The Therapy Edit - On accepting that some people don't like you

Episode Date: July 29, 2024

In this, the first of a special ten part series of The Therapy Edit, Anna talks through the first of The Uncomfortable Truths; Some People Don't Like Me.The Uncomfortable Truth: Change Your Life By Taming 10 of Your Mind's Greatest Fears is Anna's 5th book and is set for publication on the 8th August!Pre-order your copy here and have it delivered straight to your door on publication day. Here's a teaser from Anna about what to expect in this long-awaited, transformative book.‘Some people don’t like me”“Bad things will happen to people I love”“I’m going to fail”… these words underpinned my anxieties and nightmares. I bet they feature in yours too.Our fears are anchored in the unavoidable truths of life; all things reach an end, bad things happen, and we lack the control we crave.As an experienced psychotherapist, who’s had years of therapy, I realised that ploughing endless energy into trying to control the uncontrollable is keeping us all tired, wired, and worried. Ignoring fears doesn’t make them less true, it makes them more powerful. I decided to try a different tact and it changed my world.Instead of doing everything I could to ease and avoid life’s uncomfortable truths, I sought a deeper acceptance of them. Through using this approach, my clients and I discovered that fear began to loosen its grip. We were living more intentionally and peacefully.So, face your fears one a chapter at a time, and discover who you are without worry, doubt and people-pleasing holding you back.

Hello and welcome to the Therapy Edit podcast with me, psychotherapist Anna Martha. I'll be bringing you weekly 10 minute episodes to encourage and support your emotional well-being. Hi everyone, welcome to today's little 10-minute episode of the Therapy Edit. Now, over the summer, I'm going to do a little series of 10 episodes on each chapter of The Uncomfortable Truth. Now, this is my new book, which is out on August the 15th ago and grab yourself a copy. And today, the uncomfortable truth that I am going to talk about and hopefully give you some ways to come to a place of more acceptance on this uncomfortable truth is that some people don't like you.

How can you imagine how differently you would feel if you felt more accepting and at peace with this really uncomfortable truth? think about all the things that you do and think and ruminate over and fill your diary with out of worry and fear of what other people think about you. And I know for myself how much power this has had over me in my life, how much of my resources I have completely drained in order to try and, yeah, just make sure that people like me. Now, it's okay to want to be likable. In fact, it's important because it gets us, well, it keeps us kind. It keeps us thoughtful. It keeps us empathetic. It keeps us seeking to connect with people. But when, when this uncomfortable truth that

some people won't like us becomes something that we really fear, we're far more likely to flatten our own boundaries by way of just desperately wanting to please someone else. We're far more lightly to make decisions and do things and say things that aren't actually in line with who we are. And I think also sometimes the fear of what other people think about us could be really rooted in a fear of being rejected while being abandoned. When actually what happens, when we let this fear hold so much power over us, we end up chronically. abandoning ourselves. So I'm going to read a little excerpt from the book. Just the cold, hard truth. That's what we're going to, we're going to go straight in there. And I just want,

I want you to really think about how it feels in your body when you hear me speak out these truths. And then I'm going to share with you a couple of reasons as to why you might struggle with this one. And then I'm going to share with you two tips on how to find more acceptance of this uncomfortable truth so that you. You don't have to spend all that energy, people pleasing or worrying. Okay, here we go. I'm reading from this beautiful new yellow book that actually, and you got through the post yesterday.

So this is the first time I have really opened it up and had a look at the actual thing. But this is straight from the book. People don't like you. There, I said it. People don't like me either, not people as a whole, just some people. You will be walking around. Standing in queues, doing your best and someone will have decided that they don't like you.

Some people won't like you for reasons they can explain. Maybe it's something you've done or not done. Maybe they can't quite put their finger on why they don't like you, but they don't all the same. Some people who don't even know you have decided they don't like you. Someone sitting in the car behind you has sworn at you while someone at your workplace has gone home, and complained about you. You have had many feelings come your way, whether you've been aware of it or not.

You've had dislike, judgment, assumption, even hatred. There are subsections of society who will have already chosen to dislike you because of how you look or where you were born, neither of which you can do anything about. There are some people who don't like you and it has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with you at all. Nothing you could do would change that.

no act of kindness, no pleading, pleasing or torrent of self-explanation. How does it feel then to hear these words, to breathe them in and absorb them as I speak them out? How do they sit in your body and what thoughts come to mind? It might be that many of those words already swells through your mind on a tide of anxiety and rumination. I've been there, sometimes I'm there, and maybe you feel this swell of discomfort arise as you hear me saying everything that you try to avoid thinking about. Now, in the book, I share five reasons as to why you might struggle to accept this truth, why it might be something that sits so uncomfortably in you.

It might be that you don't like yourself. Do you like yourself? Do you believe that you are deserving of kindness? Because if you struggle with low self-esteem and feel inherently flawed or unlikable, then you can experience this kind of like insatiable need to please others in order to feel deserving of relationships. This is pretty much when mine comes from. I relate to this very deeply.

Realising that you're not like where someone else can actually end up acting as a confirmation of that deepest fear, that deepest narrative that you aren't likable. but honestly, when we don't address our self-esteem, which I'll help you do in the book, the whole world singing your praises would not be enough to convince you otherwise if you do, not like yourself. And one of the other ways I mention, amongst the five different reasons we find it hard to accept this truth. One of the other reasons in the book is actually that you don't experience that and that deep acceptance enough from people who are close to in your life.

think about someone who deeply knows and accepts you despite your toxic traits your flaws your red flags your weaknesses all of that and then think of someone who doesn't know you at all now who of those two people really get to say whether you're likable or not and the more accepted you feel by someone who knows you best the less uncomfortable that truth is that not everyone will like you because you know fundamentally there is proof that you are likable and that's really important but yeah when we don't when we haven't got enough of that deep acceptance from other people and maybe we're not vulnerable maybe we don't have the right people in our lives yet then yeah it's it's harder to accept it's it's harder to face that that uncomfortable truth so two ways to get more comfortable and this is what I'm going to finish off with this is what the book has got so much on

to help you become a little bit more accepting of these uncomfortable truth so that you can just completely be freed up from the things that hold you back, the people pleasing the fear. So number one is understand how subjective like is. You know, we want people to like us. You might be desperate for people to like you, but if you're really honest with yourself, do you like everyone else? Because like is so subjective, isn't it? I say in the book, how I don't like green tea. I'm not a fan. Now, I shared this once on social media and I got so many messages back saying, Anna, green tea is so good for you. Have you tried it like this? Have you tried it with milk? Have you tried it with lemon? Have you tried

it cold? Have you tried it? I'm like, you know what, guys? It's fine. I love that you like green tea. I'm not offending green tea. It's just not for me. It's not for my taste. I think realizing how subjective like is is so helpful because when we worry about being not liked, it's almost that there can be a fear that actually someone that we don't have validity when actually so often it's just about personal preference sense of humour things that maybe people can't even put their finger on so like is so subjective and recognising that really helps disempower that need to be liked by everyone if you were liked by everyone would you even be a person you'd be so watered down and so changeable that you'd be intangible, wouldn't you?

So number two is, and I think I've touched on this the moment ago, is give your power to the right people, who really knows you, who really deserves the power to give you that sense of likeability? And it really needs to be the people that know you best, that accept you in spite of and regardless of and in knowledge of all of the little dark corners and rough edges of who you are. Because if you think about it, would you book a holiday? based on a review written by someone who'd never even been to that country

or never even been to that part of the coast in the UK or never even stayed at that Airbnb, you just wouldn't because it just wouldn't, it wouldn't be valid. It wouldn't deserve the power to dictate where you spend your precious time and your precious money. So think about where you're giving that power to be like. If you're giving it to a stranger who doesn't even know you, who hasn't walked in your shoes,

then really how subjective that is and how undeserving of that power that will that will often make you feel bad or sad or not good enough so there are a couple of little insights into just more ways to you get a little bit more comfortable with that and comfortable truth that some people don't like you and that's okay and it enables this as we accept that to go forth and be more ourselves because we know that the closest people to us, they do like us. And in time, we can recognize that we can work on our relationship with ourselves to realize that we can like ourselves too. So I hope that's helpful. And I hope that despite how hard it must have felt to hear those words at the beginning,

that it's actually freed you up a little bit. So go and grab a copy of The Uncomfortable Truth and you will find lots more in there. I am so excited to announce that my brand new book, the uncomfortable truth, change your life by taming 10 of your minds, greatest fears, is available for pre-order now and is out on the 8th of August. And in this book, we tackle some of life's big unavoidable uncomfortable truths, such as some people don't like me. I am going to fail. Life isn't fair. Bad things will happen. And in this book, we tackle these big uncomfortable trees that rob us have so much headspace and energies. We try and control and avoid them. And as we move into a place of radical acceptance of these truths, you will find yourself

living more freely and intentionally with more presence and confidence than ever before. So come on this journey with me and pre-order now at Wardstones in Amazon. We can celebrate together.