# Approval Addiction - repost



## yeah_yeah_yeah (Mar 27, 2007)

This might help you

It might not. If it doesnt, dont get all UP IN MY FACE, Y'aaaalllll. OK 

I realised a while back that I have tons of addictions, little behaviours that I do to help me escape if I feel bad or whatever. If I had felt guilty, anxious or angry that day, I would be 100 times more likely to want to come on SAS, eat chocolate, go to starbucks, cruise "Bigbutts.com" or whatever. I'm still struggling with the butts, but hey, baby steps.

At the same time I also knew that I had an Approval Addiction for a long time. Needing people to respond well to me. To like me. So I figured, hey thats an addiction too. I write em all up into a table with the date every day, and under each one I put two columns - A 'U' for 'urge' (to do the addictive thing) and an 'R' for response (did I do it, yes or no). Approval was in there too.

So now, I was challenging myself to not do my additicive behaviours. I had to fight the urge to eat comfort food, to go into town and have coffee ... AND the urge to chat to everyone, be the life and soul, make witty repartee and generally be perfect. Instead I had to just state my order, or give em the money, give short responses and so on. I would be open to people around me, but not TRY. Just be reasonably upbeat in my tone and outlook. If someone talked to me, it was ok to reply politely, but that was all. No trying to be Mr Hilarity. So this was in there alongside quitting online smut and keeping away from cookies, after having read somewhere that "once a man has conquered his addictions, he can conquer anything". Cool.

So what I found was this. At first it was uncomfortable. I did get the urge to speak (a little 'Y' under the urge column then) but I resisted, Oddly, i felt CALM. Hmm.

I carried on doing this. Whole days were I made little to no effort to be Mr Entertainment, or to try to make people feel at ease, or to be genrally pandering to people and force laughs at things I didnt find funny. I started to feel CONFIDENT. I wasnt being aloof or rude - just open.

Then I began to notice that people made an effort to TALK TO ME. It seemed like the less hard I tried, the more people actually spoke to me. And as I wasnt fussed about saying the right thing (after all I was allowed to be as uncommunicative as I wanted) suddenly it seemed easier for things to just bubble up to the surface. If nothing came up, I didnt care. i could just let the conversation roll. We didnt hit it off. Big deal. But with others I started to notice big changes. I ended up in great long conversations with people about their lives and families. People seemed to WANT TO TALK TO ME :con

"Let me get this right" ... I thought ... "when I actually try to be UNcommunicative - people want to talk to ME??". Weird. it was like somehow, by not really being that fussed if I came up with the lines, the right words and the moves ... that life suddenly got 100 times easier.

I decided to bank that one and keep applying it.

Ross


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## Captain Woodchuck (Sep 24, 2005)

What do you think of this, Ross:

THE UNDERLYING CAUSE OF LOVE AND APPROVAL ADDICTION -by Margaret Paul

...Love and approval addiction is rooted in self-abandonment. Imagine the feeling part of you as a child - your inner child. When you are love or approval addicted, you have handed your inner child away for adoption. Instead of learning to take responsibility for your own happiness by loving and approving of yourself, you have handed your inner child away to others for love and approval - making others responsible for your feelings. This inner self-abandonment will always cause the deep pain of low self-worth, making you dependent upon others for your sense of worth&#8230;.-Margaret Paul. http://ezinearticles.com/?Love-Addictio ... &id=407063


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## yeah_yeah_yeah (Mar 27, 2007)

Yeah sorta. My approval needs came from feeling abandoned emotionally by my parents, but also from a deep fear that I formed after being attacked 5 or 6 times in the street. 2 of those times I was 'saved' from the worst of it because I knew people who stepped in - so I formed a belief that I needed to be friends with EVERYONE in order to be safe from harm. I'd been carrying that around with me for ever, and overcompensating for the fear with a kind of arrogance when speaking to people who scared me. Oddly (well maybe not) this was actually more likley to provoke a bad reaction - hence the word "lifetrap".

But Maggie up there has some reasonable ideas I think. I overcame approval addiction last December in terms of how I felt - but it took up until this recent discovery to completely change the BEHVIOURS I had built around it.

Mental shift alone is not enough to produce lasting change. You have to DO things differently too.

Ross


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