I had no idea how bad of a people pleaser I was until I got my diagnosis of postpartum OCD. For the last ten years, I have basically lived my life saying yes to every single person except for myself. This comes at the expense of my own happiness. Don’t get me wrong, I love helping others. My therapist helped me realize the level that I was helping was unhealthy, and I needed to start prioritizing myself. Sounds easy right? It is not. This has been one of my hardest habits to break. I still work on it every day.

Looking back, I can pinpoint exactly when this behavior started happening. It was after my freshman year of college, when I lost a lot of my friends. I kept obsessing over what I was doing wrong in order to make that happen. I felt so lost that year, and I completely lost my confidence. OCD has a way of making you doubt everything about yourself. Once that happens, all confidence is completely gone. This is where I was at after that year.

Because of my lack of confidence from my freshman year of college, I fell into a pattern of unhealthy people pleasing behavior. I thought since so many people left in my life that year, that I had to say yes to everyone in order for them to like me. Obviously, I was the problem, so I had to do everything for everyone so that they would be happy and I could have friends. I was the go-to for anyone. I would do anything anyone asked of me even if I already had plans. I just felt this was how I had to be in order to be liked.

Once I had Caia, this behavior continued. I listened to anyone who gave me parenting advice. I brought Caia to any place anyone asked of me no matter how hard it was for me. I didn’t want to disappoint or upset anyone. After all, so many people helped me with Caia, I had to do what they said. I felt like in order to keep people in my life and help me when I was struggling so hard, that I could never say no to anything that was asked of me. I was miserable. I felt like no matter what I did, someone was always disappointed with what I chose. I couldn’t win.

My therapist helped me realize that this behavior was not acceptable. I had to start having a back bone, get my confidence back, and learn to say no to people. I was so out of practice on all of this that I had no idea what to do. I started with small things, like saying no to outings with Caia. The problem with doing this is, people were not expecting this from me. After all, for the last ten years, I had been the person to say yes to everything. Seeing me say no was not expected. That made me feel guilty. Saying no is something I still struggle with everyday. I want everyone to be happy. However, I know in my heart that I have to be happy too. People in my life should be happy that I am getting my confidence back, and that I can finally say yes to myself.