Excellent posts from @What3words and @FOJN in particular.
OP, definitely think hard about how ‘people-pleasing behaviours’ are manipulative and self-centred, especially as you rejected it in your replies. Because part of the ‘appeal’ of people-pleasing for those who do it is that they often think it’s just an excess of considerateness and niceness towards others, and that the ‘problem’ is only when those others overstep the mark.
That isn’t true.
It’s not evidence of extra niceness, it’s a bad habit like any other, and it’s you choosing to over-invest in relationships in the hope of them giving you a kind of ‘return’ you find validating by behaving in certain ways. You are burdening other people with the full weight of shoring up your sense of self worth.
The fact that you can’t see this indicates the depths of the problem. Look at your reply to @What3words saying it would help you to reframe it as a manipulative trait, not a ‘nice’ one. Your reply said no one thought of you as annoying, only as a ‘she’s happy if I’m happy’ person — you leapt immediately to what other people might think of you, and the desired effect of your behaviour, which is that you are trying to manipulate people into not ‘dumping’ you (by trampling all over your own boundaries). You immediately then go on to insist that you’re ‘selfless’. You’re not. You’re trying to make other people do what you want. That’s manipulation.
And your own experiences show that people-pleasing doesn’t ‘work’. Someone cheated on you, someone meted out ‘disgusting treatment.’ Someone upset you recently. You mention arguments, friends cancelling last-minute and forgetting your birthday. You describe a person who is neglected and mistreated. What therapy will ideally help you explore is that (1) this is as a direct result of your own choices, and (2) how to drop the narrative that your people-pleasing is just a form of extreme niceness and easygoingness., while (3) working on self-validation. What you are trying to do is to delegate to others the work you should be doing for yourself.
I’m not unsympathetic, OP. If you grew up with those scripts (as I did), it can take a lot of work to unlearn them.
Just don’t end up like my mother, now 80 and a lifelong people-pleaser who hasn’t a real friend in the world because she doesn’t have a true self she’s ever shown anyone, because all her interactions with others are based on trying to get them to like her by being ‘no trouble’ and saying ‘yes’ to every request, however unreasonable.
She’s also got 80 years of (entirely unconscious) built-up anger at other people for not treating her the way she wants.
It was a deeply unhelpful way to be brought up, and my sisters and I all had to work incredibly hard to unlearn her scripts about ‘selflessness’ and other people always being more important.
To this day, she visibly flinches if she sees me refuse to do something, or say ‘Can’t talk now’ or ‘That doesn’t work for me.’