  |
|||
|
|
There is an affliction that strikes more people today than cancer, heart disease and strokes combined, and its effects can be just as damaging. It is called the "disease to please," and diet or exercise or medication cannot cure it. In fact the only way to heal this disease is from within.
The disease to please is aggressive, first diagnosed in childhood, when we start turning against our precious and true inner identity in search of praise and adoration from our parents. Like a cancer, it spreads through our teenage years as we long to fit in, to conform, to be one of the crowd. Before we know it, we are adults, totally consumed by the disease, unable to function on our own intuition, our own ideas, and our own opinions. Without the praise and acceptance of our peers and authority figures, we crumble. In our society-driven quest for perfection, we often measure ourselves against the desires, ambitions and expectations of other people, and we come up miserably short. In time, the disease so consumes us we no longer know who we are and what we truly want. So tuned are we to the music of other people, we have forgotten the sound of our own inner melody. As Terry Cole-Whittaker stated in her book Love and Power in a World Without Limits, "The more you define yourself by another's standards for success and failure, the more difficult it is to know and love yourself." We give up our healthy boundaries, self-worth and self-esteem. We lose faith in the validity of our own thoughts and opinions, always so certain someone else knows better than we. We lift others up onto pedestals of our own creation, only to watch ourselves sink lower and lower into the ground. The disease to please, if left untreated, threatens to deaden us to our true selves to the point that we no longer even care. Life becomes a numb cycle of trying to impress, aiming to please, hoping to be liked even by people we don't really like in turn. Forget the monkey, we walk around with an elephant on our backs, the heavy weight of pressure to perform to others levels of expectation. Living with the disease requires us to hand over all of our power to someone else, and to surrender our authenticity in search of the great nod of approval. We become automatons, like the women in the movie "Stepford Wives," with no goal but to get acceptance and love from anyone and everyone outside of ourselves.
The copyright of the article Healing the Disease to Please in Science of Mind is owned by . Permission to republish Healing the Disease to Please in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.
For a complete listing of article comments, questions, and other discussions related to Rev. Marie Jones's Science of Mind topic, please visit the Discussions page. |
||
|
|
|||
