Confessions of a People Pleaser
By: Sarah K Brandis
Tags: Personal Development, Personal Growth, Life Lessons, Codependency, Women

Confessions of a People Pleaser

I want you to like me, but I probably won’t like you for long

Photo by Fillipe Gomes from Pexels

Trigger warning: This post talks about co-dependant relationships between narcissists and people pleasers.

I’ve known for a very long time that I’m a people pleaser. But it is only recently that I’ve been learning about co-dependancy and the correlation with Complex PTSD.

My people pleasing is a maladaptive response to my abusive childhood. And often, the people that I get into the deepest pleasing with have maladaptive traits too. Not the same as mine, but complimentary to mine.

When I meet somebody with narcissistic traits, I change from the most authentic version of myself that I am usually working hard to be. A switch flips in my brain, and I fall into my childhood training.

I’m whoever you want me to be

When the switch is flipped and I engage my people pleasing mode with a new narcissist friend, boss or boyfriend, I become whoever I think they want me to be.

I like the music they like, quickly researching bands behind the scenes. I watch the TV shows they watch. I even share their opinions on politics.

I speed read their Facebook profile for research, and talk about whatever they like, even if it’s of no interest to me. I can keep this facade up for a really long time… Just not forever.

Eventually my mask will slip.

I trained for this

I’m who I think they want me to be, because I don’t believe that anyone will like me for who I really am.

This is not just attention-seeking or fishing for compliments. I was trained from a young age to know that I am unlikeable, unloveable, and generally quite worthless.

According to my training, the best thing I can do is mould myself into what somebody else wants, so that I don’t spend the rest on my life being alone and worthless.

If you’ve read this far, then maybe you were trained the same way.

And if you are like me, then you will no doubt have also felt how our special skills to please get turbo charged around certain people.

The narcissists we meet throughout our lifetime are like us, and not like us, in a confusing yet alluring way.

They have also experienced childhood pain. But unlike us, who internalized our abuse as being our own fault — they externalized it all. Their way of coping was to blame all of their problems on other people.

Sliding doors

A bit like in the movie Sliding Doors, we chose one path or another and that leads us a certain way.

Somebody with narcissistic maladaptive traits grew up unloved and unwanted too, just like us people pleasers did. But at some point their young mind decided that the problem was with everybody else.

Their ego swooped in to protect them from the world, and they convinced themselves that they are better than everyone else. Any hate or resentment they felt from others, must just be jealousy.

On the surface it sounds like kind of a nice delusion to have. But it is maladaptive, and here’s why it isn’t sustainable.

Their sense of self is super fragile. Those grandiose behaviors and that apparent self-belief is a lie. And this lie can fall apart at any time. So nobody can challenge them.

Have you seen a narcissist be challenged? Things get ugly real quick.

Maladaption in action

As a people pleasing partner to a narcissist, I once saw him lose himself after an argument over a parking space. A stranger dared to call him out when he stole her parking space. He went into a rant that lasted for hours, and honestly scared me so much I couldn’t speak.

Objectively, he was totally in the wrong to cut her off and take the space she had queued for. If we had been two healthy, adapted individuals, then this may not have happened in the first place. And if it had, he would have apologised, or I would have had the backbone to tell him he was in the wrong.

But the two of us being maladapted, in opposite ways, only compounded the situation. As he ranted at this other driver out of his car window, I was a statue.

Too afraid to move my head incase I made eye contact with the person who was in the right — I froze.

Flight, fight, freeze or fawn

In his book, Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving, Pete Walker explains the ‘Four Fs’ of maladaptive responses. We have all heard of Flight or Fight, the first two. There is also Freeze and Fawn.

What I didn’t realise until this book broke it down for me, is that these Fs each correspond with a particular set of behaviours.

I recognise myself in 3 of the 4 Fs, and some behaviours that go with them.

Flight can be related to obsessive compulsive tendencies.

Freeze relates often to dissociation.

Fawn relates very strongly to people pleasing and co-dependency.

Fawning is a big one for me. It is said that us ‘Fawners’ will often seek out abuser after abuser in order to keep living in the way that we are used to.

So what of that fourth F? Well that’s Fight, and it relates to narcissism.

When I first read this I nearly fell off my chair. It amazed me to think that the very same abuse I went through as a child could have turned me into the sort of narcissistic person who I let abuse me as an adult.

I don’t know why I followed the path of the other Fs, and not the Fight path of narcissism. But here we are. Perhaps it was just a ‘sliding doors’ moment that made the decision?

It never lasts

The things about people pleasing is that it’s truly exhausting. Pandering to other people in general is an unsustainable way to live. But when you do this classic thing of getting entangled with a narcissist, then you are pandering 24/7.

Even when I was supposed to be asleep, I would be trying to please my partner. I used to try to not move in the bed incase I disturbed him.

I actually did this with two partners in a row. I have no idea how much sleep I lost over the years, trying to be small, still and quiet.

But of course, this kind of effort isn’t sustainable. Soon I become exhausted. And soon after that my exhaustion turns to resentment. I want the other person to like me, to validate me, and to think I’m a good person.

However, once I’m exhausted I begin to externalize my discomfort too. The tiredness I feel from the maladaptive way I live, soon makes me hate the other person.

I stop trying to please and I fall out of ‘love’… Then I start to realize all the awful things about my partner that I had been trying so hard to deny for so long.

It always leaves me with one big, burning question;

“Why does this keep happening to me?”

I feel like the victim for letting yet another narcissist consume so much of my life. But the truth is I was complicit in this happening. For a while at least, I did everything I could to keep this person happy.

A well-adjusted person wouldn’t have tolerated the bad behavior, let alone facilitated it like I did.

The harsh truth will set you free

Here’s the harsh truth. You might not think you want it, but you do need it if you want to set yourself free from the endless conveyor belt of bad relationships.

This keeps happening to us because it is our pattern. I say that as we need to own our side of things. But I don’t say that to let the other person off the hook entirely.

Yes, the other person probably is a ‘bad person’ in some sense of the word. Yes, you can say that they treat others badly. They are often abusers.

And if you are a people pleaser who keeps getting into relationships with these abusers, then yes, you are right in thinking you are magnetised to them. They are seeking you out, because your pleasing compliments their need to be right.

You are the missing piece to their jigsaw puzzle. You help them to maintain their facade of being omnipotent, because you agree with them and tell them they are great…

Until you can’t do it anymore.

It was only when I spotted this pattern for myself, and really let myself accept and understand it, that things started to change.

Your happiness does not lie in the next relationship

It is not simply a matter of finding the next relationship, if you are a people pleaser like me. It is a matter of breaking the pattern, or unlearning your childhood training.

You won’t stop falling in with narcissists if you don’t change what you are putting out there into the world. Those people can sense your need to please from miles away, and it feeds their need so well.

You really do need to do the work on yourself. Do the therapy, read all the books on the topic, and start getting honest with yourself.

Ask your friends to launch an intervention on you if you start dating again before you have done the work to change this.

Stop saying yes when you mean no. Start putting yourself first. Learn who you really are, underneath your maladaptive behaviors. Develop some healthy boundaries.

I’m in recovery

I started my recovery journey 5 years ago, when I left the parking space thief. It wasn’t smooth sailing.

Although I’m now well on my way to living better, I wrote all of the above in the present tense. This is because I am in recovery, and not recovered. And because I will always carry something of this with me.

We probably aren’t born people pleasers. It is likely all nurture. But it is still very deeply engrained in us. Things learned in our formative years are forged in our neural wiring.

The next narcissist I encountered in life didn’t like me for long, as I was learning to flex my honesty muscles.

I said no, I disagreed. I made myself unpopular. In the moment it was easy to think I was doing something wrong. I shouldn’t be upsetting him with my honesty, right? I was trying to be authentic, not mean…

But I was learning that it’s possible to be right in a wrong situation. Just because I was finally ready to try authenticity, didn’t mean that the rest of the world was ready.

There are so many people out there like us — going through life with maladaptive tendencies. When it’s all you know, it’s not easy to change. And in order to change, you first have to be awake to the fact that something is wrong.

If your whole world is built on a lie, then change is a pretty big feat. But it is not impossible.

I don’t want to sound like I’m sympathising too much with the narcissists in the world. I’ve been hurt by them, and that’s pretty much all they do — hurt people.

But as I’m healing and learning about maladaptive personality traits, I’m growing in understanding. For them, for me, and for all of us.

We are all imperfect beings, just trying to feel safe in a complex and uncertain world.

Moving on from people pleasing

In truth, there is no way to make every interaction in your life go well. As much as I desire a quite, happy life, I can’t control other people.

I think that by people pleasing, that’s what I was trying to do.

So you can choose to stay on the path of people pleasing with an unhappy ending. Or you can chose to walk the path of truth, with painful bits and uncertainty all the way.

I’ve been seeing a viral post doing the rounds on Instagram, that says;

“Choose your hard. Marriage is hard, divorce is hard, choose your hard. Overweight is hard, losing weight is hard, choose your hard.”

I think this applies really well here too. Being a people pleaser is hard, and being honest is hard too. Choose your hard.

Certainly, there are lots of us struggling out there. Many of us are maladapted and struggling with our relationships. Many of us abuse, and many will get abused.

But on the path of truth you will find a few genuine, well-adapted people. They are few and far between, and worth their weight in gold.

It is only since I began my recovery from people pleasing that I gained healthy relationships with some of these really good people.

I’m much happier now. And after all that confessing, I feel lighter too.

Sharing is a part of recovery, and so I encourage you to share too, if you are ready. I can’t tell you that the journey ahead will be smooth sailing. In fact, I can pretty much promise you that it won’t be.

But will it be worth it? It was for me.