Understanding and Overcoming People Pleasing Behavior

Ever wondered whether your actions fall into the morally guided practice of kindness or the self-harming pattern of people pleasing? If you’re not sure where the line is, or where you land, then this article is for you!

 

What is People Pleasing? 

Let’s start by defining a people pleaser. According to the Miriam-Webster dictionary, a people pleaser is “a person who has an emotional need to please others often at the expense of his or her own needs or desires.” 

There’s a couple of important components here, so let’s break it down. 

On the one hand, the people pleasing behavior is stemming from the person’s own needs to please others. This part is really important, because oftentimes it may seem like it’s the other person who is creating the negative dynamic (the person who has too high of expectations, the person who demands too much, the person who asks for more than they give). And to be fair, that person often is doing all of those things. But the pattern of needing to please is coming from within the people pleaser themself. 

The second important component of people pleasing is that this behavior often occurs at the expense of the person’s own needs. That is to say they are prioritizing others’ needs over their own; they are choosing to take care of others instead of themselves.

 

How is People Pleasing Different From Kindness?

Kindness, on the other hand, is defined by Miriam-Webster as “the quality or state of being kind” and “the quality or state of being gentle and considerate.” So kindness involves thoughtfulness of others, but does not originate from an emotional need and does not occur at the person’s own detriment. 

In other words, kindness comes from a desire to be considerate as opposed to a need to be that way. If a kind person misses a chance to help someone out, or they aren’t able to do what another person asks of them, they’ll be able to move on without too much difficulty. A people pleaser, on the other hand, may feel overwhelmed with guilt or anxiety. And these feelings may be so intense and disruptive that they go out of their way to please the other person, even when it’s not good for them, just to get rid of those painful feelings. 

 

Am I People Pleasing or Just Being Kind? 

So now we have a working definition of both people pleaser and kindness, but how do you know which one best applies to you? Here’s a few questions to guide your understanding. Check all that apply.

• Do my kind deeds have a negative impact on me?
• Do I feel like I have to make others happy?
• Would I rather sacrifice my own needs than upset or disappoint someone else?
• Do I tend to give more than I receive?
• Am I uncomfortable when others give to or sacrifice for me?
• Do I need others to like me?
• Do I have a hard time saying “no”?
• Do I ignore my own needs?
• Do I worry about what others think?
• Do you experience chronic guilt?

The more of these questions you checked off, the more likely your behavior is better described by people pleasing. 

 

Why Do People Become People Pleasers?

The origins of people pleasing behaviors are often rooted in the parent-child relationship. This is the relationship in which we learn how to be in connection with others, and all other relationships are modeled after this one. So how does this dynamic form?

Let’s back up for a minute.

Infants and children are among the most vulnerable of all new beings, as they are completely dependent on their parents for survival. And although the notion of survival may quickly conjure up basic needs that parents offer like food, shelter, and clothing, there are much more subtle emotional and psychological needs that parents are also tasked to provide. These include comfort, nurturing, emotional support and regulation, validation, and protection. We need these things just as much as we need physical support.

But all humans are flawed, and we all have our own set of stressors, challenges, and wounds from our past that interfere with our current functioning. This means that parents step into the role of parenthood imperfectly. Parents may do a great job of providing the basic physical needs for their children (food, clothing, shelter, medical care, etc), but may be too consumed with their own needs to adequately tend to the emotional and psychological needs of their children. 

 

The Early Experiences of People Pleasers

I mentioned earlier that the emotional and psychological needs of children are just as important as the physical ones. And human beings are ingenious in their ability to adapt to their environment in order to get their needs met. So people-pleasing children learn to do just that… they adapt their behavior to act in ways that are more likely to get their needs met. 

How exactly does this play out? Let’s take a look at an example. 

All children want to be provided with love and affection. And parents often have a harder time providing that when children exhibit difficult behaviors, like whining and tantruming. This is especially true for parents who have a lower tolerance for stress, are already incapacitated by the degree of stress they are experiencing, or are consumed with their own needs. So they may respond to their child’s behaviors with anger or rejection. The people pleasing child, knowing they need love and affection, learns to adapt their behavior to meet their parents’ needs. They start to push down their negative emotions and behaviors and act in ways that prevent their parent from responding negatively. 

 

 

Little by little the people pleasing child learns to ignore their other needs and feelings, because the need for connection takes priority. After all, remember that children cannot survive without their parent, and emotional abandonment creates the same feelings of terror as physical abandonment.

In typical childhood development, children go through long periods of time where they are primarily self-focused. (i.e. What do I want? What do I need? What am I feeling?). While this may create lots of frustrating moments for parents, it’s an essential process to helping children connect to their own emotions and needs. And this part of development is an important piece to healthy coping later in life. (Because our feelings are incredibly important in helping us take care of ourselves). 

But people pleasing children often don’t have this opportunity, or at least not as fully as is necessary. Instead of learning how to turn inward to identify and advocate for their needs, they learn to turn outward to identify the feelings and needs of others.  And this follows them throughout their future, unless they decide to change it.

 

People Pleasing in Adulthood

So what happens to these people pleasing children when they grow up to be adults? Well, the exact same thing! The only

difference is that the person they are trying to please is no longer just their parents. Instead, this dynamic follows them into all of their relationships, including their teachers (just do what the teacher says as opposed to thinking critically), friends (I better do what my friend wants, otherwise she won’t want to be my friend), employers (shut up and work), and romantic relationships (if my partner’s needs aren’t the priority, the relationship will end).

You can imagine that this pattern of stuffing their own needs and prioritizing everyone else can become incredibly damaging. Something that was once a survival skill turns into a self-harming behavior.

 

How to Overcome People Pleasing

Once we recognize something as harmful to us, it’s natural to want to understand how to create positive change. And change is possible for people pleasers! Here’s ideas on how to start:

 

1. Recognize where people pleasing shows up for you

In which relationships does your people pleasing behavior show up? Consider the following ideas, though there may be other relationships this behavior occurs that aren’t mentioned here.

• Parents
• Partner/Spouse/Boyfriend/Girlfriend
• Teacher
• Employer
• Friend
• Coworker
• Client
• Leader/Guide
• Therapist/Coach/Doctor
• Hired professional
• Neighbor
• Stranger

 

2. Identify Your fears

Underneath the people pleasing behavior is often a fear of what might happen if you stopped the behavior. For any of the relationships you checked off above, consider what fears are conjured up by the idea of setting boundaries or prioritizing your needs. 

Are you afraid your friendship or marriage would end? Are you afraid of conflict? (If so, what’s underneath that fear of conflict?) Are you afraid of losing your job? Are you afraid of that person not liking you? Are you afraid you will be judged? 

Allow these questions to get you started, but keep in mind that your specific fears may not be listed here. Understanding the fears that underlie the people pleasing behavior helps you to know how to change it.

 

3. Assess the validity of your fears

Sometimes our fears are legitimate, and sometimes we are able to recognize they are fairly baseless or irrational. Both are possible here, so it’s important to differentiate when fear is valid vs. when it’s irrational

 

4. Face the irrational fears

For those irrational fears, the work towards change is primarily internal. It starts by reminding ourselves that the fears aren’t likely to happen and it is just our brain trying to trick us. This may not seem like all that much, but our body responds very differently to the message “This marriage is over if I say no” to “My brain is trying to trick me into believing this marriage will be over if I say no, but that’s not very likely to happen.” 

Challenging our negative thoughts and creating more adaptive ones can have a significant impact on the amount of distress we feel. 

 

5. Weigh the pros and cons of real negative consequences

As I mentioned earlier, sometimes our fears have a legitimate basis. This means there may be times when changing your people pleasing behavior in a specific relationship may have negative consequences. This doesn’t mean you should blindly continue the behavior. Instead, I recommend evaluating the pros and cons of continuing the people pleasing behavior and comparing that to the pros and cons of setting more boundaries and taking better care of yourself. 

Here are some questions to guide you in this work:

• What are the pros of continuing my people pleasing behavior?
• What are the cons of continuing my people pleasing behavior?
• What are the pros of stopping my people pleasing behavior?
• What are the cons of stopping my people pleasing behavior?
• What long-term outcomes are more desirable? 
• Can I cope with the short term consequences of changing my behavior?
• Is there anything I can do to help me cope better?

Sometimes you might find that you prefer the long-term outcomes of change, but aren’t quite ready to make the change. That’s ok. Knowing you want to change a behavior is the first step, and it’s ok to take your time. But remember that taking your time is different than full on avoidance. 

 

6. Tolerate the distress of change

Once you’re ready to change your people pleasing behavior, it’s expected that this will conjure up a lot of intense emotions, especially in the beginning. That’s because your brain is taking you right back to your infancy, when the survival skill of people pleasing was built. Back then, you needed to do everything you could to maintain that connection with your parents. It’s how you coped and survived.

But you are no longer that dependent child, and the people pleasing behavior is now more likely to harm than help. But that doesn’t stop the fight-or-flight part of your brain from activating every time you begin to try and stop the behavior. That’s because your brain isn’t able to recognize that the true threat is actually over. 

Once you understand this, you can begin to expect a wave of emotion to come when you start working to stop the people pleasing behaviors. Initially, the feelings will start to build and build, just like a wave that is beginning to form, getting bigger and bigger. It can seem like the intensity of the feeling won’t ever stop. But, like the wave, feelings reach their peak, and then recede. If you can tolerate the distress of the emotion, reminding yourself that it won’t last, you will eventually find yourself on the other side of it. 

The more you practice setting boundaries and advocating for your needs, and the more you practice tolerating the wave of emotion that coincides with it, the less intense and less frequent those waves will be. The true work is learning to tolerate the discomfort of your intense emotions so that they stop ruling you. With practice, compassion to yourself through the process, and people in your corner supporting you in these efforts, you will begin to shed your people pleasing behaviors and in doing so allow yourself to live more authentically. Who doesn’t want that?!

 

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Dana Basu, PsyD is a licensed clinical psychologist and founder of EverGROW therapy. She provides individual therapy, support groups, and online resources for parents in Orange County and throughout the state of California via online therapy. She specializes in working with the highly sensitive person and people with difficult childhood experiences, trauma, parenting stress, and chronic guilt.