I did for others or what grades appeared on my report card.

Our bodies have so much wisdom, and sometimes they know more than we realize. Sometimes our anxiety is merely a signal telling us to take a closer look within.

Anxiety As A Symptom, Not The Disease

When I first sought therapy for my panic attacks, I thought they were a sign of weakness that needed to be eliminated. What I came to understand is that we can choose to bury our unexpressed emotions and deep thoughts, but they’ll come back later, often in unpleasant ways.

In my case, they came back as panic attacks. When aspects of ourselves are distanced, denied, or devalued, they’ll always try to make us listen by surfacing as unwanted symptoms.

Think about what some aspects of your ignored self are trying to tell you. Maybe your symptoms are coming up as chronic anxiety, depression, muscle pain, headaches, feeling lost, etc.

The analogy of the missing roommate, from Bill O’Hanlon and Bob Bertolino’s book Even from a Broken Web: Brief, Respectful Solution-Orientated Therapy for Sexual Abuse and Trauma, can help clarify the impact of ignoring our inner selves.

The Missing Roommate

Imagine that there are a bunch of people living together in a house, and they decide to kick out one of their roommate because they don’t like him. They lock him out and change the locks.

He comes to the door and tries persistently to get back in, but the roommates tell each other to ignore him, thinking he will go away.

After a while, he becomes exhausted and slumps against the door. They think he’s gone away and won’t cause any more trouble. For quite a while, it seems to have worked. But he’s really just sleeping outside the door.

Eventually, something wakes him up, and he decides he wants to get back in the house. He pounds on the door again but gets no response and becomes tired again. Finally, he becomes desperate and crashes through the front window.

That is what happens when parts of your true self are vanished, unexpectedly. The parts of you that went missing will want to show you who you’re meant to be. They’ll scream, “I want to come back! I am part of you! I will not be ignored!”

This is how it happened for me. I got so caught up in trying to be who I thought I was supposed to be, I lost who I actually was.

However, when we devalue parts of ourselves, they develop a mind of their own. They may go away for a while, at the expense of our wellbeing and relationships, but before long they’ll come crashing through the front window.

We must realize that the experiences we have, even seemly negative ones, are here to teach us, challenge us, and allow us to grow.

How you see yourself, your life, and your options is shaped by your mindset. If you live with the mindset of a people-pleaser, you’ll constantly feel pressure to fit in, make others happy, be liked, gain acceptance, and seem happy all the time. That’s a lot of pressure. No wonder you feel anxious!

When I reached out for the help of a therapist, I thought there was something wrong with me because of how sick I’d gotten. I wasn’t able to see that even if I could benefit from making some changes, my anxiety wasn’t my fault. I needed to grow so I could learn to better manage my life and be okay with sometimes disappointing other people in order to take care of myself.

It’s okay to make mistakes; it’s alright for people not to approve of all your choices; it’s fine to have the occasional issue. In fact, it’s through the pitfalls of life that you can learn and experience who you are.

I’m thankful for my panic attacks. They allowed me to open my eyes and change my life. I started making myself a priority and embraced my imperfections with open arms.

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Editor’s note: Ilene has generously offered to give away two free copies of her latest book, When It’s Never About You: The People-Pleaser’s Guide to Reclaiming Your Health, Happiness and Personal Freedom. To enter to win one of two free copies, leave a comment below. You don’t have to write anything specific—”Count me in” is sufficient! You can enter until midnight PST on Sunday, December 24th.

About Ilene S. Cohen

Ilene S. Cohen, Ph.D., is a psychotherapist, blogger, and professor. She’s a regular contributor to Psychology Today, with her most recent release of her self-help book entitled, When It’s Never About You. Her work is fueled by her passion for helping people achieve their goals, and lead fulfilling and meaningful lives. To learn more about Dr. Ilene visit www.doctorilene.com.

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