(read time: 4 minutes)

In the therapy office, it seems like darn near every week I end up trying to convince someone to care about themselves, and investigating the deeper reasons they aren’t able to. So many of my clients have become what pop psychology would label “people pleasers” – people who suffer greatly because they take on far too much from others, agree with things they find disagreeable, attend social gatherings they don’t want to be at, and generally say “Yes” when they really mean “No”.

To move past people pleasing, we first have to see why it isn’t the right thing to do. Sure, we want to be helpful and supportive to others because we want them to be happy and not suffer. But, in our attempts to help, we should aim to lessen the overall amount of suffering, not simply move the suffering from another person to ourselves. It’s wrong to move the suffering to ourselves because each of us is equally worthy of compassion as everyone else! This gets to the idea of being “wisely selfish” – not placing ourselves above others, but also not placing ourselves below others. Other times, people pleasing behaviors venture awfully close to enabling, leading to others becoming dependent and less functional, capable, and responsible than they otherwise could be. In these cases, continuing to enable them is straight up bad for them, and therefore the wrong thing to do.

Now that we can see why it doesn’t work, we next have to see why we are people pleasing in the first place – what emotions might be fueling the behaviors. Often, people pleasing behaviors can be a result of various attachment traumas we suffered as children. When we aren’t taken good care of by others, we can fall into various patterns of behavior in an attempt to get our needs met, and caregiving is one such pattern.  The basic attitude is one of, “I’ll sacrifice and take really good care of you and your needs, and then you’ll do the same for me.” Inevitably, the other person – who had no idea they were entering into such a contract – fails to deliver on their end of the “agreement,” often leaving the people pleaser hurt and resentful.  When our people pleasing behaviors become enabling of bad behaviors in others, we need to look deeply at why we want others to be dependent on us. Are we fundamentally afraid of being abandoned by that person, is that why we can’t say “No”? Does being needed give us a sense of value and purpose that would otherwise be missing in our lives? Lastly, maybe it’s just that saying “No” is hard and uncomfortable.  If that’s the case, don’t say it! Let the other person down easy by agreeing to something far less than is being requested. Learn to say, “Well, I can’t do that, but here’s what I can do.”

I’m not saying we should never sacrifice for others, far from it. I’m saying we shouldn’t agree to do things that deplete our resources and cause us to suffer to the point where we are frustrated, angry, and hurt – because at that point you are no good to anyone, including yourself. Taking good care of others requires that you take good care of yourself so you have the emotional and physical energy you need to be there for others when they need you. That requires setting healthy boundaries and enforcing them. Saying “No” to others can mean saying “Yes” to yourself and your needs, which are just as valid.