How People-Pleasing Kills Intimacy

Highlights

Often when we're doing things because we want to feel validated or liked or, like, we are kind people — we call it "people pleasing", but it actually works against us when it comes to developing intimacy. (via)

Intimacy requires us to be known, and being known by another person means sharing the ways in which we disagree with them or have dissent inside of the relationship. (via)

That construct of people pleasing — of believing that to be close to someone we always have to give them whatever it is that we think they want from us — gets in the way of us developing actual, sustainable relationships.
So, what we think is bringing us closer to people is actually often driving a wedge between ourselves and them. (via)

There's often a moment in relationship that causes panic inside of most of us who err insecurely attached — whether that's anxious avoidant or fearful avoidant. The moment of panic will show up differently, but it will be there.. where we realize that someone we're in close connection with thinks differently than us about something so we have a moment of internal dissent inside of the relationship. (via)

explicit internal dissent so we do not agree with something that the other person is saying or explaining to us (via)

If you are pretending to agree with something that you actually don't agree with — especially if it's relatively significant — then you are not in genuine relationship with the other because the other is giving you input, whether that's validation or affection or appreciation, based on who you are pretending to be, and the real, you the actual you, who has those opinions behind that mask is no longer in relationship with this other. (via)

The only place that self-abandonment and faking agreement can lead us to is pseudo intimacy.
Pseudo intimacy is what happens when both people are collaborating on a shared fantasy. Now, both people might be conscious that this is the case or only one might be conscious that it's the case. (via)

Pseudo intimacy is this idea that you are connected, and that you are on the same page, when one or both of you knows that that is not the truth. So you're not connecting authentic self to authentic self. (via)

High-risk, high-reward: voicing your dissent.
This can lead to a multitude of possible outcomes. So, letting someone know either "I disagree with you" or "that doesn't resonate for me" or "there's something that I feel angry about related to what you said" — whatever it is that is at odds with how you believe the other person wants you to respond. (via)

NOTE: not the best option; actual conflict is what builds intimacy (see other note)

The only thing that's going to end up building more intimacy in moments where dissent is experienced is experiencing conflict. (via)

Conflict is the thing that occurs when two people are at odds in the way that they see the world or their relationship or each other, and they are willing to share those things to arrive at a new understanding. (via)

one of the most beautiful components of secure relationships is that people are actually able to challenge each other with care and compassion work through the ego stuff that comes up when they're in disagreement and, as a product of both people having different perspectives on the world, actually arrive at a greater, more expanded view of what they originally thought was the truth. (via)

True intimacy is when you are in a shared reality rather than a shared fantasy (via)

When you have true intimacy with another person, you are privy to the internal world of what they truly think and what they truly believe and they are privy to your internal world as well. (via)

through both of you sharing your conflicting perspectives but respecting each other enough to take each other's perspectives ser seriously and entertain them honestly you can
arrive at a much greater understanding of the world and how it works as well as yourself and how you work and this other person and how they work than you ever could have arrived at on your own (via)

Intimacy is about finding someone whose thinking genuinely challenging is yours because you have true respect for them and because they have true respect for you. (via)

It's really hard to get to intimacy if you don't have that mutual respect. If one person or the other is more attached to the idea that they are right and the other person is wrong than they are to entertaining the other person's worldview as true to them and figuring out where the wires are getting crossed, it's almost impossible to arrive at intimacy (via)

intimacy can only occur in relationships that are not treated as a zero sum gain (via)

if I have a partner or a friend who believes something that I think is blatantly unequivocally wrong we are in an intimate exchange the moment that I let them know that that's what I believe (via)

In order for me to truly be seen by this other person, I can't be holding this secret dissent. They can go on being wrong, and I can go on believing they're wrong, and, as long as we're both aware of that fact, we can actually still be in intimate connection. (via)

all intimacy means is that we're not keeping significant secrets from each other; we're not lying or self-abandoning in an attempt to keep in the connection (via)

there is never a route to intimacy that includes self-abandonment or people pleasing (via)

An ego defense is any sort of action that we take that is not completely authentic but that serves some survival purpose for us.
All insecure attachment responses are ego defenses. This is not synonymous with the term "egotistical".
If you are playing out an attachment behavior, you are not necessarily on an ego high — but what it means is that you are temporarily abandoning authenticity, whether you're aware of it or not (and you usually are not) in order to behave in a way that you believe on a deep, instinctual level is going to ensure your survival, whether that means keeping someone close or whether it means keeping yourself self-reliant. (via)

What's so tricky about ego defenses inside of relationships is that, when we are in an ego defense (so when we are acting out our attachment wounding or a trauma response), we often believe that what we are saying or doing is the truth. (via)

Let's say your partner keeps accusing you of not caring about them or not loving them and you start to really question yourself and internalize that, and go "well I thought that I loved and cared about them, but maybe I'm wrong.. maybe I'm actually a very terrible person who doesn't care about other people".
Now you're adopting that ego story as your own story about yourself and you are once again in pseudo-intimacy. You both believe that you are truly a callous and uncaring person who lacks empathy, when in reality that might not be the case. (via)

A lot of what earning secure attachment is, is about adding in a moment of pause between someone else sharing and you accepting it as truth or immediately rejecting it — both of which could be an ego response. (via)

if there isn't the ability to be honest there isn't the capacity for intimacy (via)

to stay always in touch with the other,
prioritize staying always in touch with the self (via)

The idea that in order to stay in connection with other people, we have to be in brutally honest connection with ourselves is absolutely true when it comes to maintaining intimacy. (via)

intimacy can cannot exist where self-abandonment is occurring (via)

To develop the tools to create deeper intimacy inside of our relationships is in large part about recognizing which tendencies keep us away from it. (via)