Takers and Givers:

I know you don’t really want to hear it, but people-pleasing and narcissism are two sides of the same coin. They rely on each other, and may be just as bad as each other. In essence, they’re both the faulty coping mechanisms to protect us against the same thing: the chaos of emotions. (Check out PsychologyToday’s article about that.)

I’ve spoken, and written, a lot about how I believe our culture has entered a state of toxicity. What I mean by that is that I believe certain ways of communicating and being have become the norm - our need to avoid difficult emotions, to solve each other's suffering, and our willingness to make life harder for ourselves today for the possibility of a better tomorrow. I worry these trends are doing a serious disservice to everyone involved. I believe it has also become normal not to question or challenge these ways too much. (Kristen Neff, an expert on self-compassion, talks about how narcissistic traits have been increasing in our culture for years.) As our politics become more polarized, our social media more restricted, and our identities more stereotyped, we lose rich opportunities for growth, learning, and discomfort. Discomfort, which is necessary for both growth and learning, and something we therefore need to be prepared for. But we aren’t, are we? When it comes to discomfort, mostly, we just avoid it. 

I believe, supported by personal experience and conversations, that this cultural trajectory is what has led us to the one dimensional tendencies of our relationships: the takers and the givers. Or in other words, the narcissists and the people-pleasers, the problem-solvers and the avoiders, the manipulators and the caregivers. We designate our roles and then we stick to them beyond what’s actually helpful. (I want to be clear that I’m not using the word narcissism here as a diagnosis - we all have narcissistic traits and some of us learn to lean on them more heavily than others. This isn’t a capital N accusation, I’m aiming here more for a neutral-sounding observation - but these things are hard to achieve in writing format.) 

What People-Pleasers Want

One of the main reasons people-pleasing is so rampant these days is because, on the outset, it’s considered a good thing. People-pleasers are competent, kind, polite, and organized. They’re good listeners, they're always on time, and they haven’t met a problem they can’t solve. Everyone loves a people-pleaser - which is a huge problem, indeed. People don’t become people-pleasers because they value politeness and respect, or because they believe efficiency is worth a lot - they might care about these things, but it’s a minor factor. The main reason people-pleasers become people-pleasers is in the name - they want to please people. And not in the selfless way we tend to assume. A people-pleaser cares so much about other people's perception of them, that they are willing to sacrifice their own perception of themselves; They want approval and validation on a mass scale, and above everything else, including their own health and happiness. A people-pleaser is dressed up in good intentions and hiding a constant need to be good and an abhorrence of any kind of criticism. That’s not selfless, that’s selfish, and maybe a little arrogant. The same way narcissists lean on manipulation to cope, people-pleasers lean on superiority. Which is a difficult thing for a people-pleaser to hear: it sounds like a criticism and undermines their whole way of being.

People-pleasers are driven this way so strongly that they inevitably become visible and available for people to take advantage of. The being-taken-advantage-of part is where people-pleasing transforms from something nice and socially acceptable to something dangerous and unsustainable. And always they are taken advantage of by people who feel very comfortable doing so: the narcissists and manipulators. These are the ones who like relying on other people to do the hard work, who don’t mind using performance tactics or disrespect to get by. The ones who do not genuinely believe themselves capable of doing the hard emotional labor themselves. So people-pleasers take on the emotional (and other kinds of) labor, and manipulators are happy to unload. Givers, and takers. It’s a beautiful symbiosis: the people-pleaser gets endless opportunities to prove their worth and the manipulator gets all the credit without doing any of the work. If you’ve ever wondered why you keep ending up in relationships with people that treat you terribly, or how your disrespectful friend always seems to find more people to disrespect, this is why. These two sets of people are irrevocably drawn to each other. They like each other. On a subconscious level both are always looking for, and finding, one another. Every new relationship starts out feeling great and comfortable, and by the time we realize we’ve re-entered the very things we were trying to avoid, we need to escape it all over again. It’s like musical chairs: we leave these relationships, step once to the left, and begin it all again with a different person doing the same thing. And then we pass these patterns down: manipulative parents have people-pleasing children, people-pleasing parents have manipulative kids. Because they’re both forever trying to cope with each other.

To make matters worse, we live in a culture that endlessly rewards this kind of behavior - in corporate or professional settings, at school, even in our personal lives. If you pick one of these roles, and stick to it, it may carry you very far. Trying to break out of this pattern, on the other hand, is regularly punished. Boundaries are dismissed and invalidated. Systems resist change. People who have made it their job to keep the ship running cannot pause to question the division of work without risking running into the rocks. And those who have avoided taking on any real responsibility have missed important opportunities for learning the skills necessary to do the hard work themselves.

Breaking the Cycle

Both people-pleasers and manipulators are avoiders at heart: the people-pleaser is avoiding the rejection and criticism of others, the manipulator is avoiding the vulnerability of authentic imperfection. That is, uncomfortable emotions - both our own, and other people’s. Breaking these patterns means learning new skills - skills that have been put off for years, skills that are unfamiliar and feel overly difficult. Skills that mean being uncomfortable in deep and visceral ways, for months, and not relieving the pressure in any permanent way. The thing is though, we’re already uncomfortable. We’re just the kind of uncomfortable that we’ve tricked ourselves into believing we have control over. Often the best thing to do when trying to escape these patterns is to begin letting go of the need to fix everything. To find small, and later big, ways to cohabitate with suffering. As Agatha says, don’t steal her struggle.

Supporting links:

Kristen Neff on Self-Compassion and Narcissism: https://self-compassion.org/

Psychology of People Pleasers by PsychCentral: https://psychcentral.com/health/the-need-to-please-the-psychology-of-people-pleasing#traits

How to stop people-pleasing, by VeryWellMind: https://www.verywellmind.com/how-to-stop-being-a-people-pleaser-5184412#toc-tips-to-stop-people-pleasing

Where People-Pleasing comes from by GoodTherapy: https://www.goodtherapy.org/blog/where-people-pleasing-comes-from/

The One Thing Narcissists and People-Pleasers Have in Common by PsychologyToday: https://www.psychologytoday.com/ca/blog/peaceful-parenting/202101/the-one-thing-narcissists-and-people-pleasers-may-have-in-common