The Dark Side of People Pleasing: From Humble Brags to Manipulation
Who is it really for?
Hi, my name is Andie, and I am a recovering people pleaser. My emails used to be so riddled with exclamation points and smiley faces that you could practically hear my voice cracking through the text. In job interviews, my favorite question was, “What are your biggest weaknesses?” because I had an iron-clad response: “I say yes to too many things and sometimes struggle to have a work-life balance.” It is the humblest of brags—your biggest flaw is working too hard? Okay, teacher’s pet. I disgusted myself, but the fear of being unlikable was far more intimidating. I often harbored jealousy for bold and unapologetic types—they might be self-involved, but at least their needs were always legible. At the other end of the spectrum, I was nervous, indecisive, and always fearful that my choices would displease the crowd. I may have appeared outwardly calm, even sociable, but internally, I felt like a greyhound on the Fourth of July.
During the summer I turned eighteen, I started seeing my first therapist. She was sweet, patient, but most importantly, she always called me on my bullshit. As I got her up to speed on my as-yet-undiagnosed anxiety disorder, I regaled her with my trivial social fears: “I don’t believe people are telling me the truth. I’m afraid they just say what I want to hear, that they secretly resent me.” She prompted, “Do you have any reason to believe people are lying to you?” I was annoyed, “Well, no. But that’s why people lie, so you don’t know what they’re actually thinking.” She paused for a long time; in retrospect, I realize she was trying to put this to me delicately, “Well, do you ever lie to people?” I asked her to elaborate. She answered, “Do you tell people what you think they want to hear? Even when you don’t believe it? And does that make you start to resent that person?” My jaw physically dropped. “So you’re saying I’m paranoid because I lie to people, then I secretly resent them?” She answered, “Maybe if you didn’t do that anymore, you wouldn’t be so paranoid that it’s happening to you.” My gob was smacked.
It took me a while to digest what she’d said. Wasn’t it virtuous to put others’ needs first? Isn’t it compassionate to keep your unflattering opinions to yourself and say what will make someone feel better? Sure, I go along with plans I don’t want to, but I’m easygoing! Selfless! A martyr even! And quietly resenting people was my secret little treat for putting up with them. How did I become this way? Perhaps my parents’ Germanic severity had me a little too eager to win validation. And growing up unpopular with headgear, I learned some tactics to ingratiate myself with other people. All grown up now without headgear or the social warfare of recess, and with a generally healthy social life, why was I still holding on to the extreme people pleasing? As a woman, sometimes your safety depends on your ability to diffuse male aggression; we are all familiar with fight or flight, but did you know “fawn” is also an option? Look it up. Yes, my “fawning” still mattered in terms of survival, but why was I still holding on to that habit in the doldrums and small talk of everyday life? According to my therapist, it was not only unnecessary but self-sabotage.
After that therapy session, I saw my fears manifest in the crystal-clear, 4K projection of what I was doing to other people, and finally saw my people-pleasing for what it was: a subtle form of self-serving manipulation. I was trying to control others’ perceptions of me by presenting an abridged and distorted version of my personality. I could fool myself into thinking “kindness” was at its core, but something murky was lying just below the surface. Was I a pathological liar? No, but I certainly wasn’t telling the capital-T truth. Instead, I was clinging onto people pleasing as a way to micromanage others’ perceptions of me, a manipulation tactic that maybe worked for sociopaths, but for me, was a small high not wholly outweighed by the side effects. I wasn’t letting go of this need to control my image, but I was now resenting others for ignoring my uncommunicated needs. I wasn’t people pleasing for the proverbial people: I was doing it out of my desire for a comfortable state of control, thinly veiled in a “goodie-two-shoes” brand of martyrdom.
While it feels kosher to be hard on myself for my simp-like proclivities, I wanted to consult a credentialed therapist to paint a more sympathetic portrait of a people pleaser. When asking Aaron Hui, MFT, what circumstances create people-pleasing personalities, he answered, “It could be a bit of a nature vs. nurture conversation, where a person could have a predisposition to this kind of personality structure, or it was a response to their environment growing up.” When asked what kind of environments can foster that behavior, he explained, “Some examples I can think of are narcissistic or emotionally overwhelming parents, parents that felt unsafe to the child, or parents that caused physical/sexual/emotional harm or abuse. In response to some of these kinds of parenting, we can use the aforementioned logic and say that the child is trying to protect themselves by pleasing the parent so the parent doesn’t get angry, hurt, or abandon them. It is a fight for survival.” Hui clarifies that, while extreme environments can create this behavioral response, “there's a spectrum of causes and triggers that push people to feel like they need to please people to move towards their benefit.”
I asked Hui if he thought there were any long-term detrimental effects of being a people pleaser. He explained, “With many defensive structures, if we rely on one kind of mechanism for too long, it basically pigeonholes you into always falling into the same social/relational dynamics over and over again. This can get tricky if the people pleaser is trying to get to a certain outcome, but only knows how to people please, and so the only outcome becomes a continuous feedback loop of people pleasing.” Ready to die on my own sword, I asked him if he found people pleasing to be a form of manipulative behavior. He answers, “If someone feels overly nice, I always think, who is this for? Is it for the people pleaser to feel better about themselves? To feel like they’re nice and therefore won’t be a target of ridicule or accusations? Do they need something from you later? Or do they have an overwhelming feeling of inadequacy and low self-esteem, and this is their way of managing those feelings? I think it can sometimes come down to the underlying motive, which can be hard to pinpoint as we get into the unconscious.”
It appears people pleasing exists on a nebulous spectrum—it can result from conditioned self-protection, a compulsive feedback loop, or simply a desire to control the outcome. Whether the instinct is rooted in trauma, fear, or ego, it is undeniable that it can eventually become detrimental to both the people pleaser and pleasee long-term. To advocate for the pleasee, a good friend will always prefer the truth over a yes man, especially a yes man that harbors a growing resentment. Unless you are dealing with a narcissist or someone suffering from an excess of “main character syndrome,” people worth having in your life should care if your needs are genuinely being met. To the people pleaser, I can tell you firsthand that when you loosen your grip on micromanaging the way people feel about you, you’re leaving space for trust to develop. In the long run, trust is a far more powerful way to connect to people. When you are motivated by the desire to be liked, relationships become transactional. Approval, not empathy, becomes the currency.
If you, like me, are a recovering people pleaser, it’s time to practice letting go. Use 80% less exclamation points in your emails. Stop agreeing to pick people up from LAX. Don’t answer Slack after 6 p.m.. Your people-pleasing tendencies were likely developed to protect you from whatever volatile, neglectful, or unpredictable situation you faced in your younger years, but you break those patterns with a little self-compassion. If you don’t want to become a burnt-out husk of resentments, validate your own opinions by sharing them with other people. It’s not up to you to decide what truths other people can and cannot handle. If people don’t like you for your authentic self, why waste your precious time playing second-fiddle to their desires? In the words of the ever-quotable RuPaul, “What other people think of you is none of your business.”