Recently, I sat staring at my phone, reading the comments under my Facebook post. Nasty ones. The kind that questions your motives, your character, your right to speak at all. My chest tightened. My stomach dropped. That familiar panic rising: Don't they know I'm a good person? That I'm speaking up for those who can't? I'm trying to stop harm. I'm the friend, not the foe here.
And then, a moment of clarity that stopped me cold: I don't even know these people—the ones being nasty.
Not one of them. Not personally. Sure, maybe we were connected socially, maybe we had mutual friends, but these weren't people who actually knew me. And yet my nervous system was responding as though my very survival was at stake. As though their disapproval could actually harm me.
Why?
The Pattern Becomes Visible
It's been nearly two years since I published my book about the abusive and exploitative tactics I became aware of. The response has been overwhelmingly positive—gratitude, relief, validation from people who felt alone in what they experienced. But that's not what destabilized me that day. It was a handful of nasty comments. Just one or two people commenting, and suddenly my whole sense of peace about who I am, what I did, whether I made the right choice—all of it disrupted. My body registered those few voices as a REAL threat.
Here's what I saw in that moment of recognition: being liked wasn't just something I valued. It was my primary survival strategy. It was how I got opportunities that seemed beyond my reach. It was how I navigated rooms where I had no formal power. It was how I built a career in a company where my entire job—literally, my job description—was to take care of people, make them feel seen and valued, and get them to invite others in.
Being likable wasn't just a personality trait. It was my livelihood.
But here's the deeper truth that really surprised me: that job didn't create this pattern. It exploited it. The pattern was already there, grooved into my nervous system long before I ever walked into that company. I'd been trained for that role my entire life.
The Conditioning We Don't See
Most of us learn early that our safety, our opportunities, our very value in the world is tied to being pleasant, accommodating, and above all, liked. We learn to read rooms, manage emotions (ours and everyone else's), smooth over conflict, make others comfortable. We learn that our anger makes us "difficult," our boundaries make us "problematic," our truth-telling makes us "dramatic" or "aggressive."
We learn that the key to getting what we need—protection, resources, education, advancement—is to be the person others feel good around.
For women especially, this conditioning runs particularly deep. Little girls are trained from birth that being pleasant and accommodating isn't just nice—it's survival. But men aren't exempt from this pattern either. Many men learn to be the "nice guy," the reliable one, the peacemaker, the one who doesn't rock the boat. The shape of the conditioning may differ, but the core mechanism is the same: your value is contingent on other people's comfort with you.
And it works. That's the insidious part. It actually works.
I achieved tremendous success by being likable. Doors opened. Opportunities appeared. People championed me, mentored me, brought me into rooms I had no formal qualification to enter. Being liked was the currency I used to purchase everything from basic safety to career advancement.
The company I worked for understood this pattern intimately. My role—taking care of people, building trust, creating intimacy, leveraging those relationships to bring more people in—was the perfect exploitation of this conditioning. What I'd learned trying to survive and thrive in the world became my literal job description.
But here's what no one tells you about using likability as your primary survival mechanism: it requires you to be endlessly available, endlessly accommodating, endlessly attuned to everyone else's needs and comfort. It requires you to suppress your own truth when it threatens the relationship. It requires you to prioritize being liked over being honest.
And when you finally choose honesty over likability? When you speak a truth that costs you those relationships? Your nervous system interprets it as life-threatening. Because for your whole life, it has been.
The Grief Is Real
There's a grief in recognizing this pattern. Not just the loss of specific relationships, though that's real. It's the grief of seeing how much of our success, how much of our sense of self, has been built on a foundation that required us to stay small, stay silent, stay likable.
It's grieving the realization that we were so well-trained in this pattern that entire industries can weaponize it—can take something we developed to survive and turn it into business models, organizational structures, relationship dynamics that ultimately harm us and others. My experience in personal development leadership was just one example of how perfectly this conditioning serves systems that profit from our compliance.
And perhaps the deepest grief is the loss of the strategy itself. Because even when we can see it, even when we understand how it's bound us, our bodies still panic when people don't like us. The conditioning runs that deep. It doesn't matter that they're strangers. It doesn't matter that we've done the work, read the books, or understand the theory. Our nervous systems still register disapproval as a threat.
What We're Really Losing
When we choose truth over likability, we're not just losing relationships or approval. We're losing our primary mechanism for navigating a world that has taught us, from early on, that our value is contingent on other people's comfort with us.
This is not individual psychology. This is systemic conditioning. Systems don't survive by force alone—they survive by teaching people that their survival depends on being pleasing, accommodating, and non-threatening. They teach us to police ourselves, to prioritize relationships over truth, to experience our own boundaries and anger as dangerous.
And when we step outside that role? When we refuse to prioritize being liked over being honest? We don't just face external consequences. We face internal ones—the primal terror that comes when your survival strategy fails.
The people commenting on my Facebook post had minimal actual power over my livelihood—a few strangers' opinions wouldn't stop my work or close my practice. But my nervous system didn't know that. Because for most of my life, disapproval did threaten my livelihood. Being disliked did mean losing access to resources, opportunities, and protection.
Beyond Survival
I don't have a neat resolution to offer. I'm still in the middle of sorting my conditioning from my authentic expression. I do get anxious and even angry when strangers criticize me online. I still feel the pull to explain, to fix, to make them understand that I'm actually likable if they'd just give me a chance.
But I also know now that this response isn't personal failure. It's evidence of how deeply our conditioning runs. It's the mark of a survival strategy that worked so well we built our entire lives around it—but maybe, the cost of maintaining it has just become greater than the cost of letting it go.
The people we're losing through our truth-telling were never really there in the way we thought. The relationships built on strategic likability were never fully real. What we're actually losing is the illusion that we can be safe by being universally liked. And what we're gaining—slowly, painfully, in the spaces where that illusion used to be—is the possibility of being fully ourselves, even when that self is inconvenient, difficult, or threatening to the systems that profit from our silence.
Some people on Facebook still won't like me. And I'm learning, bit by bit, that I can survive that. Maybe even thrive in it.
Where does likability live in your body? What has it cost you to be liked? And what might become possible if you stopped trying?
If you're a woman ready to examine these invisible structures more deeply—feeling them in your bodies and gradually, courageously, choosing something different—this is exactly the work we do together in the iLumn8 Women Membership.
For all lifelong learners on this journey: I see you. Your truth matters more than their comfort.
With love and solidarity,
Anne