You have unconscious patterns that come from childhood. Usually they are passed from generation to generation because we “copy” what we live.
By teaching you discipline through disapproval, which was what they learned from their parents, your parents taught you to question your worth, leading you to conclude that there was something wrong with you.
Your need for approval is based on the premise that your worth is measured by what others, especially those in authority, believe about you. Not what you think.
You spend your life looking for people to tell you how to act. In this way you open yourself to others manipulating you.
As an adult, you may tend to create situations that make your partner or friends disapprove of you. You will tend to make your partner or friends pay for what your parents did to you. If your partner does not allow it, you could use your children.
Once you manage to realize that as an adult you are reacting as you did as a child, by working with yourself you will be able to react as an adult, to any situation that comes your way.
Here is an exercise so you can to start to see what things you have to work with. Write at least 10 of each.
I. List how you were disapproved of as a child.
II. List situations in your current life where you feel disapproved of.
III. List the ways you “punish” people you interpret as disapproving of you.
Once you start to become aware of your patterns, you can start to think differently, but not until you realize that your behavior comes from unconscious thoughts you have about yourself.