So, I had an incredibly fucked-up childhood in a toxic abusive environment and never really learned how to people.
When I was younger I was… abrasive, let’s say. Or possibly just an insufferable prick. I would argue with people on the internet a lot and generate a lot of conflict - not from a desire to troll (as many assumed), I was just raised in a test-to-destruction environment where loud table-slapping debate was just how you learned things - kind of cage-match debugging sessions kind of thing.
This didn’t make me many friends, understandably.
Anyway, decades passed and I learned to mellow out a bit, to go along to get along, and to develop some soft skills like y’know, tact, and… compassion for people’s emotional investment in their intellectual position, if that has a name.
Well and good, the people I talk to don’t generally want to strangle me, chalk it up as a win.
But increasingly of late I’ve been hearing disparaging talk of ‘people pleasers’, which as best I can tell seems to refer to people who do all the things I was yelled for not doing half my life: going along to get along, valuing other people’s needs and emotional sore spots, taking a cooperative, defensive-driving kind of approach to social ineraction - and I am confuse.
I lack a proper framework to parse this all intuitively; I had to build my social skillset manually by trial and error, and things obvious to others remain somewhat mysterious to me.
I’m not actually ASD (just ADHD), but my lack-of-intuitive-grasp on certain things presents a similar profile. Can someone give me a longhand explanation of the border between not-an-asshole and people-pleasing?
There’s a nice saying in the community of people who heal from childhood abuse: don’t set yourself on fire to keep others warm. I always found it to be a powerful and succinct way of describing toxic people pleasing.
Are you harming yourself or your own interests (eg: your friendships, your mental health) in order to appease others? If the answer is yes, you have a problem. If the answer is no, it’s a ‘them’ problem.
This is just one perspective, but people-pleasing is when you go overboard with being considerate of others – to the point that you lose yourself. So like the one friend who will say they like all the same things as you, say yes to everything, never disagree, etc. just because they desperately need you to like them. They don’t have boundaries, so even when someone hurts them, they’re like “it’s okay, I don’t mind!” They’re missing a bit of self-respect.
There’s nothing wrong with being kind or considerate of others! It’s really important to have to form deeper relationships. The problem is when seeming ‘nice’ takes the place of your personality or being honest about your real self, because you value other’s validation more. People can sense that and it can put them off because they want to get to know the real person. People-pleasers can play the character that they think others want them to be, instead of putting in the work to like and value themselves and communicate their own needs and boundaries.
“People pleasing” is the sort of neurotic belief that people won’t like or value you if you’re not actively working to make them happy constantly. From the inside, you can manage it by:
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prioritizing self-care (pleasers tend to throw it to the wayside to care for others)
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limiting the people you seek to please (ie family and close friends, or people who reciprocate)
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reminding yourself that no one likes a doormat
But that doesn’t really address the root of the problem, which is externalizing our self-worth.
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Simple. Don’t kiss ass
