Shedding the People-Pleaser Identity

Most of us don’t want to know that we might have a people-pleaser identity. We think it means that we might be “weak” or “manipulative,” or that we should be ashamed of having such an identity. But what if you knew that the people-pleaser may have actually been saving your life for years?

So, before we go there, let us give a good description of what we mean by the people-pleaser identity. The people-pleaser obviously attempts to please people. He does that very well, and often quite successfully, as he has honed this talent over the years to a level of expertise which, in any other measure of success, would be considered amazing. He has an uncanny ability to intuit exactly what kind of pleasing a particular person might need and then give it to them quickly and with a kind of ease that is smooth and efficient. So, when shame seems to creep in when you start realizing that you’ve been a people-pleaser, perhaps thinking about this as a unique and refined skill might help.

Why does a people-pleaser do what she does? She must please people in order to feel worthy. She must please people because if she can’t they will not like her, they may even find her worthy of shame, they may abandon her, or in the worst-case scenario, they may abuse her. People-pleasing is how she survives these possibilities. She must figure out what people want and need and give it to them, lest they treat her in any of the abovementioned ways. She depends on this skill daily, even moment by moment. At some unconscious level, she may even know that her sense of existence itself depends on maintaining this identity.

Five Important Points About People-Pleasing

But there are some very important things we should know about this identity, particularly if that identity fits for you. First, it is an identity. In other words, it is not who you really are. Your authentic self lives underneath that identity—perhaps having been pushed into the unconscious for a time so that you could survive. But who you are, who you really are, is not a people-pleaser.

You put the people-pleaser identity on, like a mask and costume, because you were required to do that in a family of origin in which not being a people-pleaser was not safe. By safety, I mean that you were protecting yourself from a range of possibilities, from discomfort to horrific abuse in your family.

Second, putting on this identity, putting on this mask and costume was very smart. Somehow you knew that this particular identity would save your life in some way—ranging from psychological salvation to a literal physical salvation, or all of the gradations between those two. How did you know to pick this identity instead of some other identity, like the superhero or the bully identity? You knew because you were smart—you knew how to survive in this particular family because you intuited what role would best fit the pressure to conform in this family.

The Way In

Source: Andrea Mathews

Third, that pressure to conform was made out of the family’s dysfunction. Families tend to seek homeostasis regardless of their specific dysfunction. In other words, they are looking for balance so that they don’t have to change anything—because what they are doing is based on interlocking roles that they play in order to assure their own salvation both as individuals within the system and as a system. They don’t want to know that they need to change because such deep change is scary. So, they pressure members of the family to conform to certain roles so that those roles will balance out the family. That way they don’t know, and no one outside of the family knows, that there is a serious problem in this family.

Fourth, we give up our authenticity to conform to this pressure. We don’t know we are doing that, of course. But no child has the ability to say “no” to this pressure because doing so would amount to not belonging. Not belonging feels like a kind of death to a young child. In fact, belonging is essential to survival, whether psychological, emotional, or literal physical survival. We know that we need these people desperately in order to survive. Therefore, without knowing it, we surrender our authenticity to the unconscious and begin to live out of an identity.

Fifth, we do not have to maintain this identity for a lifetime. Sometimes it takes a dark time in our lives to wake us up to the fact that this identity is no longer useful to us. In fact, what saves us as children often begins to kill us as adults. So, whatever the cause, whether it is a physical illness, the end of a relationship, the death of an important person—especially if that death is of a parent who insisted on the people-pleaser role—or another form of darkness, we tend to begin to question the old ways of living.

Moving Beyond People-Pleasing

At this point, it is possible to begin to recognize other feelings that we have repressed in order to stay in the people-pleaser role. Those feelings might include resentment, anger, sorrow, fear, and other such emotions, emotions that as a people-pleaser we may have considered to be not only “negative,” but also taboo. These feelings may lead us to a more authentic approach to living in which these emotions are seen as valid. In fact, emotions such as resentment, for example, can help us see that we have been doing a lot of things that we don’t even want to do in order to please someone else. We can come to see this as living inauthentically.

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The authentic self has been waiting there in the unconscious all this time, waiting for us to wake up. It may have risen to the surface several times in our lives to ask us to wake up. But we sent it away again because we were afraid of giving up the people-pleaser role. It may have come up through emotional burnout or through working with stubborn people who just would not be pleased no matter how hard we tried. It may have come up through the body speaking to us through various problems such as high blood pressure. But at some point, we begin to hear its voice, and we begin to listen.

And that is the beginning of the end of the people-pleaser identity and the beginning of a whole new life as an authentic person.