People pleasing is exhausting/expensive!

[SmugglersHaunt]

I’m in my 50s and have always been a bit of a people pleaser but now at my age it’s becoming something I need to change. Has anyone managed it?!

I can’t turn anything down lest I offend the person who invited me, even if I don’t know them very well. This very often means my money and time is spent doing things I don’t want to do (meals I don’t want to spend £££ on, events I don’t want to go to etc etc). On one ridiculous occasion recently I went to a friend’s birthday drinks even though I was far too poor to afford it. It was at a stupid private member’s club and two cocktails and some peanuts set me back £75. This type of thing happens quite often.

I’m now trying to sell my late dad’s flat and had two estate agent valuations - now I’m fretting about letting one of them know they won’t get the sale. I have pre-guilt about upsetting them.

i know this (and me) is/are ridiculous and it’s incredibly first-world, but has anyone here managed to stop people pleasing? Currently I can only get out of things if I have an iron-clad excuse, but even then the guilt gnaws!

I’m not a people pleaser I’m very much about pleasing myself. But ask yourself why you do it ? That’s the only way any of us can tackle issues, from within. Maybe some actual therapy would be helpful.

Philip Larkin had it in a nutshell with his poem

They fuck you up, your mum and dad. They may not mean to, but they do. They fill you with the faults they had And add some extra, just for you.

I mean maybe it isn’t this but so many people’s issues go back to their childhoods. Even if they were lovely, were they people pleasers? My Mother was the opposite, I learned by example.

Thanks - that’s a good point. I’m not sure how they were with other people, but I very strongly remember having to tiptoe around my mum’s mood and make sure everything was ok when I was little. She would (for days sometimes) be in a mood and I’d be scared it was something I’d done. When I finally, after much badgering, found out what it was about it was always nothing at all, and most often nothing to do with me, even though she’d put me through the emotional wringer

Tremendous first reply!

Inside every people-pleaser (in my opinion) is a child who was made to put other people first, or else.

I hope you can work through it OP. My similar tendencies lifted once I realised my dm was, bluntly, a selfish bitch. And it wasn't my fault. But to accept that, I also had to let go of the hope of ever making her happy enough to be nice to me.