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Do we need approval from others to feel happy with ourselves?

Waleed Ahmed
2 min readNov 17, 2024
Photo by Chermiti Mohamed on Unsplash

If you’re always looking for external approval, you will never be really happy, so it’s not only not necessary but extremely toxic for you.

Trying to get other people’s validation, either parents, friends, partners or even strangers to feel good about yourself is a clear symptom of early childhood unresolved trauma.

When you were a kid, it’s most likely that you didn’t have the unconditional love that you needed to become an emotionally healthy human being and you thought that was how the world and its people operated, so you grew up thinking that you need to earn that love you never had by meeting other people’s needs first and behaving in a way that’s comfortable and acceptable for them.

But that’s actually the most toxic behavior for your own happiness.

You’re always trying to get other to be happy and that’s the only way you feel good, but that means you’re trying to compensate the fact that you don’t believe you’re enough and that you need others to approve of your behavior to feel that you are.

In order to change that, you need to start by loving yourself more, being more compassionate about yourself and accepting yourself as you are, with all your flaws and imperfections, because they are all part of you as a human being and you’re…

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Waleed Ahmed
Waleed Ahmed

Written by Waleed Ahmed

I'm Waleed Ahmed, and I'm passionate about content related to software development, 3D design, Arts, books, technology, self-improvement, Poetry and Psychology.

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