What is people pleasing?
Does it seem that everyone else seems to get their needs met, or gets what they want, and you don’t? Do you sometimes feel frustrated, and resentful in relationships, and you’re not sure why?
In this blog, we will be asking: what is people pleasing?
We will look at the confusion between people pleasing and selfishness, and we’ll explore what function people pleasing serves. We’ll explore why it might have been useful once, and how it is harmful to you now.
Examples of people pleasing
Your partner suggests you get a take away. You don’t think about whether you feel like one or not, you just say yes automatically. You don’t decide what you want to eat, you say: you choose, I’m easy.
You are going on holiday with a friend. They are flying from their local airport. You could fly from your local airport 30 mins drive away, but instead you drive five hours so that you can fly with them, because you think that will make them happy.
Your partner gets angry and shouts at you for no reason. Rather than defending yourself or putting in a boundary, you try to appease them, or apologise.
You want children but your partner is not sure. You tell them you are OK either way, dismissing your lifelong wish to be a parent.
You want to do well in therapy, so you try to figure out what your therapist wants from you, and tell them what you think they want to hear.
2. The purpose people pleasing serves
What is people pleasing? It is when you are constantly monitoring and trying to predict and control the emotions of the other person. This is because you grew up in an environment where your parents were unpredictable emotionally, where their needs were all that mattered to them. Your needs were rejected, neglected, denied, or laughed at. This was so scary and painful, that you learnt to detach from yourself, so eventually you didn’t know what your needs were. Instead, you watched them very closely, attending to their every need, so that you would feel safer, and loved.
3. The cost to you
Once you can understand what is people pleasing, you can start to see the suffering to you that it causes. When you put everyone else’s needs before your own, the unhealthy part of you thinks it is protecting you from rejection, pain, neglect, dismissal, or abuse. This might have been the case when you were a child, but as an adult, it is dysfunctional, because not all people will respond like your parents did.
The cost to you, is that by putting everyone else’s needs before your own, you make everyone else more important than you. You hide yourself behind a wall, avoiding being honest about what you want, avoiding emotional intimacy.
When you do this you treat yourself (and your needs) with rejection, neglect, dismissal, or denial. The outcome, is that you remain lonely, and compulsively treat yourself how you were treated, repeating the trauma.
4. The difference between healthy needs and selfishness
Selfishness: “We’re going out. Oh, you don’t want to? Yes you do, come on, you’re coming. If you don’t want to come, I’ll go on my own, I don’t care if you come or not”.
“I’d like to go out, would you like to come with me? I’d love to hang out with you” “I’d love to hang out with you too, but not tonight, I’m really tired and need an early night. Can we go out tomorrow night instead, when I’m less tired? I’d love to hang out with you”. “Yes sure!”.
Or/ “This gig isn’t on tomorrow night, and I really want to see this band. Do you mind if I go with a friend instead?” “Of course not, go and enjoy yourself. I’d appreciate a quiet night in alone, and I’m not a huge fan so I don’t mind missing it”.
5. Healthy collaboration in a relationship
In point 4 above, you can see how being honest about your needs and preferences, can bring you closer together, and lead to collaboration and compromise. It is not about one person’s needs being more important than the other’s, it’s about being confident that if you state your need, it will be accepted, believed, and respected. That it won’t lead to rejection and pain. That together, you can work out what works best for both of you in an honest way, that feels good for both of you.
Sometimes the problem is, we learn not to know what our needs are. So the first step, is to start asking yourself: “what do I need in this situation?”, even if you do this 20 times a day.
Conclusion
I hope this blog has helped you to understand what is people pleasing, so that you can notice if you are doing it yourself. We looked at why you might have developed this way of relating, and how it perpetuates your suffering. We distinguished how attending to ourselves in a compassionate and caring way, is different from being selfish, and how it can actually bring you closer to the ones you love. How it’s a way of taking compassionate care of yourself, and others.
If you can relate to this, would you like some help?
I hope these suggestions will help you to feel confident about what are the three different types of anxiety. If you can relate, and think you need professional help, I work with individual adults, and would be happy to hear from you. Book a free, 15-minute telephone consultation to talk about how I might be able to help you.