Picture this: You have a friend who’s moving, and he asks you for help on a Saturday morning when you have plans to do something that you’ve really been looking forward to. You don’t want to hurt your friend’s feelings, so instead of letting him know you’re not available, you say, ‘Yeah, sure. I can help.’”
Why did you do that?
Well, you might be a people pleaser, and your urge to make people happy could be making you sick, says Lizzie Moult, a therapist based in Scotland and author of the upcoming book, “F*** Approval. You Don’t Need It!”
The need to please people is something many of us struggle with, and it goes all the way back to childhood, Moult says. Think about when you were a very small child, and you started to eat with your parents.
“Maybe mum and dad are like, ‘Yeah, go pick up the spoon, get the food in your mouth,’ and they’re applauding you,” she says. “You start picking up these like messages of ‘if I do something right, I’m going to get the response from the people around me,’ and when we want a positive response, we do more of that because we love seeing other people happy.”
But as we get older, Moult says, we start to use people-pleasing to protect ourselves from discomfort.
“We don’t like confrontation, the feeling of being uncomfortable and upsetting somebody is our greatest fear. We will do the thing to make them happy,” she says. “So that ‘yes’ to your friend moving when you’ve really, really been like, ‘I wanted to go to the beach,’ or whatever it was. You say ‘yes,’ because the fear of doing it and letting that person down is far greater. Because that’s the thing. You’re looking at them. You’re not looking at you anymore.”
4 questions with Lizzie Moult
What are the signs that you could be a people-pleaser?
“Generally, it’s saying ‘yes’ to a lot of things that you don’t wanna do. So I’m an overworker. When I was in my 20s, I’d always say ‘yes’ to the extra shift. I’d always say ‘yes’ to covering someone who was off sick because I couldn’t let my boss down. I could never take a sick day.
“That’s a really good sign of a people pleaser. Generally, people pleasers don’t like to share what’s actually happening. So no matter how they’re feeling, they’re always fine. They’re always good. Everything is fine because they’re not listening to themselves.”
How does people-pleasing affect mental health and relationships?
“In relationships, quite often you’re hiding a lot of your own truth because you’re too scared to express it. You don’t want to actually share that, ‘Oh, it’d be really nice to go to the beach today cause it’s gonna be a nice sunny day.’ If I don’t share that with my partner, I’m then starting to become frustrated and resentful because I feel like I can’t share my own truth.
What’s the first thing you can do if you want to stop people-pleasing?
“The first thing I say to every people pleaser is that we need to turn the table around on your awareness. People pleasers are super vigilant. They are constantly, constantly reading, assuming and guessing what other people are doing. What people-pleasers don’t have is the ability to actually experience their own full scope of emotions. You just don’t take notice of it.
“So what I get people to do is — I call it five minutes of mindfulness — to sit somewhere where they have no distractions, no phone, no nothing, and just sit there. Now, it’s probably one of the hardest things you can do, because it’s so not normal. We live in such a busy world, so to sit for 5 minutes in our own self is difficult. But in that, you get to then learn, ‘Oh, how am I actually feeling? How am I responding to the weather today? How am I responding to what I’m just thinking about?’ Because when we’re people-pleasing, we don’t even consider that. We’re just waiting for the smile. We’re waiting for the ‘yes.’ We’re waiting for their reaction, not listening to our own.
“Sitting with yourself for five minutes is a really good start. The reason being is it teaches you about yourself. But then if you wanted to scratch the next layer off, it’s going back to those beliefs that we have. So for example, ‘If I eat everything on my plate, I am a good human,’ because when I was a kid, my parents were like, ‘You have to eat everything,’ and so when I did, it pleased them. So as an adult, I have to reassess those beliefs of, ‘Do I actually need to clear everything off my plate in order to be finished, to be full, to be what?’ Because they’re no longer making the rules for my life. You have to assess each belief that you have.”
What happens when you start to stay no?
“Boundary vampires… So these are the people who don’t take no for an answer. One of the best tricks I give to everybody is to get a one-liner and to stick to it. So for example, a friend asks you to help them move house, and your response should actually be, ‘I can’t. I’m off to the beach.’ So using that classic one-liner could help the boundary vampires because they don’t want to hear your truth over and over again, because they just want you to hurry up and say, ‘yes,’ because that’s what they’re used to you doing. So there’s an adjustment period, and it does take time with some relationships where you start asserting your own beliefs and your own truth as such.”
This interview was edited for clarity.
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Samantha Raphelson produced and edited this interview for broadcast with Catherine Welch. Raphelson also produced it for the web.
This article was originally published on WBUR.org.
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