People-Pleasers Are Made, Not Born
This is how we learn to neglect ourselves and prioritize the needs of others.
Let me guess. As a child, you’d always put everyone’s needs and wants first. You hated to see loved ones — or even strangers — sad, hurt, uncomfortable, or unhappy.
Pleasing them made you feel like you were good enough and worthy of love. However, it also made you feel miserable because you didn’t know how to honor your own needs.
As you grew up, you realized your people-pleasing was making you feel drained and disrespected. Your inability to stand up for yourself made it very difficult for you to say no and set boundaries, especially when dealing with stronger personalities.
Unfortunately, you’re not alone.
This article is for you.
People-Pleasers Start As Parent-Pleasers
People-pleasing has a lot to do with your early stages in life, specifically the way you were treated and cared for by your parents or primary caregivers.
Yes, I know this is a hard pill to swallow.
If, as children, our parent(s) only show love when we’re conforming to their needs, desires, and expectations, we learn that we need to please them to be truly loved and accepted — and we unconsciously apply that belief to every human interaction.
This is not something easy to acknowledge because we usually think about our parents as people we love and share a close bond with. However, sometimes their emotional baggage makes it very difficult for them to establish a genuine bond with us and love us for who we really are.
Sometimes, parents who behave this way can also be kind and loving at times, which can be extremely confusing. If that’s your case, you’ve likely developed a fearful-avoidant attachment style.
Other times, they’re downright abusive or narcissistic. They expect us to adopt all their values and submit ourselves to their preferences. As time goes by, we absorb the message that expressing our feelings is bad or wrong (since it always leads to drama or criticism), so we stuff our feelings down and do everything we can to feel validated by those who surround us.
If your parents are narcissistic, you probably feel a lot of guilt and shame for something as simple as reading this article and questioning their behavior. I’ve been there.
The most important thing to understand is that people-pleasing is not something you’re born with — it’s something you develop when your needs are not met. It’s an attempt to establish an emotional connection with emotionally immature, self-involved, or narcissistic parents. Most importantly, it’s an attempt to feel loved and accepted.
The problem here is that pleasing others never leads to genuine acceptance. Those who truly care about us don’t want us to please them or prioritize their needs constantly — they want us to express ourselves.
If you’re still unsure whether or not your parents have influenced your personality, ask yourself these questions:
- Did you feel like you had to earn love, such as by getting good grades at school?
- When you expressed your will and it didn’t align with what was expected of you, were you met with respect and support, or with drama and resistance?
- Were you rewarded for being a good girl/boy, meaning, submitting yourself to your parent’s wishes?
- Did you feel like you could express yourself clearly and safely, or did you feel like you were constantly walking on eggshells?
- How many times have you felt that you weren’t good enough for your parents?
“Submitting themselves to parental preferences was rewarded; deviating from these preferences — maybe even dictates — was regularly met with some form of displeasure. That is, when such children asserted their will contrary to parental wishes, these parents typically reacted critically and withheld from them caring and support, positive time and attention, recognition, understanding or encouragement. In consequence, such children felt not simply disapproved of, but rejected and abandoned as well.”
Leon F. Seltzer, in From Parent-Pleasing to People-Pleasing
The Society We Live In Also Plays A Role
Our society loves to devalue anything related to emotions, feelings, and mental health in general. More often than not, we’re told,
You’re too sensitive.
Why are you so emotional?
You’re overreacting.
Just toughen up and get over it.
This tendency to minimize our feelings leads us to absorb the message that maybe we really are too sensitive, maybe our feelings really don’t matter that much and maybe we really should just toughen up.
As a consequence, and depending on other factors such as your upbringing, we start to believe that we’re the crazy ones that feel too much and we’d be better off if we stopped caring about our feelings and emotional needs.
So, we invalidate ourselves and we ruin our self-esteem (and lack of self-esteem is the perfect foundation for people-pleasing behavior).
We ridicule, deny, and silence our perceptions to adapt and survive.
Several factors contribute to this pattern, but our relationship with our parents is probably the one that has the biggest impact.
Children pick up on everything. And when you’re raised to become compliant and agreeable, that’s exactly what you’ll become — with everyone, not just with your parents.
