To think people pleasing can be very dangerous and can’t be underestimated?

No, you were teaching them that your discomfort at watching another child wait and stare was more important than their desire to continue to play on the swing they had just got on.

That’s classic-people-pleaser territory, the inability to tolerate the discomfort of someone else who is being discommoded by your behaviour.

Only here it wasn’t your own behaviour, it was your child’s.

Your child didn’t mind making the other child wait. It was you who couldn’t tolerate it. The other child wasn’t making a fuss, or you weren’t being harassed by an aggressive parent, it was just that you immediately thought the other child’s need was more important than your child’s.

That’s how children get conditioned into people-pleasing.

The very worst kind of ‘people pleasers’ are those that say yes to things then bitch about it afterwards.

@ZepZep i dint see that as people pleasing. That’s avoidant behaviour - my dh does that. He doesn’t do it so I’m happy. He does it to protect himself and avoid confrontations. (Hence tge moaning afterwards btw)

I find people pleasers are often annoying and I often find that I question their true motivation for trying to please everyone else. Sometimes it seems more about them wanting approval and to be seen as nice than what anyone actually wants. You often have to second guess what ‘people pleasers’ actually want and it just makes things complicated. The very worst kind of ‘people pleasers’ are those that say yes to things then bitch about it afterwards. These are zillions of threads started by posters who fall in this category.

Ive a friend who looks after a neighbours two dogs when they go on holiday and she hates doing it and thinks they are cheeky to ask. However she always says yes whenever they ask. It’s ridiculous. I actually think she is being unfair on them. I’d hate to ask a favour of someone and for them to secretly resent me when they agree to do it.

I get asked to do favours for friends and relatives but I find it easy to decline if it doesn’t suit me. I think it means people are actually happier to ask because they know if I do offer to help it’s genuine.

I also think people use the phrase ‘people pleaser’ as a cop out for their own mistakes. If you know you’ve made bad decisions (as we all can do from time to time) I think some people try and make it more palatable by calling themselves a people pleaser. It’s as though they are absolving themselves of any bad decisions because they are such a ‘good’ person.

I see a difference between people who think themselves people pleasers and people who really lack confidence.

But, respectfully, there is no manual that says ‘Other people’s needs and wishes are more important than your own.’ You seem to be suggesting that, if everyone people-pleased, it would be fine, because everyone would be doing things they didn’t want to because they thought they had to.

If I were finding the idea of someone pleasing themselves that triggering, I’d be examining my own behaviour.

But sometimes the game’s not worth the candle. When the dcs were small there was always That Child who would come and stare at the swings when a dc had just got on.

I’d always say, “Come on, let that child have the swing.” Child would look smug. I would tell dcs that the child was rude and horrid and we would stalk off feeling superior. I hope I wasn’t teaching the dcs to be wet blanket people pleasers but to take the moral high ground and avoid a fight!

Yes - I think that’s why I jumped so quickly to define it!

And it’s very hard to comment on the previous poster and what you’ve mentioned is all possible. As the @ItDoesntHaveToBeASnowman has mentioned, she is also a people pleaser so it may be her who is the victim of emotional abuse as a child and this has become generational trauma in terms of her daughter’s need to people please too.

I’ve tagged you @ItDoesntHaveToBeASnowman because I wanted to acknowledge you are here with us! You may, of course, have had an abuse free childhood - I’m just trying to say that people pleasing can pass from generation to generation because of how harmful emotional abuse is. I’m also not blaming you for your daughter’s people pleasing as it could be down to multiple factors and it is also incredibly hard to break emotional abuse cycles as it can feel physically dangerous to stop people pleasing.

There’s another book by Gordon Neufeld Gabor Mate called ‘Keep your children close’ which looks at the important of parent orientation vs peer orientation particularly in those pre teen/teen years - maybe that would also be a helpful resource in relation to your relationship with you daughter and how to help with her need for external validation. The fact you’ve spotted it and are thinking about it and talking about it already make you a brilliant parent though and it’s how any cycles that are potentially there are broken. It might just take time.

It is, absolutely, always a total negative.

Being generous or altruistic, when done freely, is obviously a good thing. People-pleasing is neither.

(Though it’s useful for a career in customer service.)

Reading this thread I was thinking about this and how being subservient and a people pleaser is an expectation of anyone in a public facing role, it's what people consider good customer service to have someone behave in a subservient way, to almost expect to be treated in a derogatory way and be grateful for the opportunity to serve them, no matter how badly they treat you. The basic idea is efficient and timely service done politely, but quite often that's not enough, and if people even get a whiff that you're not grateful enough, that you're not subservient enough, that basically you're not willing to put up with enough shit, then there are concequences in the form of confrontations, complaints, disciplinary matters.

I have learned, to some degree, to be the subservient people pleaser at work and have stronger boundaries in my personal life, but when you spend so much time doing it, against a background of it being second nature in all aspects of your life then it's no easy feat to separate the two and work on it properly.

My mum has spent my entire life telling anyone who will listen that she's always put everyone else first and herself last - I just believed it for a long time, but actually, looking back, it's not true, she hasn't done that as much as she claims to have done and it seems to be a defence for selfish behaviour that she herself recognises as selfish but wants validation for doing.

Oh God this. I also remember as a very shy child being told to answer things myself, as “I had a tongue in my head”
at the grand old age of 55, I SO enjoy being ‘selfish’ and silently telling people to fuck off.

I'm cautious of this with my son.

He seems quite sweet-dispositioned like his dad was as a toddler, but as an adult he's an extreme people pleaser to the point he gets incredibly stressed when two people have competing demands - even though both people would be happy with some sort of normal compromise.

For example, with sharing, if my son has a pile of toys and another child wants to play with one he's not using - of course he has to share. But if he's playing with one of his own toys, my husband would still encourage him to let another child have a go - why? Distract the other child with a different toy. Adults don't just wander up and demand stuff off people!

A bit on the fence here. Yes, people pleasing can absolutely be a problem, but I can't help but suspect that some of the people going, 'I'm such a people pleaser!' are just looking for an excuse to be selfish.

Like most things in life you need to balance your needs and others.

I don’t think being a People Pleaser is always a negative. Doing a good deed, or putting yourself out a bit is necessary otherwise we’d all sink into becoming selfish arseholes. Someone upthread mentioned asking for food in someone’s house: that’s just rude and nothing to do with pleasing anybody.

I was trained to put myself last at all times (and to denigrate any achievement too). It is difficult when you come up against someone who hasn’t read the manual on this. Mil always put herself first and as dh said about her, “A friend in need is a friend off the Christmas card list.”

It’s a fine balance. I think all we need is a fully-functioning CF radar.

A big % of AIBU is basically people pleasers feeling unable to say no to their colleague who wants a lift, their boyfriend wanting to spend all their money in a stag do, or their cheeky family wanting them to host Christmas for the 20th time.

They are beyond pissed off but unable to access or vocalise their feelings.

These are the people who turn into the frogs in boiling water. It’s bloody hard to read sometimes….

It probably got passed down from their mum...like a pass the parcel.

That was my mum!
And no,I still struggle to think about myself before anyone and everyone else. I’m mid 50s too

100% agree. Spent my whole life putting others first it's only now I am starting to think about what I want to do. But I have also realised that a lot of people are very happy to put themselves first and take take take

Saying 'no' gets easier with practice. Even when you can get emotional manipulation.

For example, yesterday I felt tired to go to a family thing, MIL told me 'But you wanted to go, but I will be so disappointed if you don't go" While it was flattering she wanted to see me, she wasn't listening to me (I just sort of did an eye roll and said, no you won't you'll be fine")

Because unless you’re totally unself-aware, you will know something is wrong, even if you don’t understand what. Look at all the threads from people saying ‘I bustle around doing things for other people all the time, I’ll do anything for anyone, I’m so nice! But no one wants to be my friend, and I’m terribly lonely, and around me I see less nice people with lots of friends .’

That’s a classic people-pleaser line from someone who misunderstands how friendship works. They need to find a good therapist and explore their false beliefs about themselves and others. Probably the first step is to recognise that they’re not ‘too nice’ and surrounded by ‘takers’. People-pleasing is an unhealthy habit you can, with effort, stop, not ‘niceness’.

The law doesn’t absolve people of responsibility for their actions despite history of childhood abuse - there maybe some mitigation in sentencing but it seems to be minimal as far as I can tell. I appreciate this is not the same as people pleasing but, as OP has pointed out, people pleasing can be dangerous in extreme cases and develop into coercion.

As a former People Pleaser I would agree that it is our responsibility to fix it. Its like anything that happens in our childhoods- its not our fault that it happened but it is our responsibility to deal with it, process it and seek help if its ruining our lives.

That doesnt mean it's "easy" or that it can be fixed in 5 mins - it takes hard work and honest self reflection which can be very, very painful. However, I would rather do this than spend the rest of my life feeling resentful that others are taking advantage of me.

Its far more empowering to believe you are in charge of your own destiny and can change your dysfunctional patterns than to believe you are doomed to a life of unhappiness and completely trapped in a prison of fear of others opinions.

It's quite insidious really just how badly girls are conditioned to be kind, think of everyone else first etc. And because it starts at such a young age, that's why there are so many women who become people pleasers. Reading this thread though shows that at least they realise it and do their utmost to change it

It is. But how can you if you don't even realise what you are doing? Early socialisation is even taken into account in sentencing in courts because it has a massive impact. That much is undeniable .

As adults, we have to take responsibility for ourselves, but we should also acknowledge that some people are much better equipped than others to be self aware and to make changes in their lives.

I agree that unpicking it is complex, but, in adulthood, how you deal with what happens to you is your own responsibility, no one else’s.

And unpicking it absolutely doesn’t ’suck the joy out of life’ — it frees you to live more authentically, have stronger friendships, and to be genuinely, freely generous or giving, as you judge fit, without depleting yourself in the service of others, or being ‘prey’ to anyone.

I’m not sure what you mean by your example. Are you saying the only reason you’re not going clubbing and doing vodka shots through your eyeballs ‘at your age’ is because you’re a people-pleaser?

I was brought up to please everyone else and looking back I realise it was to make my mother look good. It took me a long time to believe in myself - for that reason I brought my sons up to have the confidence to make their own decisions. Having a narcissistic mother had me living on my nerves - people pleasing blights your life. You can never please everyone all the time.