Personal growth is activism.

3/7/2025

Writing to survive the trump administration. Episode 44: Personal growth is activism.

A big growth area for me right now is confronting my relationship to people pleasing, which also means recognizing and honoring my own values instead of playing to outside expectations, making a “good impression,” or seeking someone’s approval.

It’s a theme that has been coming up over and over for me recently, and it’s more than a little perplexing, because I’ve been AWARE of this propensity in myself for – I don’t know, at least 10 years. I remember hearing other people talk about their relationship to people pleasing in my early years of attending Al Anon, around 2014. So I know it’s a common issue.

But it’s also hard not to feel frustrated when I lapse into people pleasing mode and lose access to my inner truth for a while, only to realize later that I wish I had said or done something differently. I would like to be the kind of person who can see an injustice or harm happening (to me or someone else) and speak up about it, then and there.

This feels especially relevant from the microcosms (our closest personal relationships with the people in our households) all the way up to the macrocosms (how we show up within the political landscape in our collective fight against fascism). I know it’s related to the way we handle power and control – that people pleasing or approval-seeking is one of the facets of late-stage capitalism: the people in power WANT the masses to override their inner values in order to make a good impression or follow the rules or keep the peace.

Our family systems are directly related to our largest political systems, so all the deep personal work we’re doing will impact the ways we’re able to move forward into a new more compassionate, more connected, more equitable, more honest collective structure.