Approval Hunger-It's not a game.

I think an appropriate introduction for this blog would be...My name is Heather and I have an approval addiction.  

Or maybe, "The Approval Hunger Games" begins.

Here is the whole procedural memory thing again.  

We learn to become who we are through the relationships as children.  Before I had a significant grasp of the human language (before I could talk anyway) I figured out who everyone thought I was, so that had to be who I was.  

I've spent a lifetime trying to win the approval of others.  

Even if I don't need it or already have it!  Not sure if it is coined and defined term already, approval hunger, but I like it!  It seems as if I would do just about anything to prove my worth and justify my life. 

 I have gone through life trying to see through a set of lens handed me at birth.

The lens are faulty and distorted.  The image they portray is not reality or at least the reality of today.

A friend asked recently, "Why do you do that to yourself?"  She read the puzzled look on my face and continued, "constantly put yourself out there seeking approval of her?"  

"Good question," I reply without telling her that it is the same one that my husband asks.  "Why do you do this to yourself?"

Until I quit looking through the faulty lenses or at least quit believing what those lens say...I'm going to be a tied up mess.  

Spending all of my energy on these approval games is sucking the life out of me.  It has to stop.  

I have too much I need that energy for.  

Too much God has for me to do. 

 I get now, (you know...in my reality and not just my head) why He calls people pleasing a sin.  

It keeps my eyes off of Him and chasing some distorted image from faulty lenses.  

It separates me from Him.  From others. 

I quit.  The approval hunger games, that is.

......it might take just a few times.