#45 - 5 Signs You May Be Over-Giving

Welcome to Beyond Bitchy, mastering the art of boundaries with Vicki Tidwell Palmer. Do you think of personal and relationship boundaries as harsh, rigid or bitchy, or do you feel clueless about how boundaries work? Whether you think boundaries are bitchy or baffling, we will give you a fresh vision of personal limits as a source of freedom and liberation. Every week, Vicki shares expert information about how you can master the art of boundaries so you can get the space you need and the connection you crave. Hi, this is Vicki Tidwell Palmer and welcome to episode number 45 of the Beyond Bitchy podcast. And since this is the first episode of the month, this one is focused on boundary issues specifically related to women. Of course, the topic for today, which is all about overgiving and the five signs that you might be overgiving and what to do about it. This topic can absolutely apply to men, however, I believe that women are particularly vulnerable to people pleasing the disease to please, as they say, or maybe a chronic habitual and dysfunctional habit of saying yes to every single request. And that's what we'll talk about today. When I think about women and overgiving or people pleasing, I'm reminded of something I heard once where a woman said, you know, women will drop everything and they will travel to the other side of the earth to donate a kidney or an organ to a friend or maybe a distant relative, but they won't pick up the phone to make that massage or doctor's appointment that they've been saying that they'll get to for a very long time. This is so true for so many reasons and it illustrates the reality that most women will significantly extend or overextend themselves for others, but they may be neglecting themselves. So the metaphor I love to use when I am thinking about or talking about giving and receiving is the experience of breathing. Giving is like an exhale, releasing the air from our lungs, and receiving is like the inhale we're taking in clean, oxygenated air. And if we were to breathe out twice as much as we breathe in, we would probably be in distress. And if we became severely imbalanced and we hardly ever took an inhale and we spent all of our time exhaling, we would die. So this metaphor is a great way to think about how you want to balance giving and receiving in your life in the same way that you would want to have your exhale and your inhale mostly in balance most of the time. So let's look at why or some of the reasons that women are vulnerable to overgiving. The first reason is that I believe that women are trained usually in our family and definitely in our culture we are trained to be nice. And being nice also includes not being angry. Or if we are angry, we need to not show it. And then even if we show our anger, our anger needs to be very mild. So for example, people tend to respond or react to women's very appropriate expression of anger as if it's over the top. And so if you experience this enough as a woman, meaning that people react to your appropriate expression of anger as if it's over the top, it definitely sends a signal that you need to dial it down or you need to be nicer. People might even say, you know, what's wrong with you. So we're trained by culture, by our family and by really gender stereotypes to be nice. It's our job to be nice and nurturing and helpful. We also may suffer from codependency. And I want to say here too, with regard to women and men, I think that women and men both suffer pretty much equally from codependency. I do think that it's more apparent in women than it is in men. But I've just found over the years in both my professional work, working with men with various presenting issues, and then also just in my personal experience that men definitely do struggle with codependency. I think they're better at hiding it maybe than women are, or it manifests differently. So I want to give you the dictionary definition of codependency and then I'll tell you what I, how I define it and how I think about codependency as an issue. The dictionary definition of codependency is excessive, emotional, or psychological reliance on a partner, typically one who requires support on account of an illness or addiction. And this is a pretty kind of dry and straightforward definition and it's typical and kind of expected that when people talk about codependency, they're often describing a person who is in a relationship with someone who struggles with an addiction. And that may very well be, however, I believe the codependency is much broader than this definition because I think many people who are not dealing with a person who has a chronic illness or an addiction can be codependent. We are taught, again, by our family and our culture to have codependent traits. So let me tell you how I think of and define codependency. I see codependency as an over reliance on the responses or feedback of other people or even what you believe another person thinks or feels in order to alleviate your anxiety or to feel better about yourself. So what I'm saying there is it's not only that you're relying or over relying on the kind of feedback you get from other people, but you will even make up what you think other people are thinking and feeling and then you will respond in a codependent fashion based on what you have made up. And when someone is reliant on others for their sense of safety or their sense of esteem or how they feel about themselves or how they value themselves, they will often engage in a lot of overt meaning obvious or apparent, but more often covert meaning hidden or harder to see. So they engage in a lot of overt but more often covert efforts to make that happen. So I can't tell you how many times I've heard people brainstorm or really scheme is a better word to try to figure out what they could do or what they could avoid doing or say or not say or orchestrate some kind of event or situation in order to get a desired outcome or impact or influence another person in a certain way. And everything that I just said it describes codependency to a T. There's a lot of what's called negative control in codependency which is I need you to do say not do think, feel whatever. I need you to be a certain way in order for me to feel okay whether that has to do with how I feel about myself, how I value myself or to lessen my anxiety. So when you think about trying to orchestrate these sorts of conditions or responses in another person, doesn't it just sound exhausting or if I think I'm responsible for anything that is actually another person's responsibility and I mean this about in adult relationships in particular, that is also codependency. When you think about boundaries, you can see why this is a boundary problem. If I take responsibility for another person's issues of self-care or other personal matters or professional matters, I have veered over to their side of the street and I am no longer on my side of the street. So that's a lot to say about codependency but that gives you an idea of how I view codependency and again, what I want to say here is that I think it's almost impossible to get out of our family of origin and our culture and when I say our culture, I just mean I'm in the U.S. I'm talking about Western culture in general, I think it's really hard to survive our family of origin or the way our culture functions without having even just a little touch of codependency and I do not see codes dependency as always tied to being in relationship with a person who is struggling with an addiction, for example. Another reason women are vulnerable to overgiving is that we often assume, which is a distorted belief, but we often assume that in order for others to like us, we have to say yes to most or all of other people's requests or you know essentially go along to get along. So let's talk about the five signs that you may be overgiving and what to do about it. So the first sign is that you're resentful. And if you recall, because from time to time, you know in past episodes I've talked about resentment and I define and I borrow this definition from Piemelody who defines resentment as victim anger. I'm angry and I make up or believe that I am a victim. So if I'm overgiving, I'm probably going to be angry about other people quote unquote taking advantage of me or I may be painfully aware of what feels to me like an imbalance of energy that I'm putting into a relationship or a project and the other person isn't contributing as much or as much as I think they should. And when you're feeling resentful about giving, you've got to ask yourself who am I a victim of? You know the truth is that we're usually a victim of our own choices. If I continually say yes to requests or I'm hyper-responsible meaning I take too much responsibility for things that are someone else's responsibility or I just take on too much in any given situation and then I feel resentful. There's no one to blame or feel like a victim of except ourselves. And the reason is that you have the power to stop what you're doing or reduce or perhaps even eliminate your involvement in a project or even in a particular relationship. The first step in getting out of this kind of victim mindset so that you can end your feelings of resentment is to get very clear about what you're responsible for and what is the responsibility of others as well as accepting that you are the only person you have power over and of course taking action by for example with drawing your energy or your time or your resources and that is about you having power over your own choices. The second sign that you may be overgiving is that without thinking you almost always say yes when someone asks you to do anything. There can be a lot of reasons for this. Maybe when you were growing up you were never allowed to say no which is not uncommon or you were never allowed to make choices around things you should have been given the option to choose like what you wanted to wear you know if it was appropriate or how you wear your hair for example. You know by the time we get to a certain age we should be allowed to make these kinds of choices for ourselves as long as they fit into our family's value system. I have to say that I don't think hair ever really fits into a value system the only example I can think of is if you wanted to like shave your head and then you know shave in a curse word and it or something like that but sometimes parents get a little bit too worked up about hair which I think is ridiculous but anyway or you know you may have been taught that it's a badge of honor to drop everything and go rescue people who are in trouble or need you and some of us had parents who did that and that's what they modeled to us and one of the most painful dynamics I've seen in situations like that is sometimes a person will have a parent it's usually just one parent who has this sort of excessive overgiving happening and the truth about it is is that they're out there rescuing everyone and they are neglecting their family and so people out you know in the town or the city you know where they live or in the church or community or whatever they think the person is just this wonderful nice person who would you know give you the shirt off their back but they actually are very neglectful of their family and it goes to the point about when you get imbalanced in one way toward one end of a continuum then something else is going to be neglected on the other side one of the dangers here is if you get your esteem needs met meaning how you feel about yourself if it's dependent on how much you're doing for others you're going to have a hard time to begin to say no which of course is a boundary in cases like this you'll need to do some work around re-evaluating what you believe gives you worth esteem is the experience of knowing that you have inherent worth regardless of how you look what you do or don't do for other people how you perform in various parts of your life or your possessions or whether or not you're in a relationship or really anything external about you if you believe you're getting your esteem needs met from overgiving I recommend you begin by simply noticing when you say yes how often it's truly authentic meaning that when you say yes your insides and your outsides are matching and even tracking when there's this mismatch between what you say and what you really want to do if you're in the habit of saying yes to almost everything start tracking how your yeses impact other areas of your life for example every time we say yes to anything we're saying no to many other things and pretty much everything else and what what are your yeses costing you you can ask yourself that what are they costing me in terms of time that I might prefer to spend on my own priorities this can often help begin the difficult process of beginning to say no usually to a few easy things at the beginning or to people that it's easier to say no to and then building up to the more difficult knows or the people who are more challenging for you to say no to later on and if you need some help around this I recommend going back and listening to episode number 34 which is about choosing self-care over self-sacrifice to get some tips about how to do this and remember always focus on your progress and not perfection and it's very tempting when you're dealing with an issue like this because you may begin to notice how many times you do say yes when you mean no and if you have the expectation that you will automatically sort of flip a switch and you will always say yes when you mean yes and you'll always say no when you mean no that's just not gonna happen you know even people who are really skillful at this from time to time you know when they're not having a great day or someone catches them off guard they're going to do that so again progress not perfection the third sign that you may be overgiving is that you consistently feel underappreciated and undervalued you think no one appreciates me or can't they see how much I'm doing one of the painful realities I've noticed about this particular mindset is that the person having it often doesn't truly appreciate themselves and they're seeking outside appreciation due to their own challenges around self-appreciation and I'm not saying here that it's not great to be appreciated or that people should not appreciate others but when you're feeling a deficit in this area for yourself it's so helpful to ask yourself you know do I really appreciate myself as much as I want others to appreciate me but regardless of whether or not you struggle to appreciate yourself when you feel undervalued or underappreciated you do have the power to shift your experience you could simply make a request for a thank you from another person and by the way I think that's a very legitimate request if you're feeling a little appreciation deficient that you say you know I'd really love it if you would thank me for this thing that I did you know it reminds me of just recently my husband and I have been negotiating a really challenging transaction and we were kind of at a dead end with it and I wrote an email to one of the people who is involved in sort of the other side of this transaction and I thought it was a great email and it got a very positive response and I was in one of these places I didn't feel underappreciated but I really wanted the other people that are sort of on our side to appreciate me and I told them I said I really want you to give me some appreciation and thank you about this email and they did it's very vulnerable to do that but the point that I want to make is that you can ask another person to thank you when you want to be appreciated or to just ask for feedback you know sometimes people don't realize that another person wants feedback and so So if you're feeling better you just want to know So what the other person thinks about your contribution, you can say, you know, I'd really like your feedback about, you know, what I've done or what the work I've done so far, something like that. Or, you know, if the situation is chronic and you don't believe that it's likely that anything will change in terms of the appreciation or the recognition of your contribution, you again have the power to pull back or remove your energy, your time, your attention, your resources, whatever it is from the situation or the project or even a relationship. Another sign of overgiving is you have a compulsive need or habit to tell everybody or other people all the wonderful things you're doing for others or how hard you're working. And when this is an issue for someone, it usually goes back to what I talked about before when someone gets their esteem needs met from compulsive giving, which of course is always overgiving. And if you know that this is a problem for you, well, one of the assignments that I give that I think can be very interesting and helpful for this is to commit to, you know, it depends on how much of an issue it is for you, but I would say a minimum of at least a week where you intentionally decide that you are not going to tell other people all of the great things that you're doing or how hard you're working, that you're just going to have an experiment, you're going to use your life in your experiences, a learning laboratory to see how that feels for you and then to notice what happens when you intentionally decide not to say that and you'll get a lot of information about what need that habit is filling. Again, I'm not saying that you should never do that because I do think there are times to absolutely brag and to celebrate. And one of the terms that I've learned to use for this is positive focus, like what am I feeling really happy, proud, excited about and those are great things to share. But I'm talking here more about sort of a compulsive habitual need to do that. That fills a sort of feeling, filling a hole for you, meaning a deficit as opposed to just experiencing the joy of sharing with someone else. And the last sign that you may be overgiving is that you believe that your yes is directly related to how much somebody else will like you or how much they'll want to be your friend or be connected with you. This one can be very challenging to overcome because all of us need and want to be connected to others. And if you believe that the only way another person will want to connect with you or be in relationship with you is if you say yes to everything, you're going to be set up big time for overgiving. I see this as a real thinking error because the truth is that in order to be truly connected with another person and to develop intimacy, we must know that person in an authentic way. And when you're in a relationship with anyone who frequently says yes, when they really mean no, you can't form an intimate connection because essentially you don't know who they really are because they're not telling you, they're not telling you the truth about their yes and their no. And the other thing that eventually happens in these kinds of situations is that the person who's compulsively saying yes in order to establish or stay in connection with another person or people please, eventually can't sustain it. So they become resentful or they become hurt or extremely angry because of their of course distorted perception that they're either being taken advantage of or not appreciated in some way or they may even just outright say, you know, I'm just giving, giving, giving and saying yes to everything and you're not doing anything and again going back to what we talked about before, you know, not to labeling but whose fault is that? You know, that's about not taking power over the things you have power over. The other consequence in situations like this when you believe you have to say yes in order to establish or maintain a relationship is that over time the relationship will feel rather dead essentially because the person saying yes is not really present. They're not really showing up in the relationship as who they are and that eventually will always cause a relationship to feel kind of dead and lifeless. So here are a few quick tools that I want to give you for ending overgiving. The first one is to use what I call the good enough test. So this is in any situation where you are tempted to do more or extend or over extend yourself, I want you to ask yourself whether you believe that what you've done is good enough. Now if you're in the habit of overgiving, you probably have some distorted thinking about this and I'm going to talk about this in a minute in terms of getting feedback from other people, but I would recommend that you start checking this out like do some reality testing with other people and maybe even kind of explain the situation to them without gossiping. I mean you could talk to a therapist or a close friend and say you know I need some feedback about this. I'm working on this project with this person or whatever and this is what I'm doing and I want some feedback from you about whether or not you think that what I'm contributing is kind of in balance or is it overgiving if you know this is a problem for you and you know you have to be mindful of who you ask in these situations because if you have someone in your life who tends to be more on the undergivings side, they're more of a taker than a giver, they're probably going to default towards saying oh for sure you're overgiving right so you have to be mindful of that as well. Another tool is that if you have time to choose between saying a no and a yes, always ask yourself whether you can say yes without feeling resentment. So the question is okay if I say yes to this am I going to have a resentment which again is anger caused by feeling that you're a victim. The other one that goes with that one is to buy time before answering any request. So whether the request is done in person, by text, by email or phone, I highly recommend if you know that you are an overgiver or you tend to be a hyper responsible person, please learn how to delay your response. The in-person request or the one that would be on the phone as you're talking to someone, those are usually the most difficult and you can simply say something like you know I need to look at my schedule and get back to you or you know can I get back to you about that and I would put these phrases and these kinds of questions in your virtual toolbox as things to say whenever you get a request that can be extremely helpful and they can keep you protect you from saying yes when what you really want to say is no. Another tool is you could decide to give to yourself before giving to other people for a temporary period of time. You could even do an experiment maybe for a month where every time you say yes to someone about some significant request, I'm not talking about a little thing like you know will you pass me the salt or something like that but it's a significant request so that every time you say yes to something like that you also need to say yes to yourself about something that you either want to do or something that is for your self-care and I would also add to that that you make a commitment that you're going to follow through because you might say oh yes I'm going to do that but then you never get it done and so it could even be that you become very sort of transactional in your own mind about this that you can't say another yes to another person until you've done this other thing for yourself which is a yes to you. You know I mentioned before about getting feedback and another tool is to ask a friend or your spouse someone who knows you pretty well if they think that you're overgiving. People who tend to overgive usually don't realize that they're going above and beyond what the average person might do and again as a reminder you know if one of these people like if your spouse for example tends to be a taker they may not be the best person to ask but I will say even sometimes people who maybe even are self admittedly takers they will still be able to recognize that you're an overgiver and they may even be willing to tell you when you're doing that with other people they just don't really want to let on that you're doing that with them and I also recommend that if you ask for this kind of feedback that you simply take in the information just like you're a reporter to try to make it to take it as impersonally as you can as if it's not even about you maybe even write it down so you can look at it later and do all of this without responding or getting defensive or arguing about it. So you're just asking for feedback they're giving it to you and you can simply say thank you for your feedback and you know that's what I needed to know and then you can go and process it and this is especially true if you know that you're getting kind of, you know, you can feel your nervous system getting kind of activated, you can feel your, you know, you want to say something or you want to argue with them. It's even better in those situations to just zip your lip, write it down, review it later. Another one, another tool, the last tool is try for one month, writing down all of the times you said yes to someone else and then you later regretted it. A simple example of this is that let's say that you are an introvert and you really don't like going to parties, but your best friend had a party, she invited you to go and even though you didn't really want to go, you did. Even if what you really would have preferred to do is to stay home and read a book or watch a movie on Netflix, you have a right to want to do that and to say yes to what you want regardless of what another person might think or feel about your decision. That's where the codependency often comes in is that we tell ourselves, yeah, but if I say, I really would rather stay home, but if I tell them, if I say that I'm not coming or I have other plans, then it's going to hurt their feelings and it's going to be, so essentially, you know, going back to self-sacrifice you, sacrifice what you want in order to, in your own mind, thinking that you're pleasing another person. And I always say, you know, our good friends and the people who love us, they want us to say no to them when that's really our know. Wouldn't you want that when you think about people that you really love, that you really care about, you want them to show up as authentic and as real as they possibly can in relationship to you. And you know, you may hear that and think, well, well, really, I don't like other people too, ever say no to me. Well, that's a different type of issue, but what I'm really going for here is that first of all, we have a right to want what we want. We also, if we're staying on our side of the street, we realize that whatever another person's thoughts our feelings are about what we are doing as long as we're not, you know, violating a boundary or being really offensive in some way that we have a right to do it. And so their thoughts and feelings are truly none of our business. Those are things that they will need to process. And, you know, by the way, giving this kind of simple example about not going to the party and staying home and reading a book or doing whatever it is you want to do, it doesn't matter to me, you could be lying on your bed staring at the ceiling. You don't have to say what you're doing. You can just say, you know, I've got plans or, you know, I'm not available or whatever you don't need to explain why you do or you don't do whatever you're doing or frankly what you want to do. You just want it because you want it. When you say you've got other plans, it's simple. That's a simple statement and it's also the truth. You have plans, even if that is you're going to stay home and stare at the ceiling. All right, so today we talked about overgiving which can be a huge issue for many women. And we reviewed some of the signs that you might be overgiving and what you can do about it. And I hope the information has been super helpful for you. Till next week, I invite you to embrace the power you have to create the boundaries you want to create so that you can get the space you need and the connection you crave. See you next time. Thanks for listening to BeyondBitchy Podcast. Head over to BeyondBitchy.com for shownotes, the BeyondBitchy blog and other resources to help you master the art of boundaries. Till next time, remember, boundaries aren't bitchy.