Do you always let others pick what to watch on TV? What to eat for dinner? How you spend your free time? Do you find yourself apologizing when someone is angry or displeased, even if you did nothing wrong? Do you find it hard to express your feelings and needs when you think it could cause disappointment? If so, you just might be a people-pleaser.
People-pleasing is all about putting others needs before your own. Oftentimes, people-pleasing patterns develop early in life from a relationship with a parent, sibling, or other important other who tended to make their needs more important than yours by being demanding, uncompromising, or hard to please, displaying intense mood swings, giving the silent treatment, or using shame as a way to get their needs met at the expense of yours. These people are like rocks—hard, stubborn, rigid, unyielding. When dealing with such a person as a child, the natural response can be to abandon the self and focus on the other by appeasing, placating, and trying to win approval as a coping mechanism. You become like water—a flexible, conforming substance that molds around the rock. If you are healing from people-pleasing patterns, look back at your history. Was there an important relationship in your early life that depended on you putting your own needs aside to please someone else?
There are costs to people-pleasing. When in the habit of putting our own needs on the back burner, they go left unmet in relationships. A healthy relationship balances the needs of the self with the needs of the other. When putting others’ needs in front of your own, you will eventually find yourself not feeling satisfied in your relationships. You deserve the same level of care and consideration that you give to others.
People-pleasing can become compulsive, especially when we are socially rewarded for it—as when we’re praised for being “selfless” and “giving.” These are all good things! But, if we’re given these labels at the cost of never truly advocating for our own needs, they become confining, like a house that looks beautiful from the outside but is cold and dark on the inside. An important step in moving past people-pleasing is to let go of your dependence on the approval and praise you receive for it. Honestly acknowledging the costs of people-pleasing on your life and relationships is an important first step to help break approval dependence. Consider how else you can contribute to others and be appreciated, other than by betraying yourself. How could learning to speak up for yourself change your life and relationships?
After recognizing the origins of your people-pleasing and the costs, the key to healing from these engrained patterns is to learn assertive communication. Communication can range from passive (“ok, whatever you want”) to aggressive (“it’s my way of the highway!”). Passive communication implies that the other person’s needs are more important than mine, while aggressive communication implies that my needs are more important than yours. Being assertive strikes a healthy balance between the two, balancing the needs of self and others.
Assertive communication involves setting healthy boundaries that acknowledge your limits, your feelings, and your needs while also acknowledging the other person’s limits, feelings, and needs. For example, let’s say that your partner tends to be a “rock” person (according to our metaphor above) and you lean towards being a “water” person. You bring up that you’d like to see your family for the holidays, and they say that they would like to see theirs. Stuck in passivity and people-pleasing, the old you may have gone along with what they want at the expense of what you want—with the costs of you building resentment in the relationship and slowly growing apart. You can learn to be assertive by both acknowledging your partner’s needs as well as yours, saying something like, “I know seeing your family is important to you, and I’d love to make that happen. However, it’s also important to me that we see mine. Can we come up with a compromise here?”
Not everyone is capable of adjusting to a new status quo in a relationship where both partners’ needs are balanced. In fact, as a couples therapist, I’ve seen that when “water” people start to stand up for themselves, it can cause conflict if the relationship was previously based on one person abandoning themselves and people-pleasing. At this point, you might discover that some of your relationships are based on you being overly giving and not getting enough in return. It is your choice to decide if you want to continue to be in these relationships or not.
