A friend of mine has just started therapy for being “a people-pleaser.”
This does not please me.
Why? Well, let’s take a moment to think about what being “a people-pleaser” means. It means you want to please people. Or, to put it another way, it means you want people to be happy and that if it is in your power to contribute to them advancing towards this fine state, you will do so.
Why, then, has it become a faintly pejorative term? Why should, in the name of all that’s holy, you need to be therapised out of it? It is because, quite simply, so many other people are not people pleasers. They are – and I’m sorry to spout technical jargon here, but I hope you’ll try and stay with me – shitbags, out for what they can get, who move through life taking more than they give and sitting on their massed hordes of other folks’ time, energy, goodwill and unspecified further rare and precious resources like particularly smug and malevolent dragons.
These are the individuals who love nothing more than to come across someone who, as the therapist put it in my friend’s first session, “has difficulty establishing boundaries.” Of course they do. Because where there are no boundaries, it is easier to plunder and to colonise.
I have seen it happen to her and to other friends time and time again. It happens in personal contexts, whereby romantic partners (men, usually, though not exclusively) become parasitic and end up living comfortably in the PP’s home and off her income.
It happens in professional contexts, whereby employers keep adding responsibilities and enlarging the scope of the office PP’s job until she’s working round the clock for no more money (or even recognition) until she is on the edge of a nervous breakdown. When, of course, she will be replaced without a second thought, usually by another PP so the whole sorry cycle can begin again.
None of this is something that should happen to people who only want other people to be happy. The people who should be being flung into a therapist’s office (at best – if I had my druthers it would be a straw-lined cell with a freezing hose turned on them at irregular intervals) are the shitbags. That’s where the problem lies. But with tedious predictability, we have chosen to attack the problem from the wrong but easier end and go after those who are – if you look at it clearly and rationally – the victims, not the perpetrators.
I can say all this of course because I am not a people pleaser. I used to be, when I was younger. I absorbed unquestioningly all the messages society gives girls and young women to think of others, put their needs before your own (such excellent practice for being a good wife and mother later on!), efface yourself, keep small, keep quiet, be kind – as long as it’s never to yourself.
Unfortunately (for others), as I got older this proved to be very much learned rather than innate behaviour for me – nurture rather than nature – and by the time I hit 30 I had largely shucked off the lessons society and several unrewarding boyfriends would have liked me to learn. I decided that I was at least as important as a shitbag and wouldn’t let them circumscribe my life anymore.
Call it what you like: a splinter of ice in the heart, a streak of steel in the soul or an ineradicable ball of selfishness at my core, but that is what saved me from countless intrusions on my self (nor on my time, nor into my flat which no-one else was going to share again without paying the proper amount of rent and apportioned bills. Jesus.) I started saying yes when appropriate and no when necessary and turning my back on anyone who reacted badly to the latter. I have been free, financially sound and surrounded by good people ever since.
I wish this for my friend, and if therapy is the only way to get her there, so be it. But I remain displeased, and thoroughly so, that the responsibility is on her to change. It smacks of victim-blaming and at a time when women are repeatedly being urged not to make a fuss in the face of ever-more swingeing attacks on their rights, it feels increasingly misplaced.
Requiring good, kind people to fight against their natures, to become harder and colder in order to deal with all those who will seek to take advantage of them in their habitual free and open state is the thin end of a wedge that tells women not to dress or drink or dance like that if they don’t want to bring trouble down on themselves, and then that if they do they have only themselves to blame.
Yes, there are practical measures we should all take to survive the current arrangement of society. But the messaging in a broader sense and working on a grander timescale is important too, and that messaging is all wrong. The message should be: it’s not You, it’s Them. And the movement should be towards a world that re-educates Them. You – yes, You – are absolutely fine as You are.
