I Stopped People Pleasing, Why Do I Still Do Everything for Everyone?

Despite my Former People Pleaser (FPP) status, I still tend to do everything for everyone, however, I have noticed one distinct difference.

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I am what you might call a textbook oversharer. If we aren’t having conversations where we dive deep into the depths of our souls and our childhood trauma, then I don’t want it. With that in mind, it’s very common for me to have these types of discussions with my fellow people pleasers (PPs) or FPPs. I bet they don’t want to be called PPs. Oh well, I’m the boss around here. I say PP stays. Besides, you just want to make me happy, right? (That’s a joke.)

Anyway.

Over coffee with a friend the other day, I found myself once again trying to explain how I still do a lot of heavy lifting for the people in my life, however, I feel I’ve shed the title of PP.

I no longer wear a scarlet PP on my chest. (Ok that one sounded bad.)

This is not a thought that is new for me. It’s something I have been mulling over in my mind since step dad number two suddenly passed away last fall.

After he died, I did everything for my mom. I mean…one would hope that the widow isn’t required to do more than survive from day to day, right? However, amidst my mom’s pleas for me to do less, I continually shrugged her off because I knew I was not overdoing it. Truly. I really mean it.

You see, I’ve gotten really good at knowing when I’m overdoing it, when I’m about to burn out, or when I’m in PP mode.

Another thing I know about myself is that right after someone dies, I am the person who gets shit done. Moving and business is my coping mechanism. It’s just how I deal. I know this about myself at this point, and therefore I believe it to be most beneficial for me to use that habit for the common good. As long as I know when to turn it off.

That’s why, after a long day of running errands for my mom, planning a service, and taking care of my elderly grandmother, I made plenty of time to cry and grieve at the end of the day. I began to realize that I wasn’t quite operating like I used to. Yes, I was still doing everything I would have done in PP mode, but the energy had shifted.

The question is, how?

How I healed from people pleasing

There are a few lessons I had to learn that helped me realize that being a PP wasn’t good for myself or anyone else.

Why no one benefits from a PP:

• If I do it for them, they won’t learn to do it for themselves.

• If I keep trying to manage their emotions, they will never learn to manage them.

• It is not possible to manipulate the happiness of others.

• If I make myself responsible for their happiness, I am also responsible for their anger.

That last one is a doozy.

I cannot tell you the number of times I would berate myself for someone else having a bad day. It was as if I fully believed it was my fault they weren’t in a better mood. I had somehow failed at my job.

Basically, all roads pointed to the fact that I had to knock it off.

Naturally, I started with my husband, Tom. He was the one I lived with, after all, and at this point he was the person I was pleasing the most.

Instead of swooping in, with a smile plastered on my face, and attempting to save the day, when he came home in a bad mood, I let him be in a bad mood. If he was crabby and stomping around the house, I let him.

With a self help book tightly clenched in my fists, I would take deep breaths in an attempt to simply get myself to sit still. If he wanted to talk, he could. If he didn't want to, I wasn’t going to make him.

This was the most difficult thing I have ever done by the way. Every bone in my body felt it was my duty to crank up my smile, placate him, and absorb all of his stress and angst into my own body. Who cares if I had a bad day, I had a husband to keep happy.

Something I realized during this process was that me behaving this way was really unfair to him. To a certain extent, being angry is healthy, it’s normal, and it’s okay. Each of us should be allowed to be stressed, or upset without having another person try to tame down those emotions before we’ve properly been able to navigate them.

Now, I can confidently say that when either one of us has a bad day, Tom and I are the first ones to hold space for one another. We listen, we comfort, and we let it be. There is no “fixing” required.

Learned people pleasing

My father passed away when I was 19 years old, and before that I had heard a lot of terms used to describe him. Narcissist (before the term was trendy), and alcoholic were at the top of the list.

No matter what titles or badges of dishonor he may have carried, the fact remains that at a young age, I learned that I needed to manage his emotions. I did this in an attempt at misdirection. After my dad’s divorce from my step mom, his moods became more and more unpredictable and he usually took it out on my younger brother.

Unlike Tom, my dad’s mood swings would quickly turn into unhealthy and over-the-top forms of punishment. He would shame my brother for having a potty accident at the age of two. Dad would force false confessions out of him and then punish him for lying. He was four.

Most days, I knew how to distract Dad enough to prevent these fallouts, or to soften them before they escalated. Some days I failed and those memories will remain seared in my brain.

What I had to realize, although it took years, was that Tom was not my dad. He had shown me that fact time and time again. It was safe for me to allow him to have bad days and to be angry. No one was in danger when Tom was in the midst of a bad day. I think is an important distinction for all my FPPs and PPs to remember.

The question is, are you catering to a narcissist or a dangerous situation, or are you attempting to shift the mood of someone who is simply feeling standard emotions?

Unfortunately, like my example, I think a lot of us start with placating a dangerous situation, and then continue pleasing everyone around us because we’ve learned it’s dangerous not to.

Why am I still doing everything for everyone?

The question still remains, why am I doing everything for everyone even though it’s no longer coming from a place of fear or manipulation?

In the last few months, I have begun to wonder if I am just fundamentally flawed. If there was no real escaping my need to constantly do things for others. Even though there was no anxiety or fear behind the situations, maybe I am just doomed to be this way forever?

What I’ve come to realize is that this is no character flaw, but rather a super power. A super power I have come to call “serving.” And there is a very distinct difference between pleasing and serving.

Think of people like doctors, nurses, teachers. These are all people who live in service to others. Perhaps all of us are pre-wired that way, to serve. Perhaps it is just some of us. One thing I have come to see as truth is that I do much better when I am capable of being in service to others. Taking the time to put my focus and actions on helping another human being allows me to escape my own self absorbed prison.

In service to others I manage to escape the anxiety inducing questions like:

• What am I doing with my life?

• Where am I going to be in 5 years?

• What do other people think of me?

• Am I smart enough?

• Should I be implementing a better skin care routine?

All of these questions kept me solely focused on my own perceived limitations and lack.

Was I people pleasing for me?

I read in the book, Presence, that anxiety often causes us to be very self obsessed. Why? Because we are constantly worried about ourselves and what other people think of us. In other words, I may have been attempting to please everyone around me, but the reality is, it came from my own anxious needs to keep myself protected.

It was a survival instinct. A learned survival instinct that I no longer needed. Although, I’ve gotten to a point that I do feel proud to still have the skills in my tool kit should I ever need them.

You see, that’s the large difference between people pleasing and serving. People pleasing came from a place of fear. Pleasing was my attempt at manipulating the emotions and feelings of another individual in order to prevent myself or my loved ones from experiencing harm.

In service to others, the actions I take are external. My hope is to remove some burdens from another person’s plate, so that they might have the capacity to do the internal work themselves. You had a bad day and are feeling overwhelmed, I can do the dishes. Life feels difficult and you need someone to listen? I can be that person.

I also know when I’m not capable of being that person. Because sometimes the bad days belong to me.

Understanding all of these things has allowed me to put into words what the dramatic difference really is between serving others and people pleasing.

Serving vs. People Pleasing

After much reflection, I’ve come to realize that the biggest gap between these two things is the energy behind them.

People pleasing for me came with an energy of underlying anxiety and a need to be liked. I blamed myself for the unhappiness of those around me. If they weren’t happy, I hadn’t done my job good enough. I had failed. This extended so far into my consciousness that I would be ashamed of myself if I ever inadvertently made someone feel bad or sad.

My beliefs were that I needed to play it small. Don’t light up a room too much.

If I looked too pretty, I might make someone else feel less attractive.

There was no end to the ways I would shame myself for merely existing.

Now, I work in service to others with total detachment from the outcome.

In other words, when I go out of my way to help someone else, I do not believe they are indebted to do the same for me at some future point and time. That would not be service to another. That would be another form of self service.

When I dress my best, do my hair, and feel confident, I am not responsible for the feelings this may give to someone else. Good or bad. It is up to them to navigate those emotions and to handle them properly.

(I could do an entirely separate post on how doing this also required me to learn to not let a compliment penetrate my skin. In other words, when someone shares a good perception of me, I have learned to say thank you without allowing it to inflate my ego. I mean, as best I can, of course.)

Now, when I serve others, I do it in hopes that it makes it a little easier for them to help themselves.

In service, I am no longer putting the burden of their success on my own shoulders. I am simply helping a fellow human where they need it in order to hopefully give them the space to heal and make changes for themselves.

In service of others, I come from a place of healing, not a place of hurting.

This is the final and biggest point of all: When I work to serve another person, I am only capable of doing it if I first care for and love myself. I can only truly serve from a place of internal peace and calm.

I do not run myself ragged.

I do not overwork.

I do not believe I am capable of helping everyone.

I serve where I feel called, when I feel called, and to an extent I feel is necessary.

This is how I believe each of us becomes capable of truly making a difference in the world. In service. If we spend our lives simply trying to avoid the negative emotions or rejections of another person, we live in survival mode.

What you must realize is that beyond survival mode, is thriving mode. It’s a place where we can truly expand, reach our full potential and fully embrace who we are without apologizing.

And, ironically, when we do this, we also help people better who they are because we are leading by example.

That, my friend, is the biggest takeaway I hope to give you.

If you truly want better for those around you, you must first do it for yourself.