What’s wrong with being a people pleaser
One of the most common things I hear in my comment section and when I talk to new potential clients is that they identify as people pleasers. Probably 95% of my community identifies as a people pleaser. Not to mention that for a long time, I identified as a people pleaser as well (now I’d say I’m a recovering people pleaser - I still sometimes have the instincts but I’ve gotten much better at overriding them the majority of the time).
You’re probably aware there’s a negative association with the trait. And you might be asking yourself
Why is people pleasing such a bad thing?
I’ll often hear things like, “I just like making other people happy,” or “I care about the people in my life and I want them to feel good,” or “it makes me happy when other people are happy.” There is an air of generosity that comes from this ability to put other people first.
In many ways, society has been celebrating especially the behaviors of women when they put each other when they put other people first. So it's no wonder that this people pleasing behavior is so common - it’s almost built into the fabric of our society. Society celebrates when people, especially women, put others wants and needs above your own.
So why is it such a bad thing to be a people pleaser? Is there really anything wrong with it?
That's what I want to unpack in today's post…
Why people pleasing is bad
First we need to get clear about what we’re talking about in terms of people pleasing…
The difference between caring and people pleasing
What is the difference between caring and people pleasing? This really gets at the fundamental answer to the question of what's wrong with being a people pleaser. So…
Caring is having an interest in the happiness, feelings or experience of others.
When we care, we decide that somebody outside of ourselves is important to us, and as a result, what they are thinking, feeling and experiencing is important to you.
You decide to consider them as a factor in your decision making.
On the other hand, people pleasing is prioritizing the happiness, feelings or experience of others, before our own.
People pleasers put other people's thoughts and feelings and experiences on a pedestal, making those desires and ultimately those people more important than themselves (so implicitly telling their subconscious that I don’t matter or I matter less). And as a result, they're comfortable making decisions that actually hurt themselves in order to protect the experiences or feeling states of others.
There is nothing wrong with caring about others.
That is absolutely a trait to celebrate. But when we talk about this trait of caring on a spectrum, there is a healthy amount of caring, and then when caring goes to the extreme, by which caring about somebody else, means that you are not caring for yourself, then we have stepped into people pleasing and we have stepped in a territory that is unhealthy.
When they get really honest, most people pleasers have a version of a belief that compromising your own needs before others is good, generous, noble or the ultimate expression of love.
But my friend, martyrdom isn’t love.
Martyrs sacrifice themself for a cause. In the most common use of the term, a martyr will die so that their cause will be moved forward. But in the context of relationships - family, friendship or romantic partnership - if we no longer exist, then neither does the relationship. The true relationship requires that we are there to participate and so martyring ourselves is directly in conflict with the goals we tend to explain to ourselves.
This is why the “put your mask on before helping others” warning on airplanes is so important. If you are a mother and you try to put your child’s mask on but pass out before you can, then both of you are now left without a mask, putting your child in way more danger than, in the alternative, you put your mask on so you know you are taken care of and then immediately help the child with their mask. It is actually more responsible to care for yourself first.
Now, you might be thinking, well, I’m not killing myself to be a good friend, so it’s not really martyrdom. It’s not that dramatic. But when we people please we deny our personal preferences, wants and needs and in doing so we deny ourselves. It’s like we kill off little parts of ourselves in order to allow somebody else’s reality to exist and in doing so we make it incredibly difficult for us to truly experience love because we’re showing up with an artificial version of ourselves.
This is why so many people pleasers at some point or another will struggle with resentment of a friend or family member because “I give so much and I never get anything back” or “they never appreciate all I do for them.”
So why do so many people spill over from caring into people pleasing?
Now, we're going to talk a little later in this post about where this comes from. But first, given that we know it’s possible to care about another person without elevating their experience to more important than your own, why do so many people pleasers exit where the scale has tipped way too far?
When we care, we are also able to hold our own importance in the situation and recognize that while other people may also care for us, we are ultimately the ones that are responsible for our own experience. That we cannot expect other people to take care of us before we take care of ourselves.
Often people pleasers, on the other hand, will have this expectation of reciprocation. If they put other people first, then other people will do the same for them and everybody will be taken care of. This whole system would theoretically work if we all did this for each other.
And yet many people pleasers face the uncomfortable reality on a regular basis whether they're aware of it or not, that the majority of people are not prioritizing their feelings above their own feelings. And then these people pleasers often end up with resentment for feeling like they got the short end of the stick! “Why do other people not think about me, call me care about me, or try to anticipate what I'm feeling like I anticipate others?”
It is a painful wake up call for every people pleaser - that they’ve been building transactional relationships, without even realizing it.
The good news is that not everybody thinks about relationships the same way they do and there is absolutely a different way where you receive love, attention and care without having to have done anything in return. That you can actually take care of yourself first and receive love.
But for people pleasers to get there, they have to wade through the discomfort of addressing their existing beliefs of how love works, how to get love and then being brave enough to make the change toward trusting that you will receive love from people even when you haven’t put them first.
What causes people pleasing
So where do these patterns come from? For many of you, this behavior probably comes so naturally to you. It’s been around for so many years of your life that it probably just feels like who you are. And this might be close to true because the learned behavior of people pleasing can start from a deeply young age.
The root underneath people pleasing is called codependency. I am not going to go in depth into codependency here, but there are tons of great resources out there. And if that's interesting to you, I'd highly recommend this podcast episode because I think it does a great job of summarizing.
But in layman's terms, codependency and people pleasing come from a desire for safety in our relational environments. When you learn from a young age that you can only feel safe when the people around you feel emotionally safe. It’s a linking of our emotional states with others.
But remember back to the distinction between caring and people pleasing…
In healthy development, you learn how to care for other people but you’re able to manage the reality that sometimes people around you are experiencing a negative experience and that does not become your responsibility. Simply, it’s not your fault when mom is sad.
But for those who develop people pleasing and codependency, there was often a series of events that formed a pattern when they were of a young enough age that they couldn’t fully logic and they witnessed someone they loved, probably a parent, in an emotionally painful situation and they either were explicitly taught (for example, if mom turned and said to them…) or they implicitly understood (just by their assessment of the situation) that the other person’s negative experience was their responsibility to fix.
Your identity is linked with the other person’s ability to be okay.
But that’s fundamentally not true, you can be okay even when somebody you love isn’t okay. You can care about them, support them through the difficult situation, but you yourself not be responsible for fixing it.
For many people pleasers and the majority of the women who I've worked with whether they witnessed this behavior modeled by a parent, usually a mother, or they just intuitively figured it out, they started taking on more responsibility than was then should have been expected of a kid. Whether it was to manage their parents feelings, to help raise the siblings, or to behave in a way that got them validation from their parents, as children they picked up on a pattern that when they deny their own feelings and instead prioritize the feelings of their parents or siblings or those around the home, they didn't have to deal with being alone, abandonment, conflict or tension. So a pattern started to develop where they default to prioritizing others.
The truth that is really important to understand is at that age when you learned this pattern, you weren't supposed to be responsible for other people.
As a child at five or seven or nine years old, you aren't responsible for your parents and so your instinct to prioritize their feelings above your own was a misunderstanding. It got you here, you survived and this behavior helped you avoiding painful experiences and not having to confront the difficult emotions in that moment BUT you can now see as an adult, that these behaviors are actually creating more difficult emotions in the long term.
Here’s a practical example, if we switch this pattern from the emotional to the physical…
Your brother broke his leg at soccer practice. You can tell he’s in pain. You don’t like seeing him in pain and it’s difficult to witness and so you do your best to bring him advil and water as he heals so that he is not in pain. But you don’t skip your own soccer practice because he’s not able to play. You’d definitely never break your own leg so that you are both in pain. Because his leg is his leg and you denying your own experience or even worsening your own experience because he’s in pain doesn’t help him heal faster. You wouldn’t be helping him by skipping practice or causing yourself harm.
He can be in pain and you can be okay. You can care for him to try to reduce his pain but if you deny your own needs in order to take care of his leg, you don’t heal the leg and you’ve caused yourself pain in the compromise. There’s more pain as a result.
Caring looks like doing as much as you are able to take care of the other person without compromising yourself.
People pleasing looks like diminishing your own experience for the sake of others (but in the process you actually increase the pain). How? Because in addition to whatever they were experiencing, now they have the burden of your feelings or your expectation of reciprocation in addition to the situation.
At it’s core, what causes people pleasing is a belief about yourself to be less valuable or worthy than somebody else. Because if you can understand that because if you hold other people's experiences or feelings on a higher plane or a pedestal compared to your own, it's likely that you consider them on a higher pedestal compared to you.
There's a beautiful quote that I think aptly describes this situation from the book Setting Boundaries will Set You Free by Nancy Levin (boundaries are often required of people pleasers when they begin setting new standards for how much caring they’re willing to do of other people):
"No one would put up with constant boundary violations if she thought she were completely worthy of rest, sleep, down time, pleasure, fun, abundance, and the good things life has to offer. ... somewhere, deep inside, is a scared little child who has gotten the idea that if she doesn't sacrifice herself to meet the needs and expectations of those around her, she will be shamed, blamed and alone. The work is growing up that little kid. Letting her know that she is enough. She was always enough."
Do people pleasers have low self-esteem?
When we talk about self esteem, it's generally referencing to the conscious evaluation of what we think we bring to the table. And for most people, they come to their level of self esteem based on what they do - how much they do, what they deliver, or their achievements. Many people pleasers assess that they are a good friend, a good daughter. They get their work done and they're very responsible and so in the sense, they can think highly of themselves, they can have high self-esteem.
But there’s a crack underneath in their self-worth.
Our worth is based on who we are not what we do.
This is where many people pleasers start to falter because if they were to stop doing, stop caring for others more than themselves, they start to doubt themselves. So their esteem only lasts as long as they keep doing. And as humans we are not capable of only being the ones caring and giving - at some point in order to have healthy relationships, we also have to receive.
This challenges people pleasers to confront those deeper feelings about their inherent worth.
This comes back to how we learned to understand our worth from a very young age. But the good news for all you people pleasers reading is that if you realize that you have doubts about your own worth, that all of this is malleable and changeable.
I'm going to give you a few things that you can do to start to address these people pleasing habits. But before we do, I want to address one potentially difficult question that every people pleaser needs to address…
Are people pleasers manipulative?
If you identify as a people pleaser, reading that sentence probably felt subtly like attack. So before you put your defenses up, hear me out.
I know you feel like your people pleasing behavior comes from a place of deep care. But ask yourself this:
When I care for people, what do I hope or expect to get in return?
If I continued to prioritize other people’s feelings over my own and they never did the same for me, how would I feel?
What’s my motivation for caring for people in this way?
Oftentimes, at their core, people pleasers are giving the care, attention, time, and love in hopes of getting it in return.
Said simply, their see love/care as a transaction and the best way for them to get the love and care they so deeply desire is to give it first.
If you grew up in a household where you put your mother's feelings first or your siblings first and this led to you getting validation and attention from your parents, you began to understand that you get love when you do something to earn it.
Your desire for love isn’t wrong, in fact it’s beautiful and deeply human. But in your childhood, you might have picked up this innacurate belief in how love works and that’s fed into this pattern of people pleasing. Being your smart, resourceful self, of course, you would do the things that you knew best in order to get the love that you wanted. But it hasn’t worked the way you hoped because it’s built on an innacurate assumption.
Because love, real love isn’t conditional. You get it without having to do anything.
How would you feel if your best friend came to you and said: “I'll support you while you're going through a breakup, if I can borrow your Rag and Bone boots”? You would probably feel rather offended that they were making their support as your best friend conditional on some sort of trade. This sort of transactional behavior cheapens the experience of love.
And yet when we think about people pleasing, so many people pleasers do the behavior of putting other people first with this expectation (even if they’re not aware of it) that then it means that people will do it back. Then, when they don't get the same level of prioritization from their friends and family, they feel angry or resentful because they feel like they've been betrayed.
So are people pleasers manipulative? Not intentionally, usually.
But at some level, many people pleasers are trying to manipulate their relationships to get the love that they want.
This can be painful to face because it might bring up feelings about the way you learned love or what experiences you might have had where love was conditional. It can be even more painful as you begin to try to unwind this belief to see how certain of your relationships were transactional.
It’s super common for people pleasers to start doing the work to recognize that their feelings are as valuable as the feelings of other people around them and to have some relationships in their life either push back or fall away at this new version of them, because the relationship was built on the people pleasers willigness to be unhappy in order to make the other person happy. These losses are a much healthier alternative in the long term than continuing to perpetuate this belief in yourself, even is painful.
But in order to have true deep, safe, unconditional love, you'll have to learn how to accept love and give love without expecting anything in return. So this brings us to what are some things that you can do if you know that you're a people pleaser?
3 things to do to start to address people pleasing
1 - Identify when and how you learned any of these behaviors
Diving into what love was modeled in you household, how you made yourself emotionally safe in that environment and any other relevant experiences can be incredibly fruitful in unpacking this pattern. This can be done in therapy, your own reflection or inside coaching (I do a ton of this work in Private Coaching).
Once you know where it came from, you’ll have a direct line to identify where you as a child misunderstood something, either because you jumped to the wrong conclusion or your brain just wasn’t at a place to capture the nuance or intensity of a situation. This is where enormous healing can occur.
2 - Practicing tolerating discomfort.
I know that sounds really uncomfortable and not like anything that anybody would desire to do. But when you start to unwind your behavior pattern of people pleasing, you are at the simplest level, doing something new. Our bodies don’t like change and so this change, just like a different workout routine, might feel difficult or uncomfortable. Your body is likely to signal that something is wong so you want to practice having that reaction but not listening to it.
There will be a period of time where your instinct will be to people please and you'll make a conscious decision not to And yet you'll somehow feel like you're doing something wrong. Acknowledging that this pattern might happen and trying to have compassion for yourself while you're sitting in an uncomfortable feeling is unbelievably crucial.
3 - Prioritize your needs
Yes, self-care. We don’t just need to reduce the amount of effort we give to others, the other path is to increase the amount of effort we give ourselves. This doesn't have to be millennial pink bathtub self care, it could be investing in your own growth, it could be exploring new hobbies or even expressing a preference in where you want to eat. But the more that you can intentionally consciously practice that taking your care that taking care of yourself is a valid use of your time, you will be helping to strengthen your ability to combat people pleasing.
And of course, if you’re curious on more ways I can support you to unwind the people pleasing behaviors, shoot me a DM on Instagram with the word INFO and we can discuss how I might be able to help!
