To think this is the best remedy for people pleasing?

[MarisPiperSpuds]

Problems with being too much of a people pleaser is the subject, in one way or another, I think, of more than half the threads on here. I’ve suffered myself from people pleasing all my life and don’t get me wrong I enjoy reading the threads on here on the subject because they give me good advice. In my case people pleasing came from being made to feel unfairly guilty and unfairly responsible for other people’s feelings as a child.

i think the best way to cope with being a people pleaser which I think is VERY DIFFICULT to overcome is to be able to say no and understand you are going to feel guilty for saying no - even if you’re perfectly entitled to say no - but being able to live with that guilt knowing you made the right decision.

Example - an old school friend wants you to celebrate her new job with her. You don’t want to go because you want to extricate from that particular group of school friends. You say no but you can’t help feeling guilty - but your head tells you that if you don’t want to be part of that group you made the right decision.

The guilt feelings can last up to 20 odd years later or more - but are fine - you can’t help your feelings. But you must let your head rule your heart and know you did the right thing.

EASIER SAID THAN DONE!

Or you reframe de feeling of guilt as "yes! I've done it!". A sign that you overcame something very hard. A victory.

Sometimes you need to prioritise yourself and if other people are upset or disappointed so be it. You can never please everyone, and you need to remember people have probably said No to you before now, and you survived just fine.
We tend to worry too much about what others think, yet really it's how we view ourselves that's more important. You are allowed to say No, saying No creates stronger boundaries.
Mel Robbins has the right approach with her new book Let them. She's basically saying let others be disappointed with you, let them talk about you etc, allow it all and focus more on yourself. That's how you set yourself free.

I think a lot of people pleasers struggle to own that sometimes they want to be selfish. So they either do the thing they dont want to do, or jump through all sorts of mental hoops to convince themselves it's not selfish to not do the thing. The best cure imo is to give up on the idea that you are a lovely, kind and selfless person all the time and accept yourself as a flawed individual who doesn't want to be nice always. And that that's OK. Its very liberating.

I personally find people pleasing is a mental issue that needs dealing with properly - there is usually a reason someone becomes a people pleaser. It isn’t as easy as “I’m just going to say no from now on”

For me it took years and therapy to understand why I feel the need to people please.

I used to worry about causing “conflict” but now I know that it’s more about just being assertive.

True friends will understand your boundaries. You can still be lovely and kind whilst saying “no”.

I think although feelings of guilt are normal when you start saying no, it also feels like a huge relief.

"The guilt feelings can last up to 20 odd years later or more - but are fine - yo u can’t help your feelings. But you must let your head rule your heart and know you did the right thing."

In your heart though you don't want to go so really your head is following your heart. Get's a bit complicated. I've just accepted there are many incidents in my life for which I will feel guilty and will do for the rest of my life. I have actually reached the stage with many where I shrug and say "so what"

Yes - excellent idea!

Good mentality

Your second sentence is so spot on!

I think people pleasers cannot hear the thought that they might be disliked and not everyone’s favourite person. It’s actually quite egocentric- their worries aren’t actually about letting people down, it’s that the person might not like them. I find many pleasers are obsessed with how the world sees them and tbh it gets tiresome because they nearly always deeply resent what they agree to do. I was friends with a people pleaser and it was incredibly frustrating people she would moan about having her boundaries crossed but time and time again would do absolutely nothing about it. So we used to end up having the same conversations about it, over and over.

Absolutely I think that the key is to let go of the ‘I’m just too nice’ idea. That completely misidentifies people-pleasing as coming from a place of generosity, rather than poor boundaries, a transactional idea that services are exchanged for friendship, and often a suppressed anger that peiole don’t like them more when they do ‘everything’ for them. I would advise anyone who is trying to recover from people-pleasing to reframe it as a character flaw.

It is about boundaries. You have rigid, porous, or healthy ones. It can be hard to find the balance... can take years even.

The people pleasers I have known (am not saying this applies to anyone on here... just my personal experience) use it as a way to manipulate how people see them.

Yes to this! My mother has spent her entire life doing this. And not only can she not say no to any one in case they dislike her, she can’t bear any of her daughters to say no to anything, in case the dislike transfers to her. When I was still a teenager living at home, and Mum overheard me on the phone telling someone I regularly babysat for that I couldn’t that night, as I already had plans, she nearly went crazy. What would that person think? I got home later that evening to discover that she’d phoned the person I babysat for (whom she’d never met), and got her to drop the children off at our house, ‘so Imagine won’t let you down.’

I totally understand it op.

I'm a terrible people pleaser, it's only thanks to Mumsnet that I identified what it was I had been doing all my life.

Mine comes from not being allowed an opinion at home when I was young. Very much a "little girls should be seen and not heard" household. I wasn't the favourite child by a long margin. Mum tried her best bless her, likely a victim of her own teachings , but it still damages you. Dad was Mr passive/back room guy. Nice man, but never bothered to foster a relationship with me in any way. So I craved attention. I quickly learnt what things to do and say that would make my grandparents or great Aunt gush and shower me with praise and compliments. And I loved the feeling. So I guess I transferred that into adult life : gush, fawn, be of service to be liked. And never raise an opinion or dare to disagree with anyone, that = unlikeable.

I've learnt a lot though, and I'm far more aware of it now, which Is a good base to stopping it. I still struggle to give my authentic opinion in real life and still will allow some people to take more than they give . But I am getting better. I have managed to assert myself in some situations. It feels good. But I get what you mean about the guilt, I get it too. But as you say, I suppose you have to learn to sit with it and realise it's misplaced. Also worth remembering, they're not sitting there feeling bad for being honest or saying no ? So, why am I ?

Adult DD swears by the Mel Robbins book and I have learned a lot from the things she has passed onto me. It's helped me a lot. Cousin's DW though informed me the other week that Mel had actually stolen the content of Let Them from Cassie Phillips. Which either way, it seems to have helped a lot of people.

Most people pleasers either

• overthink the impact of saying No (normal people don't care if you can't do them a favour)
• have relationships with people that have no problem guilt tripping and shaming them, which is abnormal behaviour that they've become so conditioned to that they really struggle with saying No to requests that are often (on mumsnet!) frankly, obscene, and that normal.people would never ask of them.

I’d add a third.

• choose to surround themselves with people with chronic ongoing problems and chaotic lives, because being able to ‘help’ makes them feel powerful and needed, but only while those people continue to be troubled. Show this kind of people-pleaser a happy, stable, relatively crisis-free person, and they tune out because there’s no helper role for them.

some really interesting perspectives on here - thank you! I’m a people pleaser. I’ve tried really hard the last few years to start saying no or putting boundaries in place, but what I find happens quite often is I’ll say “sorry I can’t do that”. Then I’ll start going into detail about why I can’t. Then I’ll have a think about it and question myself as to why I wouldn’t help when it probably wouldn’t be too much of an inconvenience to do so. Then I’ll go ahead and do it after all. But it feels like I lost any goodwill as all they’ll remember is I said no and then made it all hard work unnecessarily! So I don’t really think this helps me.

Sadly being a people pleaser has put me in unsafe positions multiple times in my life, and I’ve also mean manipulated into doing things I didn’t really consent to…. But I never categorically said no, I just went along with things because I was worried it would be worse if I said no, or changed my mind, etc.

Another way of looking at it is, why would the people you are trying to please want you to do something that you don’t want to? Why would they want you to be uncomfortable, inconvenienced or stressed? If they care about you. If they don’t care about you, why please them?

Yes, we all put ourselves out from time to time for a friend’s benefit but on those occasions we do it because we want to. I wouldn’t want a friend to do something for me if they really didn’t want to. I would find another way of dealing with it without grudges.