About that people pleasing, then there is the point in recovery where 
you get so detached that you just don't give a darn about anyone else -
which also turned out to be wrong for me. I would love to find a happy 
medium and I'm not talking about a cheerful new-age channeler or a 
joyful spiritualist, in this instance.  With no disrespect intended to 
these paths, I am talking about BALANCE.  That is what I find hard.  
Either I have slammed my defenses down and put my walls up so high that
some people just can never get near me again or I am trusting someone I
hardly know completely and that's wrong for me too.
What I'd like to do is this: take a person I don't know and give them a
chance by trusting them in some little thing and, if they do well, take
another small risk and truat them in something else.  That way I'd find
out the limits of their trust and where the boundaries need to lie.   I
got this idea from one of those Hazelden meditation books called 
Daybreak.  It's for women incest survivors, based on the Survivors of 
Incest Anonymous program.  It goes on to suggest that the difference 
between walls and boundaries is that walls are rigid and hard, while 
boundaries are softer, more flexible.  I liked that too.
How to implement it, is, of course, another problem for me.
But I do know that it is easy for me to get to the point nowadays where
I just get to be like Ice woman and turn the sound off on someone 
permanently - by which I mean that I just don't listen to anything they
say anymore and when they address me, I ignore them.  I realize this 
isn't necessarily good; however, it's a lot better than letting them 
walk all over me.
The issue is how to stop accepting unacceptable behavior, without 
crossing the line and becoming unacceptable myself.  For me, it is not 
an easy one.
Of course in some cases where I have good reason to believe I am not 
safe physically, I believe it is okay to do whatever I have to to keep 
my boundaries secure and to protect myself.
For example, when my ex started following me onto a bus and trying to 
start a conversation - after I have repeatedly told him directly and 
indirectly to leave me alone - I find it perfectly acceptable to "be 
rude" and get up, walk to the back of the bus near a male AA friend, 
and totally ignore him.
But it's really hard for me to find the balance in other situations.
I tend to go quite overboard with detaching.  I have a hard time to 
tell when I am detaching and when I am isolating and withdrawing in an 
unhealthy way.  I still don't seem to get the detachment WITH 
compassion that Al-Anon suggests.
--- TriToss (tm) Professional 1.0 - (Unregistered)
---------------