I thought it might be interesting to do a little dissection today, friends. Fear not, no scalpels or aprons or formaldehyde involved. Just the precision tools of inquiry. I’m thinking we might dissect a paradox together. There are so many to choose from though. How ever shall we decide? Want me to choose? How about…the paradox of people-pleasing?
It just so happens that I have a bit of personal experience with this subject, having been indoctrinated into the fellowship of fawning at an early age. Some of you may also be card-carrying members. Whether you readily identify with chronic people-pleasing or not, you may wonder what I’m going on about with this paradox business. What’s so paradoxical about people-pleasing? Well, it’s the irony of it, you see. The nicest, most accommodating people, the very types who steadfastly, graciously please without complaint are some of the most controlling folks you will ever meet.
C’mon, you say. Are you sure? Yes, yes I know. It’s real mind-buggery. People-pleasers seem like the most easy-going people in the world. We give until we bleed, and when we bleed, we bleed graciously. We’re deathly allergic to saying “no,” and make time we don’t even have to listen to the kind of shaggy-dog stories that would make most mere mortals run in the other direction. We apologize to you when you’ve stepped on our toes. We take up next to no space at all, forfeiting it not just willingly, but cheerfully, to others. If anything, haven’t people-pleasers submitted their personal control?
Hmmm. Yes. And No. Let’s think it through. Why are we people-pleasers so driven to please? Is it out of the goodness of our mega magnanimous hearts? Well, no. In the shadows cast by our sunny dispositions lurk some ulterior motives. So ulterior we ourselves may not even see them. It’s only with the sweeping search light of scrutiny that we might see we are harboring the hope that we will make people like us, approve of us, or at the very least validate us. We are strategically sweet and calculating in our kindness, and sometimes successfully so. Enough so that we keep it up.
Like most things, compulsive pleasing does not come about in a vacuum. It’s a protective mechanism we deploy to defend from some form of emotional neglect, abuse or abandonment – the same way we deploy white blood cells to deflect viral and bacterial threats. For many (most) of us pleasers, it began once upon a time in childhood when we faced some sort of developmental trauma, whether physical, emotional, or both. According to psychologist Pete Walker, a specialist in Complex PTSD, compulsive pleasing is the fourth “F” of trauma responses: fight, flight, freeze and fawn.
Friends, if you’re bumping up against any sort of resistance toward the t-word, please know that I’m not playing fast and loose with psychological labels here. I’m not implying that if you identify with what I’m saying here about people-pleasing, you ergo have undiagnosed trauma. The trauma mantle is something that I believe one must own for themselves as part of their identity (even if they have a trauma diagnosis, they must still own it for themselves). That said, what I see when I walk out into the world and look around are plenty of dissociated, disconnected and avoidant behaviors that suggest that the hills are alive with the sound (and sight) of unacknowledged, untreated trauma. In other words, trauma is insidious, and it manifests in myriad of ways, large and small.
In fact, trauma often looks like a pretty typical childhood. Let’s say a kid grows up in a home where caregivers don’t support that kid in feeling or expressing emotions like anger or sadness. This kid learns that their caregivers approve of them when they repress those feelings and maybe even more so when they’re being helpful or useful. On the other hand, when this kid is their authentic self, which includes expressing the full range of human emotions and playing, rather than helping, their caregivers are displeased. They may even reject, shame, humiliate or send some other signal of disapproval to this kid. What’s this kid to do? They become an expert in pleasing, as if their very life depended on it. They learn to “take care of” others by stuffing themselves into a teeny, tidy container. For good measure, they may also gift wrap the whole caboodle with perfectionism and festoon it with merit badges, trophies and honor roll certificates.
Over time, the scope of the pleasing strategy has a way of expanding beyond the defensive into a more offensive mindset that goes something like “if I do this for you, maybe then you will do that for me.” There tends to be a lot of invisibly inked fine print on the unacknowledged contracts in the people-pleasing mind.
Let’s take a pause here for a little gentleness break. After all, we’re not here to indict the people pleaser as a Machiavellian master of manipulation. All this pleasing, appeasing, and approval seeking goes on largely below the level of consciousness. It’s often unrecognized and thus neither deliberate nor strategic. Pleasing others is simply the water in which we fawning fish swish.
Furthermore, trying to meet one’s needs in such a roundabout way and/or running as fast as we can to stay ahead of even a whiff of emotional abandonment comes at the steep cost of incredible self-abandonment.
Remember that people-pleasing kid we talked about earlier? That kid becomes an adult who is disconnected from their emotional experience, their physical sensations, their needs and desires. Sometimes their entire identity (#mystory). They may live with an unshakeable sense of themselves as impostor. They consistently forsake their needs in service of meeting those of others and may be unable to even remotely sense or identify their own needs (not to mention their preferences, desires or dreams). They are left feeling exhausted, empty and resentful.
Over time, the repressed reality of being so disconnected from self can calcify into rage, and the façade of fawning begins to crack and crumble under the pressure of it. We may find ourselves the proverbial “exploding doormat,” going from marshmallow peep-sweet to actively volcanic in the blink of an eye, scorching everyone and everything around.
Goodness me. What a grim and ghastly portrait I have painted here. But I’m okay with that, because I’m choosing to practice healthy disobedience to my pleasing nature and give it to you straight instead. And the truth is, whether you are a fawner, a friend of a fawner, or a foe, that it gets damn dark on the sunny side of control. Full solar eclipse kind of dark.
Fortunately, fawning was learned, and what has been learned can be unlearned. The first simple but not easy step is always to recognize it for what it is, then to start gently questioning our own motives and noticing when things feel misaligned. It’s a process, and processes are not, by definition, speedy things. So, in the meantime, friends? Apply sunscreen liberally, put on your UV-protective hoodie and your sunglasses (or eclipse glasses, use your discretion) and be as kind as you can, most importantly to yourself.
I used to think that was a paradox - how could I be both a people pleaser and a total control freak??? But it's true! I just want everyone to be happy. So I will make them be happy dammit! Good stuff as usual Keith!
Wow you describe this SO WELL. It’s such a tangled mess, I remember being in the thick of healing, between “unconscious” and “conscious;” (conscious being of course the awareness that I am a people pleaser, and the learned ability to figure out what I need for once instead of what others need) and it was hard! One feels so ugly for a little while in there, when it’s realized that the rage and control comes along with it all lol. I am not quite as sweet as I thought I was!
The other side is so beautiful, and so worth it though! We get to actually live our own life! The sweetness is there, but only when we really mean it. It’s genuine <3
Thanks for sharing this with everybody, it’s such important information!