Seeking approval
It can be very tempting to try and cure ourselves of our own insecurities by seeking approval from other people. The lure of being seen as a desirable/good/helpful person is mixed in with the opportunity to take responsibility for the decisions that we make off our shoulders and transfer them onto someone else. In theory acting in this way would liberate us from much worry and reward us with love. In practice giving away our personal power never works out so well.
The problem is two fold. First, you convince yourself that you want something that you yourself cannot create. Be it money, love, good looks, power, friendship, forgiveness, experience or something else. Then you find the person/people that you believe have that thing that you want and you put them on a pedestal. Pleasing them becomes akin to getting the thing that you desire so much.
The more approval you get from the person on the pedestal, the more you lose your ability to openly express yourself, to identify who you are and what makes you happy and to make your own decisions. You are no longer free. You are no longer true to yourself. Worse, as time goes by and you get to see the person you are pleasing more clearly, you realise that they too are flawed and imperfect. The pedestal you put under their feet falls away. Yet breaking free from the cycle of subordination without jeopardising the whole relationship you built becomes nearly impossible.
The important thing to remind yourself of, is that sometimes you need to hurt a person in order to heal them. Doctors do it all the time. Sometimes you will need to hurt other people’s feelings in order to give them the perspective they lack, and sometimes you will need to hurt your own feelings in order to realise who your true friends are. At the end of the day, nobody said it better than Aristotle:
“Criticism is something you can easily avoid by saying nothing, doing nothing, being nothing”
From an energetic point of view, people who seek approval usually have sluggish solar plexus chakras. Those are the vortexes most strongly associated with our sense of personal empowerment. The colour yellow, sunshine, eating a diet hight in fiber and fruit and barefoot grounding will all help you heal.
