02/7Emotional neglect can lead to people-pleasing Taking to Instagram, she explains, "When children are emotionally neglected, they unconsciously abandon their sense of self in order to maintain their relationship with the parent figure."
Teaching children emotional intelligence begins with allowing them to feel the full spectrum of emotions. One of the reasons people engage in people-pleasing behaviors is because they don't know how to regulate their own uncomfortable feelings in reaction to conflict or another person being upset.
Fawning or people-pleasing can often be traced back to an event or series of events that caused a person to experience PTSD, more specifically Complex PTSD, or C-PTSD.
People-pleasing is associated with a personality trait known as "sociotropy," or feeling overly concerned with pleasing others and earning their approval as a way to maintain relationships. 2 This behavior can be a symptom of a mental health condition like:3. Anxiety or depression4. Avoidant personality disorder.
People-pleasing often comes from a place of low self-esteem, low self-worth, fear of rejection, or lapses in confidence. These all feed into negative emotions—especially in the workplace (and even more so in a new job!) —that makes it feel like you're constantly risking disappointing others.
Many people with borderline personality disorder (BPD) become huge people pleasers because they want to be loved and needed by everyone they come into contact with. This kind of behavior ends up taking a terrible toll on a person.
Children of narcissistic families end up as people-pleasers
In this book, Golomb notes that one of the effects of growing up in a narcissistic environment is reaching adulthood as a people-pleaser. Narcissistic parents always put their needs before their children's.
A fourth, less discussed, response to trauma is called fawning, or people-pleasing. The fawn response is a coping mechanism in which individuals develop people-pleasing behaviors to avoid conflict, pacify their abusers, and create a sense of safety.
Being a people-pleaser is a double-edged sword—there's guilt if you say no, resentment if you say yes. But according to Sasha Heinz, PhD, a developmental psychologist and life coach, there's another price to people-pleasing: It's a form of manipulation. This doesn't mean we shouldn't be nice and helpful and friendly.
People pleasers often deal with low self-esteem and draw their self-worth from the approval of others. “I am only worthy of love if I give everything to someone else” is one common belief associated with people-pleasing, Myers says.
People-pleasers are often extremely empathic and attuned to others' needs. A people-pleaser therefore tends to pursue intimate, affectionate, and confiding relationships. These people have a strong desire for external validation and avoid, or are sensitive to, situations where conflict may arise.
“People-pleasing” only gets adopted when people have not had the interpersonal experience of feeling safe to disagree with others. As such, “people pleasing” is not a character trait or defect but a measure of how safe it was to assert oneself in relationship to early caregivers.
People Pleasers spend so much time and effort in taking care of others. Unfortunately, they often do not establish good social support for themselves. They also find it hard to give up control and let other people take care of them. While taking care of others in noble and rewarding, it can also be toxic and unhealthy.
Of the three types of attachment (secure, anxious, and avoidant), people-pleasers who try to earn love through self-sacrifice often tend to have an anxious or avoidant (insecure) attachment style.
A people pleaser is typically someone everyone considers helpful and kind. When you need help with a project or someone to help you study for an exam, they're more than willing to step up. If you recognize yourself in the above description, you may be a people pleaser.
A 2016 study revealed that people-pleasers — or those prone to excessively agreeing with others — did so as a defense mechanism to avoid mental stress. The interesting thing about this, though, is that the repercussions of this behavior can lead to just that.
People Pleasing as a Form of Control
People pleasing is tricky because you think you're being a giver, but really it's a form of manipulation. Yep, manipulation because you're trying to get something in return. You're attached to (and trying to control) the outcome. And you may not even know you're doing it!
It involves continuously changing the way you act or speak for the sake of another person's feelings or reactions. Melbourne-based clinical psychologist Jacqueline Baulch, says people pleasing often emerges from childhood and it's "more than just being a nice person".
'People-pleasers' are often looked down on as kiss-ups, or for their constant need for approval. But it turns out that people-pleasing is an instinct common to all human beings — some just lean into it more than others. “Our need to please is actually more of a need to belong.
People-pleasers are often taken advantage of as a result of their “other-focused” mindset. If you're constantly worried about the comfort, welfare, and success of others, then you begin to neglect your own. There's also a sense of desperation in this, or a least what others assume to be desperation.
Although people pleasers and narcissists are opposites in a relationship, the one thing they may share is a plethora of early experiences with a caregiver who was unable to cope with their emotions.
Callous and lack of empathy. Tendency towards risk-taking. Aggressiveness. Impulsivity.
Being a people-pleaser is an extremely stressful and frequently painful way to live. Because no matter how much they give to others they don't ever get what they are truly seeking. The real solution comes from within. As a result, people-pleasers frequently suffer from depression, stress and anxiety.