The Boy in the Cattle Barn

"Am I trying to please people?" Galatians 1:10

Many people who cannot stop pleasing others grew up in places where love and acceptance were handed out on condition. Where you got them by meeting the expectation. And I can tell you exactly when I learned the exchange rate, because I remember the season and I remember the smell of it.

I was ten or eleven. I used to go to work with my mom. She waitressed at the Jackson Mill restaurant, and while she worked I would walk across the street to the 4-H grounds, and in the fall I would go over to the cattle barns and watch the local shows.

And somewhere in that fall I figured something out.

If I was kind, and if I worked hard, and if I gave people respect, then those people would come into the restaurant for a meal and they would say good things about me to my mother.

That was the whole arrangement. I did not negotiate it and nobody explained it to me. I simply noticed it, the way a boy notices where the good fishing is, and then I used it, and it worked.

And it goes deeper than I can tell you in a few paragraphs. But there was a desperation in it. A hunger for a good word carried home to someone I loved. And I got addicted to finding ways to get that word, from anyone who would give it, and I have never stopped.

Harriet Braiker calls people-pleasing an addiction, and she is right, and the sentence of hers that I cannot shake is this one. Just as a drug addict seeks drugs, people-pleasers seek approval.

I have been sober from a great many things in my life.

I have never once been sober from this.