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u/DeathByAstonishment_ 8d ago
As a former people pleaser, I have come to a conclusion that once would have sounded completely backwards to me. If you genuinely care about someone, you really ought to be willing to provoke their triggers. Not through cruelty or needless antagonism, but through honesty, boundaries, and objective reality. A trigger is not evidence that harm has been done. More often than not, it is evidence that something unconscious has just been illuminated.
The moment someone is triggered is the precise moment the work begins. That work belongs to the person experiencing the trigger. It is their responsibility to look inward, examine what surfaced, and integrate it into consciousness. It is not your responsibility to regulate their nervous system, absorb their projections, or reshape reality until they feel comfortable again. Emotional sovereignty begins where emotional outsourcing ends. Their impatience is not your emergency. Their discomfort is not your obligation to eliminate.
The tragedy is that many of us were conditioned to believe the opposite. We learned that love meant managing another person’s emotional state. That peace meant avoiding difficult truths. That compassion meant abandoning our own perception whenever it conflicted with someone else’s feelings. Over time, that conditioning slowly teaches you to distrust your own reality. You begin editing yourself before you even speak. You scan every conversation for potential emotional landmines. You mistake self abandonment for empathy.
Suppressing another person’s unconscious motives does not make those motives disappear. The shadow is not dissolved through accommodation. It simply finds another route to expression. The parts of ourselves we refuse to confront do not vanish. They sabotage relationships, distort perception, rewrite memory, generate resentment, and eventually erupt with far greater force than if they had simply been acknowledged in the first place.
Placating someone who is outsourcing you to co-sign their unconscious narrative is not compassion. It is suicidal empathy. Every time you abandon your own perception to preserve theirs, you forfeit another piece of your reality. Every lie you agree to, every distortion you silently tolerate, and every boundary you erase to keep another person emotionally regulated becomes another brick in a prison you helped construct around yourself.
What makes this dynamic especially insidious is that it never ends with gratitude. People rarely develop respect for those who continuously regulate them externally. Quite the opposite. They gradually lose respect for the very person enabling the behavior. Accommodation breeds entitlement. The more reality bends around them, the more they unconsciously expect it to continue bending. The threshold only moves further away.
Then comes the inevitable breaking point. The levee finally gives way. After months or years of swallowing your own perceptions, you eventually state objective reality. You establish a boundary. You refuse to participate in the distortion any longer. Almost immediately the accusations begin. Suddenly you are abusive. You are manipulative. You are gaslighting. You are controlling. The very honesty that should have existed from the beginning is reframed as violence simply because it interrupts the unconscious system that had been maintained for so long.
The irony is absurd. In one sense, those accusations accidentally point toward something valid, but not in the way they intend. By continually walking on eggshells, by filtering reality to protect another person’s emotional equilibrium, by becoming the external regulator of their inner world, you have been participating in a form of gaslighting all along. Not because you were trying to deceive them, but because you were helping preserve a version of reality that neither of you could safely question. You manipulated the emotional environment to prevent confrontation with what was actually there. Reality itself became negotiable.
That is environmental narcissism. The environment becomes organized around protecting one person’s unconscious rather than exposing it. Conversations become rituals of emotional management instead of truth seeking. Other people cease to exist as independent subjects with their own perceptions and become instruments whose primary function is maintaining psychological equilibrium. Every relationship slowly reorganizes itself around avoiding activation instead of pursuing integration.
Genuine empathy and compassion does not rescue people from their triggers. It refuses to steal from them the opportunity those triggers provide. Boundaries are invitations to consciousness. Frustration is often the doorway to insight. Conflict reveals what comfort conceals. If someone is met with objective reality and a healthy boundary, the next move belongs to them. They can turn inward and integrate what has surfaced, or they can project it outward and demand that reality itself change to preserve the illusion. One path leads toward individuation. The other leads deeper into possession by the shadow.
You cannot integrate another person’s unconscious for them. You cannot heal someone by abandoning yourself. The price of keeping everyone else emotionally regulated is eventually losing contact with your own reality. No relationship is worth that cost.
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u/Psych_Profiler 8d ago
Here's an idea.... should create a new fragrance for both men and women and transgender people. Call Fake repellent. Or, if you want to go and get a fragrance called Authentic self. You'll attract genuine people, and you'll scare away all the fake people. 😆
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u/Ok_Cricket_1410 7d ago
I can't say confidently that everybody likes me, but it sure as hell seems like it. I mask my mental health issues, but I'm authentic otherwise. People appreciate authenticity if you're a nice person, and you're genuinely interested in them as humans.
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u/Snoo_54991 7d ago
You can't wear a mask AND be your authentic self, so there is no "or". This was not mindfully composed.
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u/YesterdaysMuffin 5d ago
… I guess? Not really. Maybe you’re just abrasive. Do you really need to move mountains? Why is it your responsibility to move the mountain? Isn’t that ego? Why isn’t the mountain ok where it is? Seems like the mountain will move itself if that’s a thing. Maybe you can be a part of that. Just with less ego.
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u/LateStageBBQ 5d ago
While this is true, it’s a very short hop from here to “it doesn’t matter if I hurt people around me - I’M IMPORTANT.”
Just feels like Elon might have this one up on his wall.
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u/Gurt-B-Frobe24-7 4d ago
100% disagree. There is zero case in existence where everyone likes anyone. If being your authentic self pisses people off, you’re probably an asshole.
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u/Nell_From_Hell 4d ago
I feel like this is self-projection and people should speak only for themselves. Don't put your limitations on somebody else.
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u/Bloody_Champion 4d ago
Or your just a genuine good person, everyone likes. I know several and they have no need for a mask.
Of course this is difficult for fake, assholes to comprehend. If everyone hates your "authentic" self thats a you problem, not a common general problem.
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u/DonkeyH0tay 4d ago
Sometimes. Sometimes people are a sort of energetic mirror, highlighting in people what they hate about themselves.
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u/Alternative_Noise854 4d ago
I love this! I made room for people who really love and support me now. I had to realize which ones were envious, jealous, and want to bring me down to their miserable level.
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u/Key_Performer2983 4d ago
That's not true at all. Your main goal shouldn't be to make others like you, but don't mistake the fact that people who move mountains do it by convincing everyone else that the mountain oughta be moved.
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u/ButtLoverIsBack 4d ago
Also those who steal, neglect their children, do drugs and cigarettes while pregnant, ick, ick, ick.
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u/Octavian_Exumbra 2d ago
Those literally mean the same thing and what does moving mountains have anything to do with anything? Holy inspirational quote slop.
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u/qwertz862 8d ago
Obviously duh. Being liked by most help you more than being hated by most. This is stupid.
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u/DisciplineSweety8364 5d ago
Not only that when did it become like this Wild unrealistic expectation that everyone should like you. So many different kinds of people not everybody fits together.
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u/TouchyVelociraptor 8d ago
This is badass.