The Approval Leash
“Being nice” is a leash.
A long metal chain with a choker at the end.
You know the kind I’m talking about.
Every time you’re not “nice,” someone yanks the chain—choking you, forcing you to conform.
If you resist, the pressure increases.
If you give in, it stays—just in a different way.
The trap is always there.
At any moment, your choices, ideas, dreams, and desires can be taken away because you’re not being nice enough.
You’re not making them comfortable, and that’s considered mean.
How dare you hurt them that way!
How dare you care about your own wants and desires!
How dare you take care of yourself!
I spent most of my life with that leash around my neck, giving up countless dreams, ideas, and desires.
I remember realizing I wanted to be a writer in high school.
I had a conversation with my parents about the possibility of a writing career.
They told me that unless I wanted to be a journalist, writing wasn’t an option.
It didn’t conform to their idea of what a career should be.
So I gave in.
I became a teacher—because I had to be “nice.”
I had to conform.
If I didn’t, I was the problem.
I was rebellious. Immature.
Fast forward to today—my parents still ask me what I’m going to do about retirement.
I don’t have savings. I don’t have a retirement fund.
I didn’t conform, and I’m still the problem.
The problem is never the system.
The problem is always the person who doesn’t conform to the system.
When I say “the system,” I don’t just mean the government, the schools, or capitalism.
I mean the entire system of human rules, norms, expectations, belief systems, morality, and punishments that combine to tell us how to be, how to dream, how to live, and how to die.
It’s every unspoken rule about what’s allowed and what’s not—that manipulates people into believing their dreams are wrong.
Every time we judge someone who doesn’t conform to the game,
we confine them to a cage we call safety and a life that demands conformity.
Why?
Why don’t we question a system that equates non-conformity with failure or rebellion?
Why don’t we question a system built on keeping everyone on a leash—with a choker?
Because we’ve forgotten we were never meant to be caged.
I believe it’s because we’ve accepted the need for control.
We’ve created human rules that say people must be protected, managed, limited.
But those rules are the very thing that blind us.
They keep us from seeing the illusion:
The illusion is that human beings are the problem.
When in truth—it’s the system that’s broken.
The system that’s choking us.
The irony is that we willingly allow this.
Not only do we allow it—we encourage it.
We demand it.
Because we’re afraid.
We’re afraid of chaos, anarchy.
But most of all, we’re afraid of change.
We’re afraid of a system built on radical freedom.
A system with no controls, no need to conform, no choke hold—means we have to take responsibility for ourselves.
Self-responsibility has been lost because we rely so heavily on the approval leash.
People don’t have to take responsibility for themselves. The system does it for them.
That’s what creates anarchy and chaos.
Not people.
But the substitution of self-responsibility with systemic control.
A system with no controls—no need to conform, no choke hold—means we’d have to take full responsibility for ourselves.
Full accountability is terrifying.
What if I’m a bad person?
What if I’m the problem?
What if it makes me no longer worthy or deserving of the life I’ve created for myself?
What if somebody takes those things from me?
Internal accountability cannot take the external world away from you.
It only allows you to see the truth behind what you’ve created.
The shame will glare back at you, completely unbothered by the fear in your eyes.
What are you ashamed of?
You wanted it.
You created it.
There is no shame in that.
You are only ashamed of the reason why you created it—because you understand now that fear told you a story that wasn’t true.
I’m right there with you.
Fear told me a story that said that money was power.
That the reason I was insecure was because I wasn’t independently wealthy.
But that’s a lie.
Money doesn’t equal emotional or material security.
Money is a part of the system.
It’s an easy scapegoat.
It was only when I sat with myself and got really honest about why I was insecure, and what I wanted in life,
that I understood it was my fear of using my voice and standing in my power that stopped me.
Money had no power.
It was not a motivator for me.
Money allowed me to give my power away to a system that had trapped me my entire life.
When I stopped blaming money for the life that I had created,
I freed myself from the systemic leash around my neck.
I no longer had to “be nice.”
I no longer had to conform.
I was free to live—truly live—in a way that I had never dared to do.
Not because I had monetary freedom.
But because I had emotional and mental freedom.
Those two things are more powerful than any amount of money could ever be.
To change the system, we have to change individually first.
We have to free ourselves from within.
Dare to rebel.
Dare to free yourself by healing from the inside out.
Free yourself to truly live within the system as it exists now—without needing it to change first.
The leash won’t come off until you accept that only you can take it off.
Nobody can free you except yourself.
You don’t need approval.
You need courage.
Have the courage to stand there and glare back at the shame, the guilt, and the blame that have held you captive your entire life.
When you stand there and don’t flinch, the blame, shame, and guilt will stand down—not because you threatened them,
but because you fully accepted their presence in your life.
You owned them as part of who you were.
Not who you are now.
Because you are not those things.
But who you were then—in that time when you allowed them to dictate your truth to you.
The system can’t dictate your truth to you when you accept full responsibility for yourself.
I get it.
Acceptance is hard.
Acceptance is like learning to walk on hot coals.
It asks us to be brave enough to believe that we won’t get burned.
Can you believe that?
Do you believe that?
Can you offer yourself acceptance—radical acceptance—the kind Tara Brach talks about?
The kind that doesn’t try to fix or justify anything, but simply says this is what’s here, and I will accept it.
True healing requires acceptance of all that is, all that was, and all that will be.
Acceptance melts the chains.
It unlocks the door.
It frees you to be who you are—without the pain, or the need to conform to a system that can never honor who you truly are.
And that’s where real freedom begins.
That’s where your power lies.
That’s when the approval leash comes off.
Della