People pleasing…why do we do it…and what might be the impacts to your relationship?

People pleasing comes from our way of learning to be loved as a child, usually born out of a trauma response. Our trauma responses are unconscious decisions we make in a moment of non-safety…and this can be on the micro or the macro…a major event or in a time we perceived threat ..which includes the real or perceived lack of love from a parent or care giver….to our very sensitive nervous system. 

We have 4 threat responses….Fight…which is where we fight back either in words or actions against the threat….Flight…where will flee the threat…this can be physically leaving…which is generally hard for a child to do. Or we might emotionally or psychologically flee, either by shutting down or distracting ourselves. Freeze..like a deer in the headlights which, towards it’s extreme becomes disassociation…where we leave our body and are no longer aware of what is going on. The forth threat response is Fawning…where by we try to placate the threat or person by doing whatever it is we perceive the other wants…to make friends with as a way of lessening the possibility of harm….It is this response that leads us to be a people pleaser. 

In a moment of threat we make a choice and it works, the next time we are faced with threat we do the same thing and it works and so we go building a rather robust way of responding to threat. However, when we continue with these same threat responses into adult hood, when the threats are not necessarily as threatening although our nervous system is perceiving them to be, that we can run into problems. Fawning/ people pleasing in particular sets us up to not recognise or voice our needs, or indeed feel that there is any  place for us to have them. However, we all have needs which are healthy and necessary for us to navigate life and indeed adult relationships. With all our focus on pleasing the other, not even recognising that we have needs, we set ourselves up for frustration and resentment, when our needs have no air or space to be seen, heard or met.

People pleasers notoriously lack boundaries and this is the first and sometimes the hardest part of growth out from under a lifetime of being a people pleaser. Through recognising ourselves in this we can begin the process of reclaiming ourselves, owning and valuing our needs and to finding our voice to speak them.