As you study your Approval Seeker, you may notice an urgency and desperation. You may experience a deep sense of “I am not OK” if someone doesn’t like you, or is upset with you. This can make you feel ungrounded, out of control, anxious, unsettled, or unsafe. High threat. Major alarm. Your mind can get frantic and you can have a compulsive and overpowering urge to do something to fix it. Fix it! Fix it now! Fix it, fix it, fix it, fix it, fix it!
What’s going on here? Even if we try to intellectually tell ourselves that everything is OK, this doesn’t usually calm the fear. Many times, I’ve heard clients in one of my groups or live events say, “I don’t know why I’m so bothered by this. I didn’t even really know that person. Why does their rejection bother me so much?”
The reason we get so anxious about losing approval is due to our primal experience of connecting with other humans. We all learned how to connect with others starting with our first relationships, which is usually a mother, father, and siblings. In these early relationships, we learn how to connect and attach emotionally to other humans, in the deepest ways possible. This has been studied extensively, and led to a branch of psychology called Attachment Theory. 2
For our purposes, I am going to summarize the theory. Basically, when it comes to attaching emotionally to others, we can feel safe and secure in that attachment, or we can feel unsafe and insecure. If we are secure, we feel held, supported, and loved. We trust the other person will be there for us. We trust that if they leave to go to the store, or out with friends, that they will return to us. We feel worthy of love. We trust that we will receive that love, even if we make a mistake, fail at something, are in a bad mood, or otherwise “mess up.”
However, if our attachment is insecure, we feel anxious and unsafe. We fear that others will leave us at any time. If we say something wrong, do something wrong, or are in a bad mood, they’re gone. We deal with this fear by either trying to please and be perfect so no one will leave us, or by being aloof and distant. The old, “I don’t need anyone” Clint Eastwood cowboy routine. I am a rock. I am an island.
So underneath the people-pleasing patterns of the nice person is insecurity. Of not being strongly and deeply connected with others. This is why I felt unlovable for many years; I wasn’t strongly connected to anyone.
This kind of attachment makes us see relationships as a tightrope. There is a very narrow path—the width of a single rope—that we must walk across to stay in the relationship. We must move slowly, carefully, methodically. We must plan our every step to keep our balance, lest we fall. And the fall from a tightrope is not a small misstep that we can easily recover from. No, if we fall from a tightrope, we fall long and hard–into a net if we’re lucky, onto the pavement if we’re not.
This is how the young, emotional part of our brain sees relating to others. One false move and I’m plummeting to my death. Hence the strong sense of threat. The fear, anxiety, worry, rumination, and avoidance at all costs. Hence the strange phenomenon where you want to do something different, such as speak up, be more direct, or say no, and yet you find yourself doing the opposite: holding back, people-pleasing, and saying yes!
This frustrating pattern occurs because the emotional centers in your brain have more control of your behavior than your intellect. In the face of perceived threat, they hit the override switch, and you end up doing something different. Just as if you decided one morning, “I’m going to walk out into the freeway today and see what happens.” Your self-preservation system would almost certainly kick in and prevent you from carrying that out.
As you read this book and apply what you learn, and take the small risks that I suggest throughout, you will retrain this part of your brain. You’ll begin to experience a more secure sense of connection with those close to you, including your family, friends, dates, colleagues, clients, and even strangers.
You’ll start to see that there is no threat in the disapproval of others, which allows you to relax in a deep and powerful way. You’ll also see that being in healthy relationships with others is not at all like walking on a tightrope. It’s actually more like a five-lane freeway. You can veer left, right, and all over the place, and still stay connected. There is so much more space than you realized to be you and share who you are. In fact, people are secretly begging for it.
2 . For a condensed and highly accessible review of how Attachment Theory works and impacts adult relationships, I recommend Amir Levine and Rachel Heller’s book, Attached: The New Science of Adult Attachment and How It Can Help You Find – and Keep – Love. To go deeper, you can look up articles by John Bowlby, who is the psychologist who pioneered the field of Attachment Theory.