How to Get Beyond the People-Pleasing Syndrome
It's certainly understandable that when people-pleasers grow up, they do so with a fully crystallized program that to be good enough they must comply with the wishes and demands of others. As with so many other personality dysfunctions, they're unable to validate themselves from within so must depend on others to confirm their value from without. Not having developed any sense that they're inherently worth caring for--i.e., lovable for themselves--they strive to make themselves lovable by becoming for others whatever they think might be wanted from them.
For most people-pleasers, by the time they reach young adulthood the habit of disavowing their needs and deferring to the wishes of their parents has become so well conditioned that this now outdated behavioral program automatically gets repeated (with dozens of variations) once they're on their own. At the extreme, as "pushovers" or "human doormats," they allow others (at times, may even encourage others) to walk all over them. For, sadly, being "used" in such fashion actually helps alleviate social anxieties and makes them feel more secure.
Harriet B. Braiker, Ph.D., in describing the personal costs of people-pleasing, refers to the exorbitant "price of nice" in her book with the equally catchy title, The Disease to Please. And at this point, a variety of writers have sought to characterize the enormous psychological toll that these exaggerated approval-seeking behaviors take on the lives of people-pleasers. In fact, the reason it's critical that such people determine to re-write this now inappropriate childhood script is simply that they can no longer afford it. Not, that is, if they're ever to get in touch with--and express--their true self; or achieve any sense of well-being or peace of mind.
To briefly delineate some of the most frequently mentioned costs of people-pleasers' "excess niceness," let me offer the following:
Loss of integrity, identity, self-respect and self-esteem; constant self-criticism and self-belittlement; nagging sense of guilt and shame about not really being "good enough" for others; chronic insecurities in personal interactions (for they're feeling okay is so conditional and dependent on others' approval); inability to sustain healthy relationships with healthy boundaries; inability to trust, accept or perceive as heartfelt others' kindness or positive feedback; difficulty or inability to manage, lead or supervise others (for fear of offending--or displeasing--them); inability to effectively control their time, whether at work or at home (mainly because of problems saying no to others' requests); inability to stay with or accomplish personal goals (because they're not a high-enough priority for themselves); inability to make decisions; and--ultimately--burnout, whether at work, home, or both (partly because people-pleasers don't know how to relax--or don't feel they can let themselves relax--and partly because they're forever driven to prove their worth to others, such that not constantly doing something triggers in them anxiety or guilt).
So how do people-pleasers disencumber themselves of such a self-effacing, life-denying pattern?--or at least ameliorate it? The short answer is only gradually, and with much effort. After all, these people-pleasing patterns have become deeply ingrained and associated with the only kind of parental acceptance they may ever have known. Early programs of adaptation, perceived as intimately tied to family survival, are always knotty and difficult to uproot. And so they present a formidable challenge. In fact, typically people-pleasers are ready to devote themselves to altering their self-obliterating ways only when their lives have started to feel unmanageable and out of control. Having become nothing less than addicted to pleasing others--and people-pleasing really is a kind of relationship addiction--for them to "abstain" from such habitual approval-striving requires a great deal of patience, restraint, fortitude and discipline.
Feeling more and more enslaved by the needs of those they've so obsessively catered to, their readiness to change is generally signaled by their growing resentment. It is a resentment that over time has accumulated so much mass that inevitably it's begun to leak out in the form of passive-aggressive behavior. Still afraid to show anger directly--for unconsciously they're still under the influence of their parents' negative reaction whenever they showed this defiant emotion as children--they can no longer contain the acutely felt indignity of their situation. (And it should be added that many people-pleasers become so frustrated about having to stifle themselves that with enough provocation they can verbally explode at the person they've been taking such inordinately good care of.)
Ultimately, the solution for people-pleasers, as with so many other dysfunctional personality patterns, is to learn how to become more self-validating. Only through learning how to feel okay solely from within is it possible to undo the essential motivation for pleasing others--which, of course, is based on the need to earn their validation. To this point, people-pleasers have been unable to internalize (or make "real" for themselves) this external validation anyway. Like any other addiction (whether to a substance, activity, or relationship) implicitly the keyword for them has been more. For without the ability to truly "get" that they're good enough--despite any number of compliments or kudos from without--they've spent their whole lives trying to get more and more of what finally could never lead to the self-approval and -acceptance they've yearned for all along.
And here is precisely where it becomes obvious how people-pleasing is virtually synonymous with low self-esteem. For people who truly value themselves simply don't need to focus on pleasing others in order to feel (conditionally) good enough. With sufficient self-valuing, they're free to independently pursue their own dreams, not feel bound to fulfill someone else's.
Most of the literature I've reviewed in preparing this piece centers on straightforward techniques to help people-pleasers break their self-defeating practice of subordinating their needs to others. In summarizing some of these writers' suggestions (which overlap considerably)--as well describing what, professionally, I myself have found effective--I should add the caveat that the key to people-pleasers' metamorphosis is not in doing anything differently as such, but in learning over time how to come from a place of genuine self-deserving. And such an attitudinal transformation can be extremely challenging because it contrasts sharply with the way they were originally "trained" to feel by parents who--though they may have done the best they were capable of--were still overly needy, withdrawn, self-absorbed, demanding, hostile, or intimidating/authoritarian.
Again, it can hardly be overemphasized that the reason overcoming this so-called "disease to please" can be so problematic is that people-pleasers experienced their placating behavior as the best--or only--way to gain their caretakers' love and caring. As with almost everything else relating to the human psyche, when a behavioral pattern that is clearly maladaptive as an adult was once adaptive as a child, there will be a strong, deep-seated resistance to changing it. And this opposition will hold regardless of how much, consciously, the individual truly desires to change it. For the anxious child within can only view such efforts as gravely threatening the need for personal security (which is so intimately linked to avoiding parental disapproval).
