Approval addiction. Yeah it might sound like something I just made up, but trust me it is real. I am a mom and I deal and am recovering from approval addiction every day.
What is approval addiction you may ask? Well, approval addiction is where you survive off of peoples approval and you will actually become what people want you to be just to be able to get their approval. You constantly worry how people are perceiving you and you are always worried that people are judging you by how others you are associated with behave or act.
Here is a piece of new. I am 39 years old and I am trying to find out who I am. Why, you may ask? Well ever since I was a little girl, I would become whoever I wanted approval from. A cheerleader, a popular kid, I would read whatever books the person I wanted to like me read, I would talk like them and do what they did even if it wasn’t good for me or wasn’t the right choice for my life.
As a mom approval addiction is even harder to resist. The reason, you have small children going through their stages and you worry if what they are doing is going to affect how others look at you. Will they want to hang out with you anymore? Will they want to even talk to you even more? So you try to suppress your children…make them act prim and proper so that people will approve of you parenting or of your children. YIKES!! Suppressing your children I will say is not good. Kids are kids and they need to go through their stages, they need to explore and if you suppress them then they will not be who they are supposed to be, they will just learn to conform and mold to what everyone wants them to be so they can be approved…does anyone see a circle here?
Approval addiction gets so bad at times that you tend to disconnect yourself with everyone because you have built this whole thing up in your head that people are judging you, people don’t like you, people are mad at you, people don’t like your kids and people just want to stay away. So you build this up in your head and guess what happens. People don’t want to hang out with you! People don’t talk to you because you are being distant and you have put yourself on a little island all because of a thought that you let build up in your mind.
Sometimes as a recovering approval addicted mom I have a problem trying to seek approval from my own children. Let them at times do what they want just to hear “you are an awesome mom” or “this is the best day ever”. But then regretting it later because either you spent too much money or what you did wasn’t really the best decision. Daily I pray and ask God to help me not be so focused on the approval of my children because I know they love me no matter what decisions or things we make or do. My kids know I love them and that all the things I say that may not agree with what they want to do is only for their best.
I have to be honest writing this blog post was hard for me. I don’t talk about what I go through much because when I was young I was always told “you don’t talk about your feelings because people will judge you or they won’t like you”….hmmmm that kinda sounds like maybe I had an approval addicted mom…but you know what I knew she loved me and knew she was always making the choices that would be for my best interest.
So Approval Addicted moms…don’t worry don’t stress. It is a daily struggle, but I have good news for you. If someone doesn’t like you or doesn’t approve of something you do, guess what…it is okay. The more you focus on who doesn’t approve or like you the more you push away all those amazing and wonderful people that accept you for just who you are and love you anyway. Trust me I have done this. There are some relationships that are strained in my life because I chose to allow one person not accepting me to get in my head and it made me isolate myself. It made me close myself off, now people that loved me unconditionally and people that I was so close to aren’t as close anymore because I made some choices. My goal is to rebuild those relationships and to constantly work on being better at dealing with my approval addiction.
I do have some good news for you. Theres only one person you need approval from. That person is the one that created you, the one that knew who you were going to become, the one that knew what your life was going to be. That person is God. Don’t worry, because no matter what you do God accepts you and He wants you to be happy so just sit back and soak in the fact that no matter what others think and no matter what others say, God is smiling down and saying he loves you. Now if you need to fix some things in your life then do that right now…sit down close your eyes and say “God please help me be better, help me be the person that you want me to be, help me cut out the things that are not of you so that I can be that person I need to be”
Don’t fret moms we will overcome and we will be who God has made us to be no matter how much the enemy wants to attack. You will be who you are supposed to be . BeYOUtiful!!
–Beth