Needing to be liked...

How do I get beyond the need/desire to be liked by most ppl?

If I sense that someone doesn't like me.....even if they hardly know me at all......I take if very personally.

Boy, that's a tough one for me too. It's gotten better since I've gotten older. I've realized that it's just a fact that we can't all like each other. We're all so different and it usually comes down to chemistry. I used to get totally crushed when I've discovered that someone doesn't like me. Now, I sort of try to look back at our interaction to see if I can identify when that decision was made, etc. I am still always guilty of over-analizing, but that's a different issue!

I've also realized that it is fact that there are people I meet whom I just don't care to associate with again. I don't hate them, I just don't prefer them for whatever reason. Sometimes, I don't even know why. Maybe it's that chemistry thing again.

I'm sure my rambling probably didn't help you one bit. The last thing I would advise is to not give up on people just because you discover one person doesn't care for you. There will be lots more people down the road who do.
Take good care,
Okie

You need to learn to like/love yourself first. Then it doesn't much matter what other people think of you.

Experience speaking here.

I would work at developing my "observer" self, the part of us that realizes that even though we don't know the person well, it still hurts to have them "reject" us. Everyone pretty much feels that way I think, wants to be liked? When the pain of being rejected gets to me, my observer self points out the discrepancies of having not known that person well or how I didn't particularly like that person either but just wanted to be liked, etc. and that takes some of the sting from the rejection for me and I go "do something else" for a bit and it's not so bad.

Use the feeling, since you can identify it so well, to "play" with? Hone your skills of telling who you like better/worse or who "really" likes you and who doesn't, etc. If you can get a bit of "separateness" by doing your own thing, the rejections get to be a bit less personal, often more expected and even funny sometimes since you'll learn to expect them from people more shallow than you so when they finally occur it will be a "win" for your skills of discriminating who's a good person to follow-up for friend and who was only pretending or has other issues you don't want to get caught up in anyway. It's a way of getting to know yourself more as SeptemberMorn says and concentrating on yourself, takes the power out of "their" hands and puts it where it belongs in your own.

I do agree with advice from SeptemberMorn. In addition, try to practice daily gratitute. We want to be grateful for everything that we have already had.

Grateful for the fact that we wake up every morning and thankful that we can breath. Grateful that we have some friends or relatives that care for us. When we eat, we pray and give thanks and always grateful to whatever we have.

When we are grateful of what we have already had, it will attract people or friends or things that we like and love into our life.

All the gratefulness that we practice daily would give us good feelings everyday.

Good feelings are like love, gratitute, joy, hapiness, hope, satisfaction, passion, etc. Bad feelings are like anger, resentment, hate, fear, revenge, guilt, worry, depression, etc.

Good feelings empower you while bad feelings do not.

Your thought causes your feelings; your feelings let us know what you are thinking.

It always begins with our thought. if we always think of people that we don't like for whatever reason, then because of our thought, it might attract more of those kind of people in our life. The opposite is true.

This is what is known as the Law of Attraction.

Visualization88
www.audiogettingrichscience.com

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Zen888 said:
How do I get beyond the need/desire to be liked by most ppl?

If I sense that someone doesn't like me.....even if they hardly know me at all......I take if very personally.

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I struggle with this a lot. Plus, I want to be able to speak my mind and be my authentic self and then I still want people to at least respect me. Good thread, Zen. I will be reading.

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I want to be able to speak my mind and be my authentic self

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Being one of these people myself, I've gotta warn you. It's not often popular. But I'd rather know that I know what I know and have my conscience clear than to not speak up when I see something is wrong, or especially, when I see an injustice happening. After all, in the end it's me that I live, eat and sleep with and no one else. I'd rather be happy with ME that to have to world "like" someone they think the know.

To be respected, or at least not be sensured, you have to constantly polish your speaking, your words and your mannerisms. Even then, you're not going to please "all of the people all of the time."

as i've gotten older, it matters very little to me. i have a few good friends and my family and i'm very thankful for them. i have made two new friends, here in my little town, that i am very, very grateful for. they garden and we have a ball together.

i like the observing suggestion and i also suggest learning to do something that you can do just about better than anyone else. it gives you a foundation of self-worth and you can always turn to that for comfort. you also meet people who admire your "craft" and good friends can come from that.

otherwise, be your true self and true to yourself........love, pat

I know what you mean. You don't realize how much the desire to be liked by all people is until the very opposite happens. I wish that I could help you, but i'm struggling with this myself. I guess there just comes a point where you have to accept yourself for who you are, and try not to let others influence how you feel too much.

But hey, if you ever figure it out, please let me know as i'd sure as heck like to know!!!

From another who also needs to be liked, I think it is a vicious circle. I don't much like myself, so I depend on others to like me as evidence that there is something to like, but I can't believe that anyone actually does like me because I can't see anything worth liking, so others can't see anything worth liking either so how is anyone going to like me? And even if they do, I'll just throw it back in their face, so why should they even bother?

How can you get beyond it? Learn to like yourself. And also, be genuine. Stop pretending to be someone you think you need to be to get someone to like you. If you're not being yourself, you're not going to like yourself because that incongruence doesn't feel very good. You have to be honest with yourself in order to like yourself.

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SeptemberMorn said:
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I want to be able to speak my mind and be my authentic self

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Being one of these people myself, I've gotta warn you. It's not often popular. But I'd rather know that I know what I know and have my conscience clear than to not speak up when I see something is wrong, or especially, when I see an injustice happening. After all, in the end it's me that I live, eat and sleep with and no one else. I'd rather be happy with ME that to have to world "like" someone they think the know.

To be respected, or at least not be sensured, you have to constantly polish your speaking, your words and your mannerisms. Even then, you're not going to please "all of the people all of the time."

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wow i just posted about it.
seems to me that the soluion is focusing on being yourself, explaoirng what a wonderful creature you really are....

i posted about this subject in the self help ideas forum entitled "self reliance..." i read it and it really inpired me and gives me a lot of courage and i sort of started to change my behaviour.

one of the things he says is that our lifes are
"i am not here to please the world. i am here to live."
i really like it. it says everything in such straight words.

I also struggle to want to be liked. At times i hold my true feelings in. But then i can no longer take it and am really ticked off by then.I'm working on that in counseling at the moment.

I guess I would say I deal with something similar.. The thing with me is though, that i can be liked and know how to do things that will allow people to like me, but since I had a relationship and thought that was all i needed, I turned away from the social world and ignored friendly people at the hopes no one would come into my life an try and ruin the relationship I was in.. Now that im about to lose this relationship, I find myself with no friends an a low self esteem that makes it hard to engage with people. I was much more confident when I knew I had someone to come home to.