Why You Keep Chasing Approval — And How to Rewrite the Script

About this episode

Kim Gross explores how childhood approval scripts influence adult behavior and offers strategies for rewriting them.

What if your people-pleasing and perfectionism are not who you are — but approval scripts you learned in childhood? In this episode, Kim Gross celebrates six years of the Masks Off podcast during Inner Child Month and explores the unconscious rules many of us learned about how to be loved, safe, and accepted. These approval scripts can sound like: don’t upset anyone, be good, get it right, blend in, and make sure everyone else is okay. Kim shares how achievement and external validation reinforced her own “good girl” identity, and how these scripts can show up today through saying yes when you mean no, overthinking conversations, avoiding conflict, struggling with boundaries, and feeling responsible for other people’s emotions. She also explains how the Inner Controller tries to protect you from rejection, criticism, and disconnection by keeping you in control and constantly monitoring everyone around you. Using a personal example from a family trip for her daughter’s master’s graduation, Kim walks listeners through how old scripts get activated and how to begin rewriting them with awareness, compassion, and small shifts. This episode is an invitation to stop living by the old…

People in this episode

Host: Kim Gross

Topics covered

• people-pleasing
• perfectionism
• approval scripts
• inner child
• self-worth
• boundaries

Keywords

• approval
• people-pleasing
• perfectionism
• inner child
• self-improvement
• boundaries
• validation

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