The Bully and the Rescuer

From Kindergarten on, your school teachers drummed into your impressionable mind, rules to ‘play nice’. This behavioral map that began on the playground, could be influencing your conduct and defining your role in relationships today.

On the schoolyard, play nice meant don’t bonk Susie in the head with the ball. As an adult, play nice might have morphed into enabling your boss or lover for them to save face, so they may be perceived as omnipotent and therefore rein power over you. That is correct, some of us have transformed from stopping short of a head butt during a rousing game of dodgeball, to a full on people pleasing enabler in one short span of the lifetime between third grade and adulthood.

How did this happen? Here is a two part explanation for this potential confluence. We are conditioned in this culture that it is impolite to argue a point. So, you may choose to ‘let it go’ when someone is trespassing over your goal line. Secondly, the people pleaser in you does not favor or even understand mind games. Not privy to the mysterious and complex ways of manipulation and control, you resort to innocently helping people out of their own ‘pickle’, which by the way offers up your own false sense of control.

“They need me,” you might think. “If I help them and fix their problem, I will have value,” you surmise. But, letting the bully have his/her…