You might have had an experience like this:
You tell someone no, knowing that they want a yes. But by mid-sentence, you’ve added in a few caveats, a few extra phrases to soften the blow. You can see their face change and you feel a panic setting in, so before you’ve even finished your sentence, before you have even taken a breath, you’ve gone further. You’ve walked it back, and soon you’ve recanted it entirely.
Or, you might have experienced this a few times and now, the possibility of it happening again is too much so you don’t even let it surface. “Do you want Thai this evening?” “Sure, no worries”. You hate Thai.
Or, perhaps these experiences become so instinctive that over time you can no longer imagine what conflict you were trying to avoid. “Do I like Thai food?” “It’s ok.”
Or, perhaps this happens so often, it’s become part of you. You’re easy going, chill. You can’t remember the last time you had an argument. And in all of that, you’ve lost yourself.
If you google ‘how do I stop people pleasing’, Google’s AI summary will say “Practice saying no.” One of the first results on the search page is Oprah.com, which offers “Resist the urge to over explain. Simple phrases like ‘Sorry I can’t this time’ are effective”.
None of this is bad advice, but if you’re on my website, I suspect you’ve tried this already. You might not need more tips and tricks. You might need a bit of understanding. Because you can’t stop people pleasing with techniques. It’s not a bad habit you picked up. It’s a skill you learned because you had to.
Where people pleasing comes from
No one, to the best of my knowledge, is a born people-pleaser. Some babies are easier than others, but all babies cry when they are hungry. All babies cry when they are tired. All babies cry.
And how could they not? To be a baby must be a terrifying experience. You only know the rawness of your body. Your only awareness is what your body needs. You know that you are hungry but you cannot see that your parents are preparing food. You don’t know, as an adult would know, that you will ever eat again, or that you will survive for the 5 minutes it takes your food to be ready. In that moment, you only know an all-encompassing hunger. No wonder you’re crying.
When you were a baby, you had to make your needs known. And make sure they were met. Your survival depended on it.
But somewhere along the way, perhaps your needs were not as well met, and so you got less good at asking for them. Perhaps:
- One sibling, “the rebel”, caused your parents so much stress that you had to be the good child.
- You could see how hard your parents worked, there was no money and even less time, so you knew better than to ask. And you worked just as hard to make sure they were not disappointed.
- Your parent(s) couldn’t look after you, so you had to look after yourself.
- One person in your life, or perhaps several, perhaps as a child or perhaps not, responded to any mention of your needs with aggression and violence. You quickly learned to stop asking.
You were a kid. You needed your family for everything — emotional support, but also the basic stuff like food and shelter. You can only rock the boat if you know it’s not going to capsize. You probably weren’t so sure, so you stayed quiet. You learned that you could rarely ask for what you wanted. Perhaps you learned you couldn’t even need. You might have become likeable, self-sufficient, perfect. Maybe you still are.
Strategies aren’t working
If it was just as simple as saying no, you wouldn’t be reading this. What shifts things, in my experience, is understanding and experience.
I want you to understand the role that people pleasing plays in your life. How it shows up in your day-to-day. How it impacts your relationships and your work. But I also want to understand how it helped you, back in the day. When you had limited tools to ensure your survival, people-pleasing was one of them. So what was going on for you back then? Who was that version of you that learned to be a people-pleaser? What do they need now?
And that takes us to experience. What is it like for you to disappoint someone? What is it like to say no when you know that they want you to say yes. What happens in your body? What thoughts go round and round in your mind? How awful is it to sit with, on a scale of 1 to 10?
I suspect the answer is 11. And that’s ok. It’s the perfect place to start.
In therapy, we’ll spend a lot of time talking about you. The people pleasing, but everything else too. Our relationship will deepen and, sooner or later, those tendencies will creep into our work. You might agree with something I said, even though I got it wrong. You might find yourself being irritated by me, but letting it go unsaid. And then one day, perhaps you will say it. You will tell me I’ve got it wrong, or you’re pissed off with me, or you really hate the way I twiddle my hair.
And when you say it, I will hear it. I won’t storm out the door and I will show up the next week and the week after. And so will you. You will get the experience, the actual lived experience, of showing me your teeth, and realising that I am not going to run away. Our relationship will survive, indeed, it will be stronger for it.
I am not a teacher. I am not a magician. I cannot tell you what to do, nor can I change the circumstances of your life. But what I can do is give you a dress rehearsal. Our relationship is a space to play and experiment with a version of you that you might want to take out into the real world and see what happens. If that sounds like something you’d like, call me. It’s 15 minutes, and it’s free.