You’re talking with a friend over coffee. “Well,” he asserts, “I think there are really only two kinds of people in the world: those who get and those who give.” The maxim has a pleasing simplicity: there are those who mostly please themselves and those who mostly spend their time pleasing others. The takers and the taken. The selfish and the selfless. Doesn’t it just about sum up what many of us believe?
Are You a People Pleaser?
The reality is that most of us are a combination of those two extremes. But those givers who strive to please others at their own expense deserve attention, because they tend to seek out psychological help much more often than those in the other camp. Why? Because giving to the point of self-abnegation can exact a cost that eventually outweighs whatever benefits the giver may have expected or experienced in the past. Good feelings that used to come from acts of unselfishness and sacrifice are replaced with disappointment, resentment, loneliness, even hopelessness. Something has really gone wrong. After many years in this mode, the pattern seems set, and the giver may feel trapped: “I can’t do this anymore! What’s wrong with me?”
Are all generous souls destined for this fate? Of course not. But careful reflection helps us to recognize and understand this pattern of self-torment, confusion, and true suffering. The blueprints for this behavior are ingrained early in life and operate mostly outside of the person’s awareness, from deep within, the reflection of habits adopted long ago.
Why would people choose to make themselves so miserable? How can that happen? As any giver who has become trapped in a tangle of motivations will tell you, however, it doesn’t feel like a choice at all.
People Pleasing Can Begin in Infancy
Let’s take a look at early child development, the organization and structure of our formative experiences. At the beginning of life, human beings are born into a state of absolute dependence. Many infants gradually realize that everything good—food, warmth, tenderness—is provided by people surrounding them, particularly Mother. The baby cannot feed herself, take care of her bodily needs nor make herself feel safe. In most cases there is no need for her to do so. The relationship of security shaped through countless repetitions of satisfying interactions provides a sense of “I am okay. I am safe. Nothing bad is going to happen to me.” This dependency is rewarded most of the time with pleasure, comfort, calm nurturance, a “oneness with the good.”
But sometimes things are not so smooth. A baby (and a mother) can feel frustrated, angry, frightened when the connection between them is “off” for any of a multitude of reasons. For babies who have experienced the necessary levels of satisfaction and comfort, these episodes don’t result in long term damage because the context of what researchers call “good-enough mothering” provides the inner strength to withstand temporary frustration and occasional rage. Rather than living in a derailed traumatized state, babies and mothers recover their equilibrium, the place where they live together most of the time. Being dependent is still okay. The “normal” infant experience is thus a balance of those interactions in a way that makes for a “good-enough” mix of the good and the bad.
Children Develop People Pleasing Defenses when Dependency Does Not Feel Safe
The situation for some other babies, though, may be quite different. Due to many factors (a topic for another blog post), they may never really experience the “good-enough” state to form a core, a developing self that is the basis for tolerating and dealing with bad feelings, discomfort, fear, loneliness. A profound wound is inflicted. Dependency, although still a reality, has become dangerous. As emotional scars form, a complicated pattern of adaption begins to develop. When these children begin to recognize the failure of their environment, they learn to deal with that state of deprivation and frustration in a variety of ways, all geared to repair the environment and themselves in an attempt to gain some sense of feeling better, happier, safer—essentially trying to recover what has been “missing.”
So how does a young child do that? One way is when he learns prematurely to take on responsibilities he is not equipped for. Rather than a relaxed state of overall satisfaction, he becomes hyper-sensitized to environmental failure, acutely attuned to “good” and “bad” states. An odd reversal of roles evolves. Essentially, he realizes he must “take care of” his caretakers; pleasing those on whom he depends for life carries the possibility of receiving some of what he needs to feel nurtured, loved, protected.
The corollary of this mix of reality and fantasy is a rudimentary but overdetermined sense that “I have power and control over the situation.” As this pattern is provoked and develops, it can harden into a fixed way of viewing the world. Rather than enjoying dependency and reliability of the “world” to meet his needs, he is obliged to try to take over. This leads to a distorted way of seeing himself and relating to people. The seeds of depression and anxiety are sown.
What Is Really Going on Inside?
How can this happen in such a young child? In pre-verbal communication, a very young child knows only what she is capable of knowing—that is, what she feels. Sophisticated adult mental functions are not available to her to process what she experiences. Rather, the child has only very primitive ways to deal with feelings: they are enjoyed in the moment or suffered. Those particularly painful ones are “put way,” “pushed away,” separated from the child to protect her fragile self. This is not an intentional act. Rather it is a reaction, repeated over and over, which is stored in what we call the unconscious, a part of our experience of which we have essentially no awareness.
Unbearable frustration and fear go into hiding, remain buried, in the visceral and feeling- and image-based unconscious. “I don’t know why I do this!” is an admission that deeply hidden patterns are neither apparent nor available for reflection or modification. We realize, though, that unpleasant, terrifying, or violent feelings feel so destructive that creating a barrier to them in effect saves us from having to feel them all the time. It’s an essential maneuver for survival on the part of a child’s brain, but also the basis of the struggle to recognize and understand the root of these experiences.
So how does this forge adults who are miserable and stuck in a pattern that does not work?
In our next post, we’ll trace the development and integration of this mode beyond childhood into adolescence, and explore its manifestations in adulthood. We’ll explore how the people pleaser processes and incorporates messages and how they ultimately affect her, how the pattern reverberates throughout adulthood as an apparently fixed stance toward herself and others. You may begin to see yourself in some of our descriptions, and develop a clearer picture of patterns in your or another’s life.
A key to ameliorating the emotional pain of this suffering is learning to become curious about yourself, about the cues and hints, dreams, even thoughts that seem too embarrassing or shameful, and to begin to wonder about what may have happened that has been long shut away and held from awareness. A clear understanding of the inner turmoil that can pervade the anxieties and morbid thoughts of people pleasers is the first step toward freedom from this cruel and painful way of living.
Image Credit: Paul Bence