Think You’re A People-pleaser? Name Three People You’ve Pleased

We’re increasingly aware of the toll people-pleasing takes on the person doing it. But it’s hard on everyone around them, too.

We know that people-pleasing can be harmful for the person doing the pleasing – my meme feed is filled with people-pleasers finally taking their lives back, or joking about the ways they haven’t managed to. But being in a relationship with a people-pleaser can be a really draining, confusing experience too. 

People-pleasing runs in my family, from the greatest of grandparents down to my humble DNA which twists itself to fit in with the rest of my insides. Growing up, I was deterred from ever putting myself before others. Such acts were seen as selfish, greedy, and grounds to be kicked out of the village. If my family had a crest, it would be an image of a badger wearing an apron, doing the dishes and crying, under a banner of cursive that reads “Does anyone need anything?”

For a long time, I thought this was the only way to live a virtuous life. Who wouldn’t want to please everyone around them? What fools are running around happily disappointing people rather than serving them? With intentions as pure as a golden retriever’s gaze, I was convinced for a very long time that denying myself to please others, that defining myself based on what I could offer them, made me a capital-G Good person.

So I was helpful and generous, I burned myself out in an effort to give everything I had to the people around me. And slowly, I became resentful and started avoiding my friends. I practiced saying no in the shower and then heard myself say yes to everything that was asked of me in the real world. Cracks soon formed in my friendships. There was a discomfort underneath our interactions that I couldn’t place, a sense of shallowness, lack of trust. Growing like wild weeds from the root of a rule I had made for myself a long time ago: don’t actually be honest with these people, they won’t like you if you are. 

It is said that people-pleasers begin as parent pleasers. We learned how to function in our family, and for some of us, that meant an entire denial of our needs, feelings, opinions, selves. We became flexible, adaptable, moldable to fit into whatever shape our family most needed us to be. As adults, we entrench ourselves in the lives of others, to make ourselves indispensable, to be needed, to be accommodating, to be loved. 

But forming our adult relationships on these foundations, can make for a rocky start. We leave the people we love guessing about what is real and what isn’t. We tell them we’re happy to help and then sigh and huff about it, we become resentful and hold grudges about how much we’ve given them. We say yes when we want to say no. We keep mental lists of everything we’ve done for them and what they haven’t done for us. 

Being in a relationship with a person doing this can be utterly exhausting. How are the people around us supposed to feel relaxed or safe, like they know where they stand? This is why it is sometimes said that people-pleasing is a form of manipulation, a way of hiding who we actually are in an attempt to control how people see us. 

As journalist Katherine Whitehorn beautifully put it, “You can recognize the people who live for others by the haunted look on the faces of the others.”

Years on in my people-pleasing recovery, I am glad to say that I have found ways to be honest and clear with the people in my life. I still help and care for them, but it now comes from a genuine choice. I check in with myself before offering help, I mean the words that I say. And now, I notice ripe people-pleasing in others: when a friend offers to help me out but is clearly frustrated about it, when my partner wants some space from me but has no idea how to ask for it, when someone tells me something I’ve done is fine with them and then months later comes at me with fury that they’ve been burying. When someone looks me dead in the eye and says “yes” when I know with my whole heart they mean “no”.

I get it, and I empathise with them. But if my friends do this to me now, I see it like they’re taking a step away from me, from us, from themselves. What I want is for them to be honest with me, and to know that our friendship is strong enough to survive us both showing up to it as our honest, flawed selves.

The main issue with believing that we have to deny ourselves in service of others is that it is built on the belief that we are inherently worthless, that all we have are the people around us and what we can provide them, and that they’ll drop us in a second if we even think of disappointing them. But in truth, we are disappointing – we’re massively disappointing. We’re human and messy and busy and sometimes so consumed with ourselves that we forget birthdays, don’t show up to parties, and leave messages and emails unread for days. Can that be OK? Can we be loved and disappointing at the same time? 

In some relationships, reducing your people-pleasing behaviours and speaking more honestly might mean you lose the person or friend from your life. Isn’t it better to let people like that go? Don’t the people who stay deserve to get to know the real you?