What Does It Mean to People Please and Why Do I Do It?
Simply stated, to people please means that someone wants to please others. You’re probably thinking well, duhhh. I know, I know, but it’s not as simple as the definition implies. Throughout this post, I’ll share more of what this can actually look like (signs of people pleasing) and how these tendencies are created.
At the surface, this doesn’t sound like a bad thing, but it becomes a problem when we want to please others so badly, or feel such a strong desire to do so, that it is a detriment to ourselves.
It becomes unhealthy for us when we prioritize pleasing others above our own wants and needs, putting ourselves on the back burner.
When we say “yes” or do / say anything to please another person, it needs to be because we really want to, not because we feel that our relationship with them might change or end if we don’t do it.
Here are some other signs that you may have people pleasing tendencies:
You have great difficulty saying no.
You feel responsible for others’ emotions.
You feel you need praise or validation from others.
You work very hard to avoid conflict.
You find yourself apologizing, a lot.
You pretend to agree with others.
You feel you need to be liked by others.
You have trouble being the “real you.”
You lean towards perfectionist tendencies.
You have low self-esteem.
You feel resentful towards others.
You often feel unsatisfied in your relationships.
If any of that sounds familiar to you, you might be wondering where these tendencies came from. How and why do we start the patterns of people pleasing in the first place?
Early Influences
In your relationship with early caregivers, you were in a position of feeling a need to please them in order to stay connected to them.
This may have been because your caregivers were inconsistent. This could have been physically inconsistent, frequently spending time out of the home or making unkept promises to show up for you. However, emotional inconsistency is most likely the culprit. Maybe they showed you conditional love, love that made you feel you needed to earn it by doing certain things or behaving in certain ways. Maybe they were in such a state that their own emotional needs overwhelmed their ability to take care of yours.
There are many possibilities for why you may have felt the need to please and or care for your caregivers.
This may have lead you to eventually become a muted version of yourself, being the “good” child to not be the cause of any conflict, or you may have gone the opposite direction by deciding to rebel against these caregivers.
As children, it is common to take on the responsibility of your caregiver’s faults as faults of your own. You may have internalized your caregiver’s inconsistency as something within you not being good enough.
This is absolutely not the case. A caregiver’s inconsistency typically has much more to do with their own lives. A caregiver may have been experiencing their own difficulties, such as unresolved trauma or mental health needs, addiction, financial stresses, lacking their own emotional skills, etc.
Although it is not true, the development of that belief that you are not good enough can lead to both self-esteem issues and people pleasing tendencies, which can be closely related.
Trying to please your caregivers may have served another purpose: to gain a sense of control. When caregivers, the people we are dependent upon, were inconsistent, it can foster a sense of chaos and unpredictability - leaving a child feeling a lack of control in their world. As a child in this environment, you may have tried to please your caregivers in an attempt to keep them more consistent and, therefore, gain more control in your life.
Due to all of this, we develop people pleasing tendencies in order to achieve a goal: secure a consistent source of love. But this is, of course, not a healthy way to achieve this. Believing we need to please to achieve this is the maladaptive belief that comes from the early experience of emotional inconsistency from our caregivers.
This experience with such influential relationships in our lives can teach us that all relationships will be just as inconsistent if we are not pleasing others every chance we get. This is why people pleasing tendencies can show up in many, or even all, of our relationships.
Trauma
Traumatic experiences, such as abuse as a child or from a partner, can lead to the development of people pleasing tendencies.
In those experiences, it is likely that your boundaries were violated. It makes sense that this would lead to people pleasing because being able to firmly maintain boundaries is one helpful way to protect yourself against engaging in people pleasing tendencies.
When our boundaries are violated, one time or repeatedly, this can change the way we interact with others.
Traumatic experiences, in early childhood or throughout life, can also leave us fearing rejection or abandonment and having a sense of low self-esteem.
Such experiences can send us the message that pleasing others will keep us safe, connected, and loved.
But, again, this is an unhealthy way to achieve those goals and it can also keep us “stuck” in unhealthy situations or relationships.
You Once Needed To People Please
I once read that people who people please are survivors, and I love that strength based explanation.
The tendencies served a necessary purpose for you - to increase a sense of safety, connection, love, consistency, and control in situations in which you did not feel these things.
However, once those situations have passed or changed, the people pleasing tendencies often remain even though you no longer have the same need for them. This is when people pleasing begins to hurt you more than help you by creating a sense of burnout within you, keeping you stuck in a state of low self-esteem, or negatively impacting your relationships with others.
If you identify with this post, there’s good news. You are not alone, and there are ways to recover. You’ve already started gaining awareness by reading this post. You can find more ways to change people pleasing tendencies by reading my last post 'How to Stop People Pleasing'.