Stop People Pleasing: And Find Your Power - Hardcover

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Hailey Magee is a certified life coach who helps people around the world stop people pleasing and find their power. Her refreshingly nuanced perspectives on boundary-setting and self-advocacy have captured the attention of millions on social media, and her public talks and virtual workshops have welcomed tens of thousands of participants. Certified by Erickson Coaching International, Hailey is dedicated to offering clear, research-supported strategies for change, helping recovering people pleasers rediscover not only their power and agency, but their pleasure, joy, and sense of wonder. She lives in Seattle, Washington. You can find her at HaileyMagee.com or on Instagram at @HaileyPaigeMagee.

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Chapter 1: People-Pleasing: What It Is, Where It Comes From, and Why We’re Leaving It Behind

1 PEOPLE-PLEASING: WHAT IT IS, WHERE IT COMES FROM, AND WHY WE’RE LEAVING IT BEHIND

People-pleasing is the act of chronically prioritizing others’ needs, wants, and feelings at the expense of our own needs, wants, and feelings. As people-pleasers, we struggle to speak up for ourselves in our relationships. We give past our limits to be liked by others; have immense difficulty setting boundaries; struggle to identify and leave toxic environments; and become involved in many one-sided relationships that are all give and no take. Often, we feel defined by how helpful, useful, and supportive we can be to other people.

Though people-pleasing manifests in our relationships with others, it stems from a disconnected relationship with ourselves. You might think of it as a form of self-abandonment. Even in the absence of others, many of us avoid tending to our basic needs; discount our own emotions; feel uncomfortable in our own company; and become disconnected from play, creativity, wonder, joy, and delight. Cut off from a sense of self-worth, we may engage in perfectionism, self-shaming, and self-judgment; struggle with distress tolerance, self-soothing, and emotional regulation; or even engage in compulsions or addictions to avoid feeling our emotions.

People-pleasing is a pattern of behavior, not a mental illness or diagnosis. For most, it isn’t a conscious choice moment to moment, but an ingrained way of interacting with others that was instilled in childhood. In this chapter, we’ll explore where the people-pleasing pattern comes from; how it affects our relationships; what differentiates it from kindness; and how we can use this knowledge to begin to break the pattern.

FOUR PORTRAITS OF PEOPLE-PLEASING

The people-pleasing pattern affects people of all genders, ages, ethnicities, and income brackets, but it doesn’t manifest the same way for everyone. Some feel completely confident and authentic at work, but become passive in their romantic relationships. Others have no trouble speaking up for themselves with friends, but struggle to set boundaries with family members. Still others feel that people-pleasing colors every area of their lives: work, romance, friends, family, and community.

People-pleasing can look like:

Tanya

Tanya, forty-five, is a corporate lawyer in New York City. She is fierce and uncompromising in the courtroom, but in her personal relationships, she feels inconsequential and powerless. She resentfully subsidizes her unemployed partner’s expenses while he seeks work at a snail’s pace. Each weekend she travels upstate for a long visit with her recently widowed mother, whom she describes as “narcissistic and overbearing.” She has a couple of casual friends in the city, but their coffee dates quickly turn into therapy sessions when her friends dump their personal problems into her lap—and show no curiosity in return.

A sense of obligation and resentment pervades all of Tanya’s relationships. She over-gives and under-receives in every single one of them, but she doesn’t know how to shift this dynamic.

Aaron

Aaron, thirty-five, is engaged to be married, but family complications are threatening his engagement. His father died when he was a child, and ever since, Aaron has been very close to his mother, Jada. Whenever Jada needs anything, he’s there in a flash to provide it. She calls him multiple times a day to chitchat about everything from the weather to the recent football game. Even when Aaron and his fiancée, Issa, are on dates, he steps away to take phone calls from his mother.

He feels smothered by his mother’s insistent presence, and even Issa has expressed hesitation about becoming the third wheel to Aaron and Jada’s enmeshed relationship. But ever since his father died, he has felt responsible for his mother’s emotional well-being. He wants to create space, but he doesn’t know how—and he’s terrified of hurting her feelings.

Lena

Lena, twenty-nine, was born into an Orthodox Jewish family. As she’s gotten older, she’s become uncomfortable with certain aspects of her faith—particularly its rigid gender roles—and after many months of reckoning, she decides that she can no longer participate in the religion and disaffiliates.

Newly uninvolved in the Orthodox community, she notices how much her upbringing has prevented her from finding and using her own voice. In social situations, she always defers to the men in the group; in conflicts with friends, she immediately becomes passive and accommodating. Without a religious community to guide her, she has no idea what she wants, what her dreams are, or who she is. Lena wants to follow her inner compass, but she doesn’t know where to find it.

Zoe

Zoe, a nonbinary twenty-four-year-old, is a lively, talkative graduate student in a theater program. Zoe makes friends effortlessly; their social calendar is always filled with coffee dates, happy hours, and weekend adventures. But despite their many friends, Zoe feels disconnected and fundamentally unseen.

At a young age, Zoe learned that being permanently cheerful was a surefire strategy to get attention from their distant parents, so they use the same method now to make friends in adulthood. Zoe is always bubbly and agreeable, and though they make fast friends, those friendships never deepen; Zoe never shares when they’re going through a difficult time, and never asks anyone for support. They crave connection and wish to be seen and known—but their people-pleasing prevents them from building intimate friendships.

Tanya, Aaron, Lena, and Zoe may have different backgrounds, but they share the struggle to speak up for themselves and the desire to express themselves authentically in their relationships. All four want to identify and assert their needs, set healthy boundaries, and make decisions based on their own values and priorities.

The first step in breaking the people-pleasing pattern is understanding its origins in our own lives. Doing so helps us develop both self-awareness and self-compassion as we learn how we originally developed this pattern as a coping mechanism to stay safe.

THE ORIGINS OF PEOPLE-PLEASING

We develop the people-pleasing pattern as a way to manage our experience of unsupportive, unsafe, or unpredictable environments. Many of us learn to people-please in childhood in order to get safety or affection from preoccupied, unavailable, or abusive caregivers. For marginalized groups—such as people of color, LGBTQ+ people, or neurodivergent people—people-pleasing can also be a survival strategy to avoid stigma, harassment, or harm.

Trauma

Those who have experienced trauma are more likely to develop the people-pleasing pattern. In 2003, psychotherapist and trauma expert Pete Walker expanded the well-known “fight, flight, or freeze” stress response model to include a fourth addition: fawn. When threatened, a person with the fawn response will try to please, gratify, or accommodate the source of threat instead of fighting back, running away, or shutting down.

The fawn response is particularly common among those who experienced childhood abuse. Walker explains that, in childhood, these people likely...