Self-knowledge is the essential first step toward making changes that improve wellbeing. When you find yourself stuck in a self-destructive pattern of behavior, you’ve actually already begun to turn your life around—by recognizing the pattern for what it is.
In our last post, we began to unravel the complex emotional underpinnings of an all-too-common behavior pattern that can take a huge toll on self-esteem: being a people pleaser. When your primary, but sometimes unacknowledged, rule of life is pleasing others, you can find yourself going to extremes to make others happy, to your own detriment. If this sounds familiar, it isn’t cause to berate yourself. Rather, let’s take a closer look at how you may have arrived at this place, to help you understand all the factors at play.
Early Roots of a People-Pleasing Coping Style
A quick review: People pleasing is often an adaptation that originates at an early age, due to an insufficiently nurturing environment that deeply influences a child’s first perceptions of the world and herself. Most people are fortunate enough to have had “good enough” mothering, an idea first coined by British child psychiatrist Donald Winnicott. This is essentially the experience of having mostly reliable, nurturing and protective human accompaniers, the basis of security and stability that enable the development of healthy adjustment in adulthood. Even when things go wrong between parent and child, enough “good” is available so that both can exercise their capacities to empathize, feel honest guilt, tolerate miscues or hurts from the other and move toward a place of healing and regeneration.
But those who lack this nurturing and stabilizing environment or who experience severe disruptions in development may form a distorted understanding of their role in the relationship. Neglect, abandonment, empathic failure or profound inconsistency in care may leave the child with feelings of anxiety, fear, rage, helplessness and isolation. Without the capacity to escape or protect himself from this intolerable state, these experiences, emotions and associations go “underground,” deep into a place that separates him from overwhelming pain.
The child may reactively try to repair or amend this breech of care through overdetermined, anxiety-ridden attempts to engage those around her in desperate hope of reviving in them awareness and sensitivity to her needs. But a continuation and elaboration of this pattern of relating to others feeds her perceptions and expectations, now based on her sense that she must try to raise herself by taking care of others who are not attuned to her. Literally, her survival depends upon pleasing them. The child steps into the role of parent or “adult child.” The pattern takes root, is reinforced and eventually becomes the primary coping mechanism.
How People Pleasing Becomes Ingrained in Adolescence
Peers play a significant role in this process. Early socialization and identity formation in adolescence are key phases wherein this deeply entrenched sense of self plays out. People-pleasing children may have difficulty forming relationships with others. They may struggle to feel included in school. They may be prone to depression, behavioral disturbance, academic problems or other struggles.
“Wait a minute!” says the parent (or the voice of a parent that you hear in your head). “Every child has trouble with some kids and is bound to feel lonely or isolated once in a while! All kids have moods. Kids fight. They get into trouble. That’s just normal childhood. She’ll get over it. Besides, look how well she’s doing in school—top of her class! She even likes learning!.”
Maybe. How might we know? Cultivating patience, questioning and doubt, wondering broadly about patterns and habits helps us to go beneath the surface of the observable to consider a whole picture, one that honors and includes all childhood experience from the beginning. Defaulting to what appears obvious may actually leave no room for an alternative understanding. “Good” behavior, such as academic achievement, may, within this context, be an elaborate attempt to please, hoping for the reward of love, adoration and praise.
During school years, many other adults and peers enter the child’s enlarging social sphere. Besides parents, there are friends, classmates, teachers, coaches, advisers and others whom the people pleaser believes must be taken care of and enabled in an attempt to preserve the relationship, however distorted.
In the process, the “child in the child” goes into hiding, is exiled, even entombed as a remnant that lives only through hibernation. There it remains static, almost inaccessible. The people pleaser’s adolescence and early adulthood are marked by a pattern of fear, compliance and a subjective sense of failure. He may lack memories of experiences, relationships and childhood fantasies, because the vividness of those early years has been white washed by empathic failure.
The First Step Toward Positive Change
Deeply ingrained is a compliant coping style, a way of living based on other people and their wishes, and, often, a dull sense that “something is missing” without having any clue what that might be. The people pleaser may struggle with an inability to form close, mutually satisfying relationships. He may feel that nothing really matters very much, other than obligations and a persistent fear of failure or disappointing. He may become mired in obsessions, addictions or perversions of anything good. Creativity, wonder and curiosity are forgotten. A sense of emptiness prevails.
This is how people pleasing becomes a fixed way of life. It is an entrenched behavior pattern that masks a troubled past and inner turmoil, all too often written off as “That’s just me, that’s just who I am.”
This is not a sunny, satisfying proposition. But it is also not an irreversible life sentence. Does this sound like your life? Do you feel something stirring, something perhaps perturbing or even threatening in this description? Take heart. Self-knowledge is the first step toward positive change. And you, my friend, are not alone. We’ll look at how to find the path to healing in our next post.
Image Credit: Todd Diemer