How would you describe a people pleaser?

[Waitingforthesunnydays]

I keep hearing this thrown around everywhere. I think it’s becoming a bit devalued in the way everyone’s suddenly a narcissist for occasionally being a bit selfish. Someone called me a people pleaser at a group dinner the other night cos I asked if anyone wanted the last piece of shared starter rather than just taking it myself. Then someone else said “Waitingforthesunnydays is the least likely person in the world to be a people pleaser”! Amazingly two insults at the opposite end of the spectrum that were equally insulting! I don’t think I’m a people pleaser. I don’t do anything I don’t want to do unless it’s for family or close friends who’ve done a lot for me, in which case I do it cos I care. I only make an effort to make people like me if I like them and want their company. I smile a lot though, and am always polite and friendly to people, unless they’re dicks or they give me a reason not to. At a party I’m not a mingler, I prefer to hang out with people I know well and whose company I know I enjoy. If I felt someone didn’t like me and I didn’t know why (in say, a work setting) it would bother me though. Not sure I’d make loads of effort to try and make them like me but I’d be a bit miffed about it. Am I a people pleaser? Are you a people pleaser? How do you know? What do you think made you that way? How would you define it? Do you think you become less of a people pleaser as you get older?

Well, yes exactly, so she was never a people pleaser in the first place so I don’t know why you think it’s “gone too far”?

She sounds rude and horrible to me, nothing to do with people pleasing at all

@TerracottaBowl - it's so counterproductive, isn't it?

I used to have a friend who thought it was rude to ask for what she wanted. She was constantly affronted than no one could just intuit what she needed and offer. They were just supposed to work it out through obscure hints and oblique comments - or frigging ESP.

It was a nightmare.

Weird you can’t see how shockingly rude, self absorbed, inconsiderate, selfish and unpleasant your friend is @Waitingforthesunnydays

“People pleaser” it’s like that vomit inducing “I am too nice” I sometimes see on mumsnet. I always think “I very very much doubt it”

Or they are very traumatised - they know what they want but daren't say it. However once one is an adult it's encumbent on us to do something about it.

In SIL's case, her misogynistic, domineering father had a lot to answer for.

I think 'I'm a people-pleaser' involves less self-delusion than 'I'm too nice'.

A people pleaser isn't actually 'nice' in the usual sense. She (because it's more usually a she) doesn't do things for other people from a free choice, out of generosity and kindness.

She does things for other people because she thinks saying no will make them dislike her, and in the belief that doing things for them will make people value her, because her self-esteem is too poor to think people will value her just for her company.

She's exchanging, in her head, services for friendship.

Which means that she often chooses people with problems and needs she can fulfil (childcare, lending money, lifts, an endless shoulder to cry on). Someone with no needs is no use to her because they don't 'need' her.

She is also often fuming with concealed resentment about 'not being appreciated' when the people she believes are her friends (because she has done things for them) don't reciprocate in kind, because she has presented herself to them as someone without needs, a human service animal. She often doesn't even like or respect these people she devotes herself to helping, but she turns herself into whatever they need anyway, and says 'My problem is I'm too nice, I'm surrounded by users.'.

And yes, absolutely it comes from a set of scripts she's absorbed in childhood, but after a certain point, as an adult, you need to learn that these beliefs are untrue, and holding you back from healthy, reciprocal friendships.

Or you don't, and you spend your life looking for people who 'need' you for what you can do for them.

We can get all Freudian about it but to me it seems like “people pleasers”please who they want to please at the detriment of those in their life they should genuinely want to “please”.

Your mother a case in point @TerracottaBowl

I find they'll take sides with one person and then go and take sides with the other person too.

This is why I don't trust them.

The best description of a people pleaser I’ve seen is that people are actually pleasing with their personality and behaviour.

I’ve seen quite a few people describe themselves as people pleasers when in fact they lack self awareness about how they are perceived or are emotionally immature and quite intense or can be demanding and pretty controlling of their friends. There really is not a group of people around them who are pleased by their behaviour.