What Exactly is People-Pleasing? Let’s Get Into it.
People-Pleasing Revealed by a Trauma Therapist in Colchester, CT and Falls Church, VA
People pleasing is a survival response.
People-pleasing is a threat/survival response called the fawn response. Just like fight, flight, and freeze, fawn helps you to survive when you feel threatened. You usually use this response to placate a threat, make the threat feel calm and happy, to diminish the threat and to preserve yourself.
This threat response is relational.
When someone explains fight, flight, and freeze they might begin with an imaginative explanation about “hey, what would your body do if it saw a bear…or a tiger…?” But could you imagine yourself people pleasing a bear? Probably not. While the other responses also occur in relationship, fawn is unique. It engages our ability to read someone else’s needs, what they need to be soothed, and stuff our own needs and feelings down in order to keep going.
People-pleasing often begins when we are young and centers around how we learn to relate to others: your parents, peers, additional family members, and authority figures. It can also be impacted by systems that work against rather than for you—that serve to oppress and disempower. Do you live in a body that is constantly made to feel unsafe and threatened when you exist and move through specific spaces? Has people-pleasing, or soothing an authority or frightening figure, ever supported your survival in those moments?
People-pleasing is not the same thing as being nice.
People-pleasing is not the same thing as being kind and generous. Believe it or not, you can both be kind and operate in people pleasing survival mode. The important thing to look at is: when you zoom out, what is at the root of that behavior?
When you respond to someone, does it feel as though it is coming from obligation?
At the end of your response, if you do not soothe this other person, does your body anticipate a consequence?
Do you find that there are heightened feelings of fear, terror, guilt, and shame, almost as if you owe someone a certain version of yourself?
When that interaction is over, what happens to your body? Does it feel relieved? Exhausted? Numb? Empty? Invisible? Tired?
Or, do you notice yourself finding joy in responding to others? Do you find that you can take up space and observe yourself as a separate entity from another person while you are interacting and together? When you interact, are you instead able to find delight in sharing, giving to others, and receiving as well?
People-pleasing can make you good at hiding and collapsing.
Do you find that you wear a mask around others, catering those masks to whatever another person needs?
When you step away, who are you without your mask(s)?
What does the version of you that exists underneath enjoy and also hate?
What do you need to express yourself?
Where does your anger live?
When someone has learned to relate to others by functioning through the people-pleasing response, it can feel wrong to engage with anger. Anger has been collapsed for so long that saying no and saying yes when genuinely wanting to do so can feel like reaching for a lost item in the dark. The people pleasing part of you engulfs all of you.
People-pleasing can be accompanied by a very harsh and shaming inner critic.
Whenever there is a compliment. Whenever you might get slightly angry. Whenever you think about pushing back, the inner critic bullies you. This part of you can feel relentless. Many times, this part of the response can occur both before and after interacting with another person. It can have a shaming message of “not good enough” or “stay where you belong.” The impact can be to keep you doing the same thing, repeating the same responses over and over again.
People-pleasing probably gave you some strengths too.
Hang on a moment…did you just write that? Yes, I did. This is a survival response we are talking about. If you take a step back, what has this allowed you to do? Survive. Rather than looking at it with hatred, what if you examined it with compassion? What would you see? If the extremes of this response did not engulf your life, what abilities has it given you? Have you been able to see what others might miss? Become successful in what you do day-to-day? Develop a skill? Parts of this response can offer strengths while you recognize other parts of it no longer serve you.
Your people-pleasing response feels trapped in hurt, criticism, and shame. And you notice you deserve something different: kinder and more nurturing. Developing love and gentleness for this part of you is absolutely possible.
Interested in childhood trauma therapy or therapy for teen anxiety in Connecticut or Virginia?
Alice Zic is a licensed trauma therapist offering online therapy in Connecticut and Virginia. Alice’s specialties include parentification trauma, childhood trauma, and teen anxiety. Through an Internal Family Systems (IFS) approach, Alice supports clients to heal people-pleasing and perfectionism and find their true, authentic selves. Schedule a free consult call to begin working with Alice below: