People Pleasing

 My name is Grim and I'm a recovering people pleaser. For most of my life, I put myself last to make other people happy, self sabotage for approval, and do my damnedest to avoid conflict because I don't believe I'm worthy of love, attention, or happiness. I've sat through conversations, being talked at, because I don't dare to say I don't care about the subject being talked about, or that I find my conversation companion incredibly boring or rude. Only recently I had a meeting with someone and it was more like attending a piece of theatre (albeit a highly repetitive one), because it felt more like other person was monologuing instead of conversing. It's incredibly frustrating and I've lost so much time to this need to fawn and please other people. 

On the other hand, being a people pleaser also means that I'm a manipulator, always doing my best to appear happy and compliant so you won't get angry or upset with me - because that will send me into a spiral of shame and self loathing, fuelled by the belief I'm not good enough and never will be.  

That's a harsh truth, isn't it? An uncomfortable one, too. It's only recently that I've realised that that's what I'm doing. In my head it's framed as being kind, looking after people I care about - or am at least invested in - or not making a fuss. When colleagues put on music (or rather "music") that I hate which I do regularly because there's a track my work colleagues like that I can't stand to the extent it's become a joke in my office, I dive into my headphones to escape rather than kicking up a fuss. I don't listen to the songs I do like on speaker, because I know nobody else will enjoy them - and tell myself I'm being considerate... which I am, but at the same time I'm minimising myself to avoid conflict. My unwillingness to rock the boat makes me unwilling to share. If I'm in a conversation with someone who - like my companion a few months ago - drones on and regularly repeats themself, I tell myself that I'm listening, that they need to let things and the lack of questions about my life is rooted in their own immediate concerns. Similarly, with former partners who rarely if ever asked how my day had been, I convinced myself that it was me being kind when I made a point of asking after theirs. In truth, while there was an element of that, it's also that I was looking for some breadcrumbs and a sign that I was a "good person" because I was fulfilling my social obligation of caring. 

I even put off seeking therapy because I perceived my ex-wife's need as greater, even though she wasn't seeking any help unless I pushed her to do it. (This was when I was young and foolish and thought everybody wanted to get better).

I'm not sure this just affects actions either, but thoughts as well. Perhaps the most extreme case I can think of from my recent past was when I visited my parents the other day. I'm looking into relocating and was talking about where I was thinking of moving to and mentioned Nottingham. My Mum said she'd like it if I lived there because I'd be closer to home... and for a couple of days that felt like it had clinched it - I'd move to Nottingham. It was only after a realisation that in reality I'd go wherever my career took me and that it was my decision to make that the penny dropped. I'm still considering moving to Nottingham, but it's definitely not a done deal!

In common with many people, I learned to minimise myself from an early age. I won't go into details, but I learned early on that I was unacceptable and had to be different to my natural state. I know all children go through that - we call it socialisation and you can see it in part as what Grace Petrie calls "dividing babies into blue and pink" in her song Black Tie. Becoming a people pleaser isn't that though, it's a different process which arises from bullying, abuse, and the undermining of someone's self confidence. Many people link it to wounds carried by the Inner Child; in Internal Family Systems, this is seen as the development of a strong "protector" that responds to others to help keep the Self safe. It's a survival strategy that does nobody any good. Whatever the cause, and however we formulate it, it's still something where we neglect ourselves because we've learned to behave that way. What works at one point in our lives, when we aren't safe and need to perform that action, becomes a problem later on. 

I don't want to go into the details of my case, but I do remember fearing I'd never meet anyone and having a belief that I would never be good enough. Having seen my parents' relationship, I also believed that one person had to suffer so the other could prosper, and I hated my father so... well, you do the maths. When I did meet someone, I hid parts of myself, let things slide because of the many reasons I had to not be noticed or cared about (some of them based on how I viewed my childhood, some of them based on how I viewed my biological sex, and some of them . I gave and gave until I had nothing left, because I believed - especially later on - that that would earn me love. 

Spoiler, that didn't happen, in fact it probably managed the reverse. 

I think that's what's so insidious about people pleasing, you're not even manipulating people because you'll get a big pay out. Your charlatanism is purely so somebody will accept you because you fear that otherwise the thing everybody else has will slip past and you'll be left out. You're not the team from Leverage, or Mr Wednesday from American Gods, you're more like a bird taking the seed nobody else wants, because in your head you don't deserve the better seed. There is no grand design, and you're literally demeaning yourself and manipulating the people you claim to love for a few scraps from their table. As a result, you end up doing loads of things that you don't want to, resenting every moment but unable to help yourself. 

I guess the turning point for me was two years ago, and at first it had nothing to do with identifying I wanted to stop being a people pleaser. Instead, I was living on my own for the first time since the mid 1990s, and that meant I had to start listening to what I wanted, and thinking about myself. It meant I wasn't living around other people, arranging my life so the bits where I was being authentically myself were hidden away between performances of the Incredible Shrinking Person. I got the chance to breathe, and reflect. The fear that I would never find anyone persisted however and I very briefly saw someone over the Christmas of 2021. When we split up at the end of January 2022, I vowed I didn't want to date another person who wasn't seeking help for their past trauma, because everyone I'd been involved with was wounded in someway. A few other things happened and I moved to the thing I'd been wanting to do for years: face to face therapy. 

The thing is I knew I had this tendency, but not how deeply it ran. I knew - particularly from my marriage - how much I put myself last. I knew I had to address the people pleasing tendencies within me and I thought I was doing that. It wasn't until the first stage of my autism assessment this week that I realised that I'm potentially people pleasing at work too, and I'm finding it quite hard to cope with. Partly because it's led me to ask myself if what I'd taken for politeness and kindness is actually people pleasing. What's worse is that I'm also asking myself if I share too much information in an effort to be liked and veer between oversharing and not sharing at all. I honestly don't know but it feels like everything's up in the air and I'm struggling to find a good balance.