The Truth About People-Pleasing
August 16th, 2023 • Written by Tracy Taris, LMFT
“Oh, it’s just the people-pleaser in me!” a woman says candidly, flicking her wrist with a half smile after sharing a time she denied her own needs. In our social circles, we may consider a woman like this “extremely caring” and “selfless.” Maybe we are this woman. Some people identify themselves as a people pleaser as if it were a personality trait, but it’s not a trait– it’s a trauma-response. People-pleasing is a symptom of deep-rooted shame.
Let’s break it down: Google defines a people-pleaser as a person who “feels a strong urge to please others, even at their own expense. They may feel that their wants and needs do not matter or alter their personality around others.” What would ever make us feel that our wants and needs don’t matter? Usually, mistreatment or neglect from a loved one earlier on in life. In response to this we may have learned to protect ourselves by denying our own needs before anyone else can. We make ourselves small in an attempt to not need the person who is emotionally available. Behaving this way provides a short-term sense of control and a reputation of selflessness, but there’s nothing wrong with being selfless, right?
Maybe not at first. Regardless if we people please a little bit or a lot, it can be very destructive for the relationship we have with ourselves and with the people in our lives. To the highest extreme, we could become such a chameleon that others do not know how to trust us because they don’t know who we truly are.
The root of people-pleasing is shame, which robs us of our identity and agency over our lives. Our needs may have been implicitly or explicitly denied growing up if had an authoritarian parent or caretaker where fear and power made up the foundation of leadership and obedience rather than communication and curiosity. To survive, we may have found it was easier to fawn or appease the person, not because we necessarily wanted to put the person’s needs before our own, but rather to avoid real or perceived danger from conflict. If left unchecked it can lead to low levels of self-esteem, trust issues, and a lack of agency in our lives because we allow everyone else to define who we are.
If you frequently tend to people-please, I’m sorry that you’ve experienced unsafe situations where you felt that you could not voice your own needs and desires. No matter how inadequate you may or may not feel, you deserve to feel safe and be in healthy relationships. Oftentimes, those who silence other people’s voices lack the tools or humility required to offer healthy communication and connection. That may just be how they, and the people before them perhaps, learned to survive.
However, we have the power and agency to break these cycles by responding to our circumstances in a way that heals. People-pleasing may have been a helpful protective mechanism early on in life, but it is not sustainable in adult relationships.
Thank your younger self for protecting you, but give her permission to catch up to where you are now as an adult and allow yourself to lean into the discomfort of shedding this expired way of living. It may take a few situations to endure the pain and discomfort of changing your behavior, but it will be much shorter than a agonizing lifetime of being dishonest with yourself and others.
Now that we have identified people-pleasing, let’s think about how to get free from it. I’m sure most of us can think of a situation in our lives when we said “yes” when we wanted to say “no”, “it’s fine” when it was very much not fine, or “sorry” when it wasn’t even close to being your fault. To free ourselves of people-pleasing we must unpack its root: shame and separate it from some of its close and distant cousins.
We are often unaware that shame is on board because we mistake it for the emotions of guilt, embarrassment or humiliation. These four distinct emotions stem from different types of circumstances. Once we figure out which we are feeling, we can address the real issue at hand. The first three emotions often masquerade as shame.
Let’s identify the differences:
Guilt: A feeling that occurs when we have done something wrong. Guilt is simply our brain sending the message to us that we need to apologize or stop doing what is harmful.
Embarrassment: A feeling that occurs when we do something silly or dumb, but we know other people have done it too. Embarrassment stems from our humanness and the goofiness that comes with it. We can, and often do, laugh it off.
Humiliation: A feeling that occurs when someone does something to us that is degrading, like putting us on blast in front of a bunch of people for a mistake we made. We need to state how it made us feel and then set a boundary with that person.
Shame: A feeling that something is inherently wrong with us as a person. At the core, we may initially think that people-pleasing is the attempt to convince other people of who we want them to think we are, but in reality, we are trying to convince ourselves that we aren’t the bad person or bad things we’ve come to believe about ourselves.
Out of all of these emotions, therapy is most helpful for eliminating shame. Focusing on other people won’t change how we feel about ourselves. Internal pain can’t be healed by external measures. Once you identify the shame, talk to someone who is trained in helping people overcome it so they can guide you to live aligned with your values.
Here at Healing The Mind & Spirit, I, or one of our therapists can help with this. In my book, Many Voices One Truth, I have a whole chapter on shame and how to overcome it. The bottom line is, we are only as stuck as grip on our patterned behaviors allow us to be. Break the ties that bind by letting go of people-pleasing to become for authentically Y.O.U.
