Exactly!

Eric

Thanks for taking the time to share your thoughts and experiences.

To answer your question, it’s hard to pinpoint a specific event, but I can certainly pick out two things in my childhood that I’m sure played a big role.

First, having red hair and freckles and looking like I was about 5 years younger than I was made me an easy target for bullying and verbal abuse from other kids. This shattered my self-esteem and left me feeling like I always HAD to win people over, which made me a natural overbearing kid (eg. annoying).

Second, I have a brother but he’s almost 6 years older than me and left for the army at the age of 18 so my adolescence was spent as pretty much an only child. And with both my parents working at their Furniture store full time I had a lot of time to myself.

Being an introvert this wasn’t always bad as I generally played well by myself and found alone time to be a nice escape, but it also left me craving attention and that added to my natural tendency to pine for others attention, which pushed them away.

One other thing I just thought about while typing this out is the fact that I was totally a hyperactive ADHD kid. I had too much energy for my own good. So this, coupled with the other things mentioned above meant that I was just plain annoying much of the time.

The thing that really knocked me out of my people pleasing (initially, though I will always struggle with it), was coming to the Lord (becoming a Christian). This happened after a lot of drug and alcohol abuse (my main form of escape back in those days), when I hit rock bottom. It was there that I found God waiting for me with open arms and it was at that moment that I stopped caring so much about what people thought of me.

Now, having said this, it still took over a decade to get to the point where I could write this blog post and pinpoint so much of the details of my “disease”. And even to this day I struggle, just in a more “recovering” kind of way.

On a side note, after reading your comment one thing that came to mind was the fact that as people pleasers, one of our greatest dilemmas we face is the impossible situation where we want people’s respect, but by bending over backwards for everybody we lose it left and right.

In other words, we act in a way that actually lessens our respectfulness, because we want to be respected. Being liked is more often mentioned, but deep down inside it’s respect that we crave and that’s just not achievable when we never say no to someone or always act as the pursuer of attention.

I’m glad you’re becoming so aware of your People Pleasing this early on in your life. The first step to stopping this insanity is being aware of it while it’s happening.

You said this:

“I guess, what I’d like most is to become a stronger, more self-reliant person. A person who will stop a lifetime of misplaced convictions out of a fear that if he doesn’t, he will continue to suffer disappointment after disappointment.”

That’s spot on and I hope you are able to achieve that! There’s nothing worse than waking up well into your adulthood and finding that you’ve wasted many years of life doing what you “think” others want you to do or who you “think” they want you to be.

Eric

I know I haven’t responded in a while. I’ve been busy with work and family, but I just wanted to say thanks for all the feedback and I’m glad to know that this post is still finding its way to the right people and resonating as much now as it did when I first wrote it.

Eric

So, like others here, I googled people pleasing, under the search ‘I don’t know who I am without falling into my old people pleasing habits’.. I came across your article and found it unbelievably relevant, painful, and inspiring. Never had I thought of people pleasing as a ‘debilitating addiction’ or ‘disease’ like the ones you’d find people discussing in the rooms of AA, but as simply a bad habit, like being chronically late, that could be remedied with a little effort.

Now, though, I’m realizing the painfully real implications of this flawed mode of thinking and feeling. I’m a 21 year old college student about to enter his final year as a psychology major. I’ve always needed the approval/acceptance of my peers – above that even of my family – and, looking back, have made the majority of my life choices based on what they ‘d think of me.

Fear of being rejected, of being talked about, and, most of all, of being alone, have constantly driven me to being too agreeable, to dropping all of my priorities in hopes of being with/pleasing a particular person. And, like you, I’ve used my productivity in college as a buffer for my self-esteem, and as a way to soothe the usual discomfort I felt while alone. Yet, if after a day’s hard work, I called a girl, or a ‘friend’ of mine and he/she didn’t answer, I’d be crushed.

That’s my great personal dilemma: I’m so afraid of what people will think of me if I let my guard down, that I constantly revert to people pleasing through entertaining others. And, though, in my mind, I wasn’t ‘found out’ and felt glimpses of happiness in those moments while with them, I always left wondering the same thing – why doesn’t she call me if I make her laugh so much? I’m smart, I’m good-looking, she says she enjoys my company, so why? Why do I always have to call others first, why don’t people come to me for emotional support. I fell for that girl in college, and, ultimately, she couldn’t commit because I wasn’t emotionally stable enough. And now I know why.

I used to be an extremely open person, and am still very honest, but have been disappointed too many times to risk another painful separation. I guess, what I’d like most is to become a stronger, more self-reliant person. A person who will stop a lifetime of misplaced convictions out of a fear that if he doesn’t, he will continue to suffer disappointment after disappointment.

I never before wanted to look at myself, and so used others as a kind of biased reflection, but now feel I finally have the wherewithal and drive to change, and feel extremely fortunate to have come across your article.

And finally, was there a significant event or part of your upbringing that led you to fall in the habit of people pleasing, Eric? I ask simply because I think many people with low esteem like people pleasers come from broken, conflicted, or partially absent families.

Thanks for the article. It really resonated…