Breaking Free from the People Pleaser Trap: Unveiling the Why Behind the Need to Please Others
Fellow people pleasers, here me out: Others' reactions to our behavior is more often about them, not us. Yet we feel like we are the scum of the earth if someone is mad at us. Why?
Merriam Webster defines people pleasing as “a person who has an emotional need to please others often at the expense of his or her own needs or desires”. If you aren’t sure if you’re a people pleaser, let me give you some scenarios to help paint the picture:
You go with the flow and let others make the decisions to try and make things easier for everyone, but you secretly dislike or even hate the decisions being made. Yet you stay quiet.
You go to the salon to have your hair or nails done and it turns out nothing like you asked or you just don’t like it, but you say nothing at all due to fear of conflict or coming across as rude
You find yourself taking the blame and apologizing constantly for things that are not your fault, even in the slightest
You let yourself be treated poorly by others because you fear they’ll leave you if you aren’t agreeable and compliant to what they want
Thinking about times when you’ve done one of these things? Then welcome to the people pleaser club! And trust me, you’re not alone. Around three quarters of Americans feel that they would be described by others as people pleasers, according to a poll by YouGov.
So where does the need to please others come from and why do we do it like our life depends on it? People pleasing is not an actual diagnosis or disease, so there’s not a super obvious answer for it. But I’ll tell you this: there’s a good chance somewhere along the way in your upbringing, you were told or shown that the equilibrium of your and others' environments falls on your shoulders and it was your job to keep it peaceful. You learned that staying quiet or agreeable is the only way or the best way to keep everyone and everything calm and happy. Once we make this connection in our mind as a kid, it’s easy to run with it. If our environment feels hectic or out of control and scary, we may have been told to be quiet, do what you're told to do, and things will calm back down. And guess what? It worked.
Now the neural pathway in our brain has been made: if I’m quiet and easy going, things will be calm. On the surface, this isn’t a bad thing. And it’s typically true that doing what you’re told leads to more harmony in your environment, and that’s all good and dandy. The issue comes about when we internalize this message and make it who we are, which is so easy to do.
If you get praise for being quiet or going along with what others want all the time, you’re going to keep doing it, because the praise feels great! There’s also a scary downside to this: if I say something that differs from the majority opinion or state my own needs and wants, will I lose the praise? Will I be scolded? Will I still be lovable?
This is how we figure out why we people please so much and how to overcome it. I want you to ask yourself: What am I scared will happen if I state my own needs and say no to someone/something? Your answer to this question holds a lot of power. If you answered with something like: “I’m afraid they will be angry with me”, ask yourself why that bothers you. What does it say about you that you fear others will be mad with you? The most common answer I see is that this means the person will leave me if they’re mad and I’ll be alone and unloved.
I want to let you in on a little secret: Majority of the clients I work with who struggle with stating their own needs and standing up for themselves will say that underneath it all, they fear abandonment and being unlovable. Of course they do, because that’s all we really want isn’t it? We just want to know that the people who care about us aren’t going to leave or abandon us. This doesn’t just mean physical abandonment either. It could also mean emotional abandonment, which for some may feel even worse.
There’s no guarantee that people won’t leave, and that’s the scary part. Sometimes they will leave, but do we really want those people in our life who throw a fit and walk out once we start to state our own thoughts? Those who truly love and care for you will attempt to listen when you start to speak up. They may even encourage it. If they do throw a fit or block you out, then they aren’t the ones we really want in our corner anyway. Remember, people’s reactions can say more about them than they do you.
I’ll be sharing more about overcoming people pleasing tendencies, but in the meantime, be sure to check in with yourself about what really drives your need to please others and where did you learn it?
Kate Regnier, LMSW
Regnier Restorative Counseling, LLC
