I have drawn two guiding principles for myself recently, and they are not especially sophisticated. No worksheets, no acronym, no laminated therapeutic framework involving twelve coloured boxes and a wheel. They are simply this:

Don’t abandon yourself, don’t be a dick.

And actually, I think they’re pretty good.

This is particularly relevant for the people pleasers in recovery, because we are absolutely brilliant at abandoning ourselves. We have often learned, consciously or otherwise, that if everybody else is okay, if everybody else is happy with us, if everybody else has what they need, then perhaps we will be safe too. That is fawning, and one of the reasons it can be so difficult to spot is that from the outside it can look very much like kindness. We accommodate, anticipate, smooth things over, make ourselves useful, notice what other people need and often provide it before they have even asked. None of those things are inherently bad, of course, but the problem is that somewhere in that process we can become incredibly practised at disappearing.

For me, abandoning myself means putting somebody else’s needs first while suppressing my own. It is saying yes when something in me is saying no, making somebody else comfortable by pretending that I am comfortable too, or talking myself out of what I know because acknowledging it might create tension. And what I notice most about this is not necessarily that I become furious with everybody else, although anger can certainly show up, but that I end up exhausted, depleted and often still surrounded by the same problem I was trying so hard to solve in the first place.

I can spend huge amounts of energy making sure everybody else is okay, anticipating what might go wrong, smoothing, accommodating, helping, making myself easy to deal with, and then discover that I have left myself with very little in the tank. And, rather annoyingly, all that effort often does not even resolve the situation. It might make things more comfortable in the short term, or reduce the immediate sense of danger, but that is exactly the point: fawning is a survival methodology. It can be incredibly effective as a way of getting through something. It is just not a particularly sustainable way of living.

And when I do realise that I have done this, I am often most annoyed with myself, because ultimately nobody is asking me to burn myself to keep them warm. People will generally take what I offer, and why wouldn’t they? It is not their job to monitor whether I am over-giving, over-accommodating, quietly ignoring my own needs or running myself into the ground while making their life easier. I cannot keep offering things I cannot sustainably give and then expect everybody else to somehow know when I have crossed a line I have not told them exists.

That bit is my job.

So ‘don’t abandon yourself’ has become a very useful checkpoint for me. Am I actually okay with this? What do I need here? Am I saying yes because I want to, or because some part of me is frightened of what happens if I say no? Am I offering something I can genuinely afford to give, whether that is time, energy, emotional labour, access, patience, explanation, forgiveness, whatever it happens to be?

Sometimes we have spent so long looking for somebody else to take our side that we forget we are allowed to take our own.

But then there is the second principle, because I do not only fawn when I am triggered. If I feel cornered enough, I can also fight, and this is where ‘don’t be a dick’ comes in.

I think of this as the cornered wounded-cat response: keep advancing, even with the best of intentions, eventually you will get clawed, not because kitty is feral, but because it’s too scared and hurt to do anything but lash out. For me, ‘don’t be a dick’ is basically shorthand for not using my hurt as permission to hurt somebody else back. It does not mean I am not allowed to be angry, or that I have to become endlessly reasonable and saintly while somebody behaves appallingly. I am allowed to leave, set a boundary, say something difficult, tell somebody that what they did was not okay, or decide that I do not want a relationship with them at all. The point is simply that there is a difference between protecting myself and lashing out because I want the other person to feel some of what I am feeling.

It is essentially the old principle of not doing unto others what you would not want done unto you, just with slightly less biblical branding.

What I really like about these two principles is that they stop each other becoming ridiculous.

‘Don’t be a dick’ on its own could very easily become another instruction to abandon yourself. Be reasonable, think of their feelings, don’t make a fuss, be the bigger person, let it go. Lovely. Congratulations, we have reinvented fawning.

But ‘don’t abandon yourself’ on its own could also become a way of justifying almost anything because my feelings are valid and therefore whatever I do with them must also be valid. And that is not true either. My feelings can be completely valid and my behaviour can still be shitty.

So I sometimes imagine the two principles sitting on my shoulders in place of the traditional angel and devil, except they are both fairly sweary and neither of them is especially interested in moral perfection. One is asking, ‘Am I abandoning myself here?’ and the other is asking, ‘Am I being a dick?’ And somewhere between those two questions I can usually find a bit more room to move.

That middle ground matters to me because it gives me somewhere to stand where I do not have to disappear in order to keep the peace, but I also do not have to attack in order to protect myself. I can say the difficult thing without trying to destroy the other person with it. I can be compassionate without turning compassion into self-erasure, and I can protect myself without turning self-protection into cruelty.

I started using these principles during some very difficult conversations in my own life, and what surprised me was that they seemed to create more room for accountability, not less. I could say what mattered without turning every conversation into a charge sheet, and I could protect myself without needing to punish. I could look at the past because I wanted something different in the future, rather than because I needed the other person to suffer appropriately for what had happened.

That feels like a very different place to be.

I am not suggesting these are universal commandments. They are quite tailored to me, because I know two of my own familiar trigger responses very well. I fawn, and if that stops working and I feel cornered enough, I can fight. So these two principles give me something simple to come back to when my nervous system is busy trying to run the entire show.

People pleasers and lashers-out of the world, unite.

Preferably after checking that we are neither abandoning ourselves nor being dicks.