When my editor asked if I was a people-pleaser and if I’d like to review a book on the subject, my instinct was to answer yes. Not because I felt that was the most honest way of responding – I don’t perceive myself as a people-pleaser – but because I wanted to be the sort of writer who was helpful, available, useful, and amenable, which, I guess, is a different way of providing totally the same answer.
Now I reflect, people-pleasing has been an affliction since my school days, the result of social conditioning girls are subjected to, expected to be palatable, pleasant, polite. It also comes from, I think, being the daughter of an extremely hard-working single mother: “Look, Mum, I’m worth all the sacrifice, exhaustion and financial precarity! I’m all the things you hoped I’d be!”
In my day-to-day life I can reel off endless examples of people-pleasing: I will drink cow’s milk in tea even though I’m mildly allergic if someone has made me a tea that way; if I’m in a restaurant with a friend, and the dishes are for sharing, I’ll literally eat whatever they order, pretending I have exactly the same taste; I will agree to a play date at a time that I know is completely inconvenient to my son and I for fear of another mum having to adapt her schedule.
Last week I sat next to a man in a café whose music was blasting out of his phone, not his headphones, as I tried to work – just because I didn’t want to disturb him (his noise was extremely disturbing to me, of course).
According to Dr Kathleen Smith, author of True to You: A Therapist’s Guide to Stop Pleasing Others and Starting Being Yourself, published this week, people-pleasing can be both a blessing and a curse. Our “deep focus on others, the pull towards cooperating and keeping people happy, is one of our greatest evolutionary gifts. It is the glue that binds families, friends, organisations and communities. But sometimes, a superpower can feel like a curse”.
The issue with people-pleasing is that in our extensive focus on others, we forget ourselves. Smith warns that this can lead to four things: “1. You’ll have no energy left to pursue what’s important to you. 2. You’ll become more allergic to any distress in your relationships. 3. You’ll become more responsible for others than for yourself and 4. You’ll abandon your beliefs the second anyone disproves of them”. I could see my reflection in at least two of these.
So how does one learn to stop people-pleasing? Is it something that can be undone? Smith bases her practice on the Bowen family systems theory. Murray Bowen was an American psychiatrist working in the 1950s who “wanted to understand how some families coped better with challenges than others”. He argued that if we understand families as natural systems, built on survival and adaptation rather than dysfunction, we can build better dynamics.
Bowen believed the crux of better relationships was people creating a strong sense of self, or “differentiation”, as he called it; i.e. the ability to stay in contact with others while thinking and acting for one’s self. He believed that the way to do this is by making mature decisions, not acting off emotional reactions.
My attempt to cure my people-pleasing
Right on cue, my mother comes to visit. Smith writes that if we’re anxious about the dynamic of a relationship we will “accommodate, act out or avoid”. At 16, my acting up was off the scale, but these days I’m more practised at accommodating (Yes, sure, whatever works best for you!) or avoiding (I’m fine!). At the moment, I’m particularly guilty of the latter with my mum. As she gets older, I don’t want to worry her. Which is why I haven’t told her about my face.
“Oh, what a shame!” she says when she sees me. I have a mild case of dermatitis around my mouth. “It might be eczema. Have you called the doctor? Have you changed moisturiser, washing powder, the bed sheets?” I feel irritated that although I’m nearly 40 my mum is trying to fix my problems. I’m unable to appreciate her concern. And instead of employing the maturity the Bowen method calls for, I act like a teenager. “Muuummm, I’m fine!” I huff.
Often, people-pleasing comes from a desire to “calm” a situation, Smith writes. Prior to our meeting, I had chosen to keep conversations with my mum calm by not mentioning my skin reaction, fearing she’d assume the flare-up was a sign of stress, prompting even more crisis and questions. I realise now, that if I’d been a bit more grown-up about it, I could have forewarned her, perhaps sending a text to reassure her everything was okay.
“Your relationship with a parent is perhaps the hardest place to bust out of emotional patterns,” Smith writes. She calls these cyclical behaviours Ferris wheels, and one of you needs to jump off if things are going to be better. Reading Smith while watching my mum and I’s interaction play out in real-time underscored how efforts to please her at all costs were seriously backfiring for us both. It was clearly time for me to make the leap.
I’m ashamed to write in a national newspaper that the difficulty of asserting myself as an adult is a running theme when it comes to my relationships. This is no truer than with my partner, E.
Smith would have us down as textbook “overfuctioners” and “underfuctioners”. The clue is in the title, but in short, he overcompensates in our relationship, and I do the opposite. “Marriage can make us spectacularly incapable,” Smith writes, referring to the camp I’m in. “When you don’t exercise certain muscles of responsibility, they begin to atrophy.” I have what Smith calls a “borrowed self” in which I let E take responsibility for most things, essentially be the self for us both. He manages our finances, plans days out, organises the old clothes for the baby bank, replaces the plaster our 19-month-old just tore off the wall – and so much more. Smith would say I’m using him to fill “my maturity gaps.” My mother would tell me to bloody well grow up.
Now this isn’t people-pleasing per se; it’s categorically people-pissing-off, but it’s rooted in the same problem: the loss of self, of differentiation, in a relationship. Smith’s remedy? Ask the following: “How would I like to be responsible today? What’s worth doing even if nobody notices?’ And so for the next few days, I start my day with these questions, writing lists in my iPhone notes. I start to take on more and I’m intrigued to see how being responsible isn’t something I’m “bad” at, like I’d assumed, and indeed offers a feeling of empowerment.
My people-pleasing had gone so far with E that I’d assumed he was best placed to make every decision because he would be better at carrying out tasks, and therefore ultimately be happier. Yet by starting to measure my responsibility, and make decisions about our lives, I’m beginning to redraw my sense of self. E was thrilled when I took over the weekly shop and started researching things to do on our upcoming holiday but the real victory is that I am showing up with my own self, not burrowing in his.
My greatest challenge, however, in asserting a sense of self – and dropping the people-pleasing – is in my career. Can you write 8,000 words by yesterday and we’ll pay you in six months? Sure! No, we still haven’t paid that invoice. No Worries!
Differentiation of the self in a career setting feels particularly precarious because of the imbalance of power. It is my job to please editors and clients. And yet this has led to endless examples of not only financial chaos but feeling worthless, as I internalise the repeated lack of basic decency. Professionally, Smith would say I am bringing my “pseudo-self”, bending myself to the demands of others, and instead I need to learn to become a “solid self” – someone who can speak their mind and live by their values.
Motivated to be a solid self as much for my son as for me, I start by pushing back on a deadline – something I loathe to do, especially as a new mother. I have three unpaid invoices. I figure the mature thing to do would not tiptoe around these individuals but assert my needs without assuming that they would never want to work with me again. I realise that my more assertive – or mature – behaviour only makes me look more professional, not less. By the end of the week, I haven’t had to work until midnight to meet a deadline and while invoices remain unpaid, I feel far more aligned with my values.
As with any change of behaviour, the real test is sustainability but Smith’s prompts are helpful, and pursuing actions in the name of maturity feels pretty watertight.
No one is going to resent you for being emotionally adult. Arguably, for people like me, a loss of self around others isn’t necessarily immature, it can be a survival strategy, as Bowen and Smith would probably agree, and therefore being mature takes courage to let go.
One thing that Smith’s book makes clear is that very few adult relationships, especially familial ones, are straightforward. Her message is more than just a kick up the butt to act like a grown-up; it’s finding ways to trust yourself to be yourself and to believe that it is enough for those around you. And so I text my mum: “Been to the doctor’s. Been prescribed some cream. No need to worry.” I’m finally getting off the Ferris wheel.
Dr Kathleen Smith’s True to You: A Therapist’s Guide is out on 9 July (Macmillan Publishers)
