The Origins Of People-Pleasing

A lot of people I work with call themselves “people pleasers”. On the surface, pleasing people sounds great, but it can become a problem when we go out of our way to do so, ignoring our own needs in the process. We might feel sheepish or frustrated by this tendency, but at the same time, we often feel like we can’t help it.

What is “people-pleasing”?
People-pleasing can be described as a feeling of heightened responsibility for others, one that blurs the boundary between our ourselves and other people. We might instinctively try to take care of other people’s needs at all times, to the detriment of our own. This sort of responsibility gives rise to shame and anxiety: when we feel unable to please everybody, we feel like a failure, like something terrible might happen to us.

In reality there’s nothing wrong with being unable to meet someone’s needs, and vice versa. Just as we can’t be happy all the time, we’re bound to experience disappointment at some point in life. So why might our hearts race, palms sweat, and stomachs churn when we think we’ve let someone down?

Where does people-pleasing come from?
These unpleasant physiological reactions take us back to an earlier time in our lives, when we needed to be acutely aware of other people’s feelings to cope in an unpredictable environment. This unpredictability isn’t just limited to households of high conflict, abuse or violence. As children, when our caregivers cannot consistently regulate their own emotions, be they frustration, anger or sadness, we’re not going to get the help we need to regulate our own, rendering life unstable for our young nervous systems.

Without co-regulation (the process of understanding and feeling our emotions with the support of people around us), we’re left to make sense of our feelings alone. Unable to fully grasp what’s going on around us, we end up looking for danger everywhere, and finding it. 

Role-play: how we survive chaotic environments as children
And what might this danger look like? A heated argument between our parents. A scowl. A raised eyebrow; a raised hand. These cues of emotion are rooted in a fear of punishment and catastrophe. When we’re children, our nervous systems interpret a caregiver’s unregulated emotions as threats to our survival, as they signal that our basic needs for stability and care are at stake.

In order not to add fuel to the fire, we may start to play certain roles: The Mediator, to calm the explosiveness of our parents’ fights. The Confidante, to comfort a parent when they’re upset. The Responsible One, to protect a sibling from being scolded by a stressed parent.

“Pleasing” others in these ways once meant keeping danger at bay. Psychologist Salvador Minuchin called this “parentification”, describing the early maturation of children who swapped roles with their parents to become their emotional caretakers. So if we were “parentified” as children, how might this affect us as adults?

Loneliness and perfectionism: the cornerstones of people-pleasing
Recently, a person I work with shared how hard it is to imagine leaving his mother to move in with his long-term partner. His parents divorced when he was just six years old, and his mother raised him on her own, giving up a dream of travelling and exploring the world. The thought of leaving his mother now, after all she’d sacrificed for him, sent him into a tailspin of guilt and confusion.

The same person often panics when his partner initiates check-in conversations about their relationship. Any feedback that comes up in these chats sends his nervous system into overdrive: he withdraws for days, as all hopes of being The Perfect Partner give way to the fear that his partner would leave him.

Together we started to look at the backstory behind the fear, discovering a set of high expectations at work that could be traced back to the person’s childhood. From a young age, he strove to achieve top grades and never get into any trouble at school. Playing the role of The Good Child meant that his mother’s sacrifice of her hopes and dreams wouldn’t have been in vain, a belief reinforced by the praise he received from peers and teachers alike. At the same time, any sign of “failure”, like getting a B on a test, felt devastating.

Healing from people-pleasing: unlocking compassion for our younger selves
Understanding the origins of the person’s people-pleasing history helped us discover how lonely he was growing up: being The Good Child meant denying himself permission to experiment, take risks, and try things that he thought would burden his mother, let alone ask her (or any other adult) for help. By assigning himself the responsibility of protecting his mother’s needs and feelings at all costs, he also waived the right to explore his own. 

Until now it had never occurred to the person that a habit of people-pleasing had made relationships a zero-sum game: sacrifice was all he’d known, and for a long time he had no reassurance that his needs were, in fact, valid. Seeing how these beliefs had formed in his formative years enabled the person to feel sadness and compassion for his younger self, and realise that all this time, he had deserved to play, explore, and make mistakes.

Healing from people-pleasing can be hard work, but it can open up ways of moving through the world with more support and flexibility. If we find ourselves constantly worried about what others think of us and doing all we can not to let others down, it’s likely we’ve taken on people-pleasing roles from an earlier time in our lives.

Co-regulation and the practice of “safe” relating
Naming and disarming roles we played in childhood can help us understand how they serve and don’t serve us today. On the bright side, people-pleasing tendencies can mean being empathetic and caring towards our loved ones, but its shadow side can bring up persistent feelings of shame and guilt that disqualify our efforts. 

Ultimately, people-pleasing undermines the things that keep healthy relationships going: shared responsibility and accountability, respect and collaboration. If we depend wholly on other people’s approval to survive, then we continue to play out the lonely roles from our childhoods, forgoing opportunities to be seen and heard as we are, and to work together with others. 

Over time, if we practice co-regulating with others – tuning in and giving voice to our feelings with openness and curiosity, and allowing others to do the same – our nervous systems will start to recognise that this way of relating to others can be safe. In this way, we stand to foster stronger connections to our needs, and the trust needed not just to survive, but thrive in our relationships.


Image Source: Spracklin Chiropractic