Dealing with People who are insecure or hard to Please
Have you ever known someone who is always angry and almost impossible to please?
Are you friends with someone who gets irritated in almost anything and never hesitates to lash out vicious words to anyone who may go against his or her beliefs or preferences?
In Joyce Meyer’s book ‘Beauty for Ashes’, Meyer discusses how to deal with people who seem to crave love and attention from everyone else. In the book, Meyer made it clear that we should not be burdened as we are not responsible for other people’s joy.
In ‘Beauty for Ashes’, Meyer adamantly discussed a dark part of her childhood. She suffered incest that led her to become an unhappy woman – until she met the Lord where everything changed for the better, including her outlook in life.
Before she finally became healed from the pain of the abuse, Meyer said she was a difficult person, a ‘love-starved’ individual who expected people to give her love and make her feel good about herself.
“You may want your friend or spouse to make up to you for the years of abuse you suffered. But such unrealistic expectation of a friend or a spouse puts them on overload and possibly scares them away. They may be trying to give you everything they know how to give you, but until you are delivered from the wounds of your past, nothing that anyone else does for you will ever be enough,” Meyer said.
“I remember going through a time when I was never happy. I always wanted Dave (Meyer’s husband) to do something else, always wanted him to do something more and he sincerely tried for years. He did everything he could to help me through my years of crisis of pain…But one day, he looked at me and said, “Woman”, now hear this. I have tried to make you happy and you know what? I have decided that it can’t be done. No matter what I do, I am not going to make you happy.” Then he said, “So guess what? I am finished trying.”
Meyer said many marriages end up in divorce because one spouse feels that the other is not making him or her happy. The author points out that the ‘root of rejection’ is what actually keeps a person brokenhearted.
“A root of rejection will leave you insecure, with low self-esteem and no confidence. Until you are delivered, you will always expect someone else to make you feel good about yourself,” Meyer said.
“People who have a root of rejection in their life feel unloved and insecure. Their personality is broken; they are shattered inside. As a result, they are constantly looking for something to make them feel okay. They try everything: a better job, a promotion, a spiritual gift, a position in the church, the right friends, the right label in their clothes, the right kind of car…they seem to always imply, ‘tell me I’m okay. Fall all over me with compliments, let me always be right.”
Meyer said she committed many days of her life praying for deliverance until she became the woman that she is today – healed and fulfilled.
“If we become wholly filled with God Himself, we will not crave the reassurance of others. We will be so flooded with God’s love that it will overflow into our relationship with Him, with ourselves, and with others,” she said.
Joyce Meyer also cited a very powerful verse in Ecclesiastes 5: 20 that emphasized how God could help us put the past behind:
“God keeps such people so busy enjoying life that they take no time to brood over the past.” Ecclesiastes 5:20 (NLT)
I would like to add an important insight from another chapter where Meyer cautioned everyone not to take the responsibility of making other people happy.
”A lot of times, we want everybody to be happy with everything we are doing. But we have to get over thinking that everybody is going to be happy with everything we do. We have to do what we believe God is leading us to do, but we have to realize that everybody is responsible for his or her own joy.”
