People-Pleasing Is a Flawed Way to Exert Control

People-pleasing contains immense hope, but it's also conflict-averse. Within that hope is a magical idea, indicating that if one were to perfectly adapt to their environment, everything would “turn out fine.” The people-pleaser, therefore, tends to personalize, completely blaming themself for their troubles. It’s either that they aren’t doing enough to warrant some reward or they’re simply complaining too much. Either way, they often consider themselves to be the problem. Several factors are associated with this tendency: rigidity, anxiety, an intense need for control, an equally intense need for simplicity, and a sense of excessive self-importance.

People-pleasers often struggle with making choices, from small to big. So, they often struggle to adapt when making mistakes. This means they frequently double down on bad choices to manage the bubbling shame of having failed. One version of personalizing may foster hope, whereby the people-pleaser believes they can work harder, while another, we can call it essentializing, implies the pleaser fundamentally feels like a failure, which can be devastating. So, the options seem to be: produce more or leave and feel like a failure (when blaming themselves, they usually don’t seriously consider confrontation). Rigidity (i.e., fear of change) makes personalizing more likely and vice versa. In reality, mistakes more often than not result from multiple factors, so having made one can be based on poor judgment as much as ignorance. How often can we know what we don’t? But personalizing makes people-pleasers feel like ignorance is always their fault.

Additionally, personalizing helps these individuals better manage anxiety, or the fear that they’ll be exposed as impostors. It makes them work harder to fit others’ seemingly exorbitant expectations. Unfortunately, if the environment is a bad fit, for example, demanding and unsupportive, personalizing as a coping mechanism eventually falls apart. At some point, the people-pleaser realizes that taking on more responsibilities is never enough. But to manage the fear of having to consider alternative options, they often continue to try harder. Frequently, they wait until the anxiety feels completely unnameable to walk away, which they usually prefer to outright confrontation.

In relation to managing one’s own anxiety, personalizing fulfills one’s need to control. This delusion contributes to the illusion that one dictates their own future. While some degree of this is healthy, in that we need to have a relatively high locus of control, personalizing makes one feel too important. It’s a way of having one’s cake and eating it, too. The people-pleaser desires three things simultaneously: to avoid conflict, to avoid having to make a difficult decision on whether to change environments, and to indirectly but positively influence their present setting. At bottom, they possess an almost otherworldly sense of hope that their efforts will be recognized and rewarded. Self-importance, here, manifests as the belief that one can single-handedly change an entire culture/environment and do so without meaningful risks, by simply being good. Unfortunately, the indirect and implied pleas are often overlooked, and the people-pleaser’s silence is misperceived as contentment.

Lastly, personalizing lends itself to one’s need for simplicity. Preoccupied with approval, people-pleasers often struggle when having to live without it; they feverishly attempt to capture or recapture it. Personalizing is supported by the belief that those who work for it can have it if they try hard enough. We see this in politics when marginalized groups are blamed for their predicaments, which is largely a denial of one’s fear that their life, or destiny, isn’t fully in their own hands (in addition to denying one’s own privilege).

Since people-pleasers, or socially-prescribed perfectionists, tend to view the world through the lens of rewards and punishments, they erroneously believe they can influence this system solely through their stubbornness. Eventually, the pleaser may have to decide to stop engaging in wishful thinking. And they’re then left with an apparently unbearable choice: Do I confront or leave?

Personalizing is the preferred cognitive distortion, helping us avoid catastrophizing and labeling (e.g., feeling like a failure). When considering the above-noted decision, we can ask ourselves what we’re afraid of and why. If we get fired for requesting fewer responsibilities, is our résumé strong enough to support us? Have we built up a strong enough reputation to have a voice in our endeavors? Do others agree that we’ve been mistreated or even exploited? Can we survive and even thrive elsewhere? The cliché is that we may prefer the devil we know to the one we don’t, and while it’s true that some environments are relatively similar anyway, the act of leaving or confronting, essentially self-respect, and experiencing its consequences can help ease rigidity and accompanying anxiety. Ultimately, we can’t know whether our choices are good or bad in the short term, but even if your next romantic partner, for example, makes you unhappy, fostering the ability to end unhealthy relationships may contribute to your well-being in the long run. Facing the unknowns symbolizes growth.

Finally, people-pleasers struggle with knowing what they “deserve,” especially when their system seems to fail. Making this more challenging is that one context may make you feel like you deserve a lot, and another one may cause you to feel ungrateful. If you’re an absolute perfectionist, believing that you need to be perfect all the time and everywhere, you may believe that each context defines you as you are, essentially. Fortunately, but also confusingly, few things are further from the truth.