The Social Anxiety Besties Club chooses a book every couple of months to read and discuss. This month’s book was Please Yourself : how to stop people-pleasing & transform the way you live by Emma Reed Turrell. I finished the book this morning and I thought I’d share some of my thoughts.
As I read this book, I not only saw myself in the descriptions, but also many of the people I love. My children, my parents, my mother in law, friends, etc. We’re all so afraid of upsetting each other that we forget to think of our own feelings.
Turrell describes 4 types of pleasers:
Classic People-pleaser
These pleasers “take pride in their ability to get things right.” They exist to make life better for other people. If you ask a classic pleaser what they want, they will defer to everyone else. My mother in law is this kind of pleaser. She will never choose a restaurant or voice her opinion. If one of my children does something to her and I tell them to stop, she says “it’s okay” and I have to remind her that we don’t like the behavior and that we are trying to teach them how to behave with others. She never wants to rock the boat or tell anyone she doesn’t like something. My daughter seems to be taking on this role as well, deferring to her brother when decisions need to be made because she doesn’t want to cause a problem.
Shadow People-pleaser
“Shadows expect to live in service of other people who occupy the light, those who are seemingly more important and more worthy of the attention.” I don’t see this kind of pleaser in my life that I know of. I think we all have a tendency towards this kind of pleasing at times, but none of us are this type predominantly.
Pacifier People-pleaser
These pleasers tend to please “more out of a fear of getting it wrong than a desire to get it right.” They may have grown up in a family where it didn’t feel safe to upset someone else or maybe another sibling was the “chief boat-rocker.” I believe this is the type of pleasing I do the most. In my family, my parents were constantly fighting, as were my siblings. I felt like I needed to be the peacemaker (and this was reinforced by my parents labeling me as such). And after yesterday’s EMDR session pulling out memories of everyone telling me I needed to be a “good girl” it makes sense that I developed the need to not upset anyone. I also see this in my son and daughter. My son tends to change what he likes based on the friends he is with, turning into a chameleon friend, blending himself into being liked. His biggest fear is that someone might be mad at him, be it family, teachers, or friends.
Resistor People-pleaser
These pleasers would not call themselves pleasers. They feel they can’t please, so they disengage. “They shut off their feelings in order to escape the pain of failure.” In many ways, I believe my father was this type of pleaser at times. He felt like he could never please my mother, so instead he would go behind her back and do things he (I suspect) knew would make her angry. He vacillates between this one and pacifier, never feeling like he can make anyone truly happy.
Turrell goes on to describe the parent-child relationships that cultivate these behaviors. She points out that parents do the best they can with what they have, but that “they can’t give you what they didn’t get themselves or didn’t know to be missing.”
As I read this book a few different things came to mind. One, I recognize the need in myself to work on acknowledging my own feelings and to please myself. Two, I’m doing exactly what my parents (unintentionally) did to me and creating people-pleasing children. Throughout the book my focus took me to the second point more than the first. Probably because I wanted to ignore my own feelings and worry about my children (old habits die hard). I kept asking the question “How do I break the cycle and help them to feel like they don’t have to be people-pleasers themselves?” I realize that I parented them the last 13 years the only way I knew how. I’ve tried to break the cycles as I’ve realized they exist, but worry that the damage has already been done. I found myself frustrated as I read that everything was about helping an adult break through their own people-pleasing tendencies instead of how a parent can help their child (which isn’t the point of the book, but I wanted it just the same).
Towards the end of the book, I found this paragraph, which spoke to me:
If we people-please those around us, we might communicate that this is also what we expect from them. If we accept their people-pleasing in return, we train them to continue putting our needs above their own. As a therapist, or a parent, or perhaps as just a homan, we have a responsibility to model and not martyr. To lead by example and please yourself, and free them to do the same.
I realize that I need to work on my own people-pleasing tendencies to be an example to them, as well as watching how I praise. I want a quick “fix” for my children, but that isn’t possible. I will have to do the work in me. However, I am not the only influence in their life and I know they get a lot of their people-pleasing behavior from both my husband and mother in law.
My husband can be very rigid about behaviour he likes or dislikes in the children. Whereas my mother in law is such a pleaser that they can do no wrong in her eyes (beyond the usual grandparent adoration) and if there’s anything wrong it’s with herself. I don’t have the guts (yet) to talk to either of them about how they are training our children to lose themselves. But I hope that as I work on my own ability to please myself I can not only set the example for my kids and assure them that their feelings are valid and they are loved no matter what those feelings might be, but also muster up the courage to discuss these patterns with my husband and mother in law.
Turrell also pointed out that the recipients of the pleasing are left “with the burden of making every decision” and can be draining. In the very act of people-pleasing, those we try to please may be pushed away. She says that “It’s ultimately a selfish act wrapped up in a selfless bow and that’s a surefire way to piss people off in the end.” I’ve noticed this with my relationships with those that are pleasers. I feel annoyed when my mother in law refuses to make any decisions. I get irritated when my son says he’s sorry when he’s done nothing to be sorry for. And in realizing that their “pleasing” behaviors are anything BUT pleasing to me, should be an impetus to stop my own people-pleasing. The problem is that pleasing has become an unconscious process that needs to be recognized before any changes can be made.
I’m very glad I read this book and realize that I will need to return to its pages often as I work on pleasing myself, which Turrell points out “won’t happen overnight” and recommends “baby steps” towards recovery. She also advises that “things can often feel worse before they feel better” and that it’s important to treat yourself with kindness and compassion, treating yourself even when you don’t feel you “deserve” it because “you need it to kick-start your own cycle of self-pleasing.” She suggests making a list of simple things that give you pleasure (like coffee from a favorite mug, or a song that brings you job) and if you are feeling low, just pick one, even if you don’t feel like doing it. She calls this “[paying] attention to your emotional traffic lights and [demonstrating] to yourself that you [are] important enough to validate your feelings and [are] worthy of your help.”
Are you a people-pleaser? Do you know someone who is? If so, I recommend this book. It may not solve everything overnight (and doesn’t pretend it will), but it will open your eyes to the origins of your people-pleasing and open the door to believing that “you are good enough. In fact, you always were.”
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