AUTHENTICITY

You can’t please all of the people all of the time, as the saying goes. But when we care better for ourselves, we care better for others, discovers Yasmina Floyer

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Expert advice

Emma Reed Turrell is a psychotherapist who works with individuals and organisations to help them overcome limiting beliefs and realise their potential. She is the author of Please Yourself (HarperCollins, £9.99). emmareedturrell.com

It was a Friday evening, my family’s weekly circuit breaker, where we enjoy the three Ts: take-out, TV and time together – except things had changed. My daughter had recently been offered a funded place at a dance class. She wanted to do it. Even though it’s on take-out night. Even though she would be back late and still need to be at ballet for 9am the next morning. But, three weeks in, she admits that she doesn’t want to do the class, never has. It turns out she thought it would make me happy, because I took dance classes as a teen. She worried it would displease the performing arts school to turn down a funded place; that because this opportunity came her way, she had to accept it so as not to appear ungrateful. I realised that for women in particular, the message that we ought to be a ‘good girl’ and acquiesce has persisted well into my daughter’s woke generation. I’ve never considered her (or myself, for that matter) as much of a people pleaser – but, it turns out, it isn’t as avoidable as I had thought.

When I was her age, I paid very close attention to what my peers wore on non-uniform day. Sweatshirts with Ellesse and Adidas logos emblazoned on the front like a modern-day fleur-de-lis indicated status and street cred. These logos were more than just branding; they acted as a cultural semaphore, signalling that you belonged. As a first-generation Mauritian girl, it was important to me to be accepted, and to try to reflect what I saw around me, even if popular culture did not reflect me back. Part of that meant wearing the ‘right thing’ on non-uniform days, and I strived to do just that – though I never quite got it right. Therapist and author Emma Reed Turrell speaks to me about how primal this desire to be accepted is: ‘We are born people pleasers. As a human baby, we’re born roughly 12 months prematurely to any other mammal, and our initial code of conditioning centres on working out how to stay in favour. Part of the human condition is that we are dependent on a pack, and our caregivers are the difference between life and death.’ The relationship between people pleasing and survival is all the more poignant if you’ve experienced a childhood where capitulating to the needs of a caregiver was connected to safety or ensuring that your basic needs were met.