TRANSCRIPT
A few people have asked that I make a video on the psychology of people pleasing. And I speak as someone who is a largely recovered people pleaser. Not a hundred percent, but largely recovered.
What is a people pleaser? A people pleaser is someone who lives to make other people happy, to please other people at the expense of themselves, to say what other people want to hear so other people will not become uncomfortable, and therefore the other people will accept them, love them, nurture them, welcome them. This is the dilemma, to one degree or another, of most children. In my case, in my childhood, it was a big part of my life, a big part of the psychology that I had to develop to survive. To get loved, I had to make my parents happy or else they would not love me properly. My parents were bastions of conditional love. Of course, they never said that. They said to me, “Oh, we love you unconditionally.” And they did say it. Both my mother and my father said it many times: “We love you unconditionally.” But the real truth was, if they had been honest, they would have said, “Daniel, we love you unconditionally as long as you first conditionally make us happy and please us.”
So what happened to me as the result of figuring that out was I had to literally twist my whole sense of self and subjugate my truth, my honest expressions, subjugate my feelings and my needs, even my thoughts, my perception of myself, my honesty, in order to make them happy. I had to lie. I had to figure out what can I do to please them. I developed a little antenna that came out of my head that said, “Hmm, when I say this, how do they respond? When I say this, how do they respond? What gets the best reaction out of them? What makes them like me and love me more? And what do I do that makes them angry, that makes them upset, and makes them reject me? And don’t do that, don’t do that.” That was the psychology of how I became a people pleaser. That was the crucible, that was the high degree of temperature and pressure that forged my personality in a twisted and warped way. And I did it because it was far too painful for me to be rejected and hated and massively criticized and abandoned by my parents. And so, people pleaser I became.
What I discovered is that it’s a really crappy strategy, but it works. And that’s true for people pleasers I see everywhere. They learned this strategy because they were making the best of a very bad deal. And this strategy for them worked as a survival mechanism to get some crumbs of love in their childhood.
Now, the problem with being a people pleaser is it may work to help a child survive in a very confused and twisted and traumatizing family system, but it is, and often can be, a pretty rotten strategy for having a satisfying, self-loving adult life, even a satisfying, self-loving childhood. It’s confusing to make real friends when you don’t know how to be a real self. And if you’re a people pleaser, you’re not a real self because you’re not being really honest about who you are.
I remember even as a child, sometimes some of my people pleasing strategies didn’t work very well. I remember getting bullied sometimes and not knowing how to stick up for myself because I was getting bullied by my dad so often. And I people pleased him to get him to love me. He needed to discharge his rage onto me to feel like a man, to feel good about himself. And he needed me to accept his bullying in order for him to feel comfortable around me. And so I transferred that behavior of my own onto others, and it made me a very good target for bullies. I even was beaten up a few times because I just reflexively could not stand up for myself. It was easier for me to be bullied and beaten up by some nasty, bigger, meaner kid than to realize how much my father hated me and rejected me. And to stand up to that bully would have been to stand up to my father, and that fate for me was worse than death. Being bullied and even picked on and beaten up was less painful.
Slowly in my life, that dynamic changed, though. It really started to change when I went away to college, even when I became a later teenager, and then certainly into my early 20s when I realized I’m dysfunctional. I don’t know how to properly stand up for myself. In fact, I’m not really even a proper real self, so there’s really nothing to stand up for. It was like I was faking it in so many different relationships, friendships, even relationships with young women who I was dating or trying to date. It was like being a self was too scary for me. It went against really the emotional crucible of my family system.
At first, even as a teenager, my real self would leak out sometimes in ugly ways. And one of the ways it leaked out was I was really angry. And I’ve seen this with so many people who are people pleasers. Just below the surface, sometimes you can see it in their eyes and in their neck and in their mouth. And sometimes, boom, it comes out of their mouth. So many people pleasers, perhaps all, are deeply underneath the surface, blocked away, hidden beneath a wall of concrete and barbed wire because it was so disallowed. They are angry, full of rage, even because they’re not allowed to stand up for themselves. They’re not allowed to say, “No, no, no, this is not okay. You can’t treat me this way.” Because if they said that and they had anger—anger being the prime ingredient of boundaries—if they had anger, they would get rejected. But sometimes the anger leaks out, and it leaked out with me often in inappropriate ways. And it didn’t feel good. And it’s like, where is this coming from? I asked myself many, many times.
If the more I got away from my parents physically—got away first sometimes physically far away, literally living on the other side of the planet at various points in my early 20s—and also emotionally getting away from them, sometimes emotionally in my own psyche, in my heart, in my journal writing, how I was really feeling, realizing that there’s a whole inner world that I have denied because I was forced to deny it as a people pleaser. But looking inside myself, reconnecting with me, reconnecting with my sadness, my anger, my righteous anger, my feelings of terror and pain. I’m doing this again and again and again, crying, grieving, realizing there was a beautiful person in me who I loved deeply, who I’d never been allowed to love, who I’d never been allowed to nurture, who no one had ever nurtured, no one had ever cared about or seen, no one had really ever defended.
The more I defended that little boy, that little person, that little soul inside of me, the more I grew. The more my feelings were allowed to exist in my psyche, and the more I found that when I was in socially awkward or uncomfortable, even abusive situations at the receiving end from others, I could stand up for myself. I could say no, or I don’t want that, or I don’t like that. Or I could just leave, pull out of relationships. I didn’t have to stay at jobs that I didn’t like. I didn’t have to live with people I didn’t like. And what I discovered is, oh my God, I feel better. I’m honoring myself.
I think this is true for so many people pleasers, people who are in the process of recovering from being people pleasers, is that as they begin to honor themselves, they start to feel more alive. They start to feel more satisfaction with their lives, and also they start to attract other people who respect them. What I’ve seen a lot with people who are people pleasers—I saw this sometimes in extreme cases when I was a psychotherapist—is that people who are really extreme people pleasers often just attracted really kind of awful people. A lot of people who were drawn to people pleasers, people who were drawn to people who didn’t really have a self. And what I’ve seen is that as people start to feed their true self, they don’t want those kind of people around them. They don’t want people who are drawn to people pleasers also.
What I’ve seen is that people who are healthy, real selves don’t really want to be around people pleasers as much. It’s like people pleasers can be kind of unpleasant in a lot of ways. It’s like, yes, people—people who will only tell you yes, yes, yes—but they’ll never tell you how they really think, how they really feel, and who they really are.
I think about this from when I was a people pleaser. A lot of times, people who are healthier didn’t necessarily want me around as much because I didn’t have so much to offer them in a lot of ways. I wasn’t such an honest person. And as I became healthier, I attracted healthier people.
So for me, the cure for people pleasing, in a nutshell—and I’ll say this the ongoing cure—because there’s still some reflexive part of me that, especially in very stressful situations, can still be a people pleaser. I think about getting mugged a couple of years ago. It’s like I really people pleased those two guys who were mugging me so they wouldn’t kill me. I wanted them to like me so they would be less likely to really physically damage me in some horrible way. And actually, sadly, it worked.
It’s like all that horrible stuff I went through in my childhood with my mother and primarily my father with his brutality, it taught me how to behave in a situation where I was getting mugged to save myself.
But in a nutshell, the healing from people pleasing is going within, finding the core of me, even a little bit of it, and listening to who I am. Listening to what my voice is on the inside, listening to what it says, listening to how I feel, acknowledging the validity of how I feel, listening to my sadness and feeling it, letting it suffuse my body, feeling my anger—not necessarily acting it out on people, especially not acting it out inappropriately on people—but acknowledging that yes, when I’m violated, I can be angry. And I’m still angry about many of the things that happened to me once upon a time.
I can use that anger to keep away from people who would continue to behave that way. I don’t have to please them. In fact, my job is not to please nasty people, idiots, liars, mean people, cruel people, rejecting people. Instead, my job is to honor the truth of me—the little boy who I once was and the man who I am now—to honor the full range of my feelings, to honor the truth of my history, to honor the healthiness of my relationships, to honor all the people around me, to honor their boundaries, to respect them, to acknowledge the mistakes that I’ve made in my life. And I’ve made a lot of mistakes along the way because I came from a very screwed up background, and I acted out a lot of the screwed up things that happened to me.
To acknowledge what I’ve done, to continue to grieve, to continue to stay away from screwed up people, to be productive, to be honest, and to share what I’ve learned in hopes of being helpful to others on this path.
[Music]