People Pleasers Try To Please Everybody But Themselves

Dear Dr. LeCrone:

I’m a people-pleaser. I also want everyone to love me, and I feel that if someone doesn’t like me, then he or she must hate me.

I feel that I must make everyone happy or else I’m a failure. I can rarely ask for help because if I’m helped, I feel obligated to return the favor many times over.

As you might guess, I was raised in a very unhappy family with a total absence of love and respect for each other. Can you help me understand and deal with this problem?

-A reader in Texas

Dear Reader:

Unfortunately, you have a problem that is all too common and is often an impediment to good mental health. People-pleasers often have these characteristics in common.

• They are hypersensitive to the feelings of others and have a frequent belief that if others are unhappy, it must somehow be their fault.

• They possess a strong and unrelenting need for reassurance that they are doing the right thing and not offending anyone else.

• They often have problems making decisions, and experience dilemmas because of their fear of making decisions that would offend someone. Consequently, they are often perceived as tentative and unsure of themselves.

• When faced with the inevitable situations in which their actions have left someone displeased, they suffer from feelings of guilt and despair.

• Their desire to please diverts most of their attention away from themselves and leaves their own emotional needs unattended.

• This strong desire to be liked and to please everyone makes their appraisal of other’s behavior unrealistic and often too forgiving. They then assume that if something goes wrong, it is their fault.

• People-pleasers are often very self-depreciating and have difficulty in accepting compliments.

Changing these unhealthy and unrewarding patterns of behavior is difficult but possible. The problem often comes from long-held feelings and beliefs of inadequacy going back to childhood and adolescence, when the people-pleaser’s attempts to please parents or caregivers were rejected, made conditional or otherwise unobtainable.

Change involves a reappraisal of the basic assumptions about the way people relate to one another, and includes a very strong and consistent effort to attack and reverse irrational and erroneous beliefs.
I will devote my next column to this process of change.