Women who Need to Please

I have talked to many women who have an insatiable need to please others. While in many cases this comes from a natural caring, motherly place, it can often come from a fear driven compulsion to make others happy.

This need shows itself in women’s inability to look after their own needs, to say no to things that they don’t want to do, to set boundaries, to ask for what they want, to find their own fulfilment in life, to have access to power and to feel alive.

Women who have this pattern are susceptible to putting up with abusive relationships in which they are not valued, appreciated or cared for. They often have one-way connections with friends in which they give and others take. They are terrified of conflict and will do anything to avoid it. They will agree when inside they don’t, say yes when they mean no, go when they don’t want to and give when they’ve got nothing left.

These women can end up feeling unfulfilled, bitter and lonely. My own mother had an extreme version of this Pleaser pattern. She was trained at boarding school that it was rude to ask for what you want. If she wanted the salt or pepper at dinner, she was taught to offer it to someone else first, in the hope that they might offer it back to her! Thus she spent her life offering everything to everyone else, in the hope that she might get something back. However, most people just took what she offered and walked off!

She ended up deeply unfulfilled, miserable in her marriage and with deep depression. She was unable to ask for what she wanted and lived vicariously through me. She would follow me around, be desperate when I left and do anything for me. I used to do experiments while walking around town. If we were walking up a street together, I would stop and wait for her to start walking again and decide on a direction. However, she never would. She would stand there waiting to see where I wanted to go and then follow me, always restricted by her inner Pleaser.

The Pleaser pattern comes from a very strong aversion to being rejected. The Pleaser’s job is to keep a woman’s friends and family close, to keep them liking her, to get her acceptance and appreciation and love. A woman with a strong Pleaser can’t tolerate being judged and rejected, so will do anything to avoid it. Of course she must have learned that being rejected is painful from somewhere, so it is very common that women with this pattern have experienced painful rejection in their early life.

Rejection doesn’t have to be just from major events though. We all have different levels of sensitivity and for some children being judged or criticised is a damaging as full on rejection. Sometimes gentle teasing can be traumatic. For other women, the damage is done by abusive, controlling or addicted parents.

However, the damage is done, the child learns that rejection is intolerably painful. Also of course to a child, rejection from a parent or caregiver feels life threatening. Children’s psychology is geared up to get love and care from the parent no matter what, as they know they can’t look after themselves. If a parent doesn’t like or love the child, it is terrified that it won’t receive food and shelter and may die. Therefore childhood rejections are burned into the psyche with the added intensity of fear of survival.

As an adult, we know that we can look after ourselves and tend to our own survival needs. However, once the damage is done and the child learns to adapt to rejection by doing whatever it takes to please the parent, then that pattern continues permanently, unless the woman consciously does something about changing it.

A child will play with lots of different behaviours, until she finds ones that gain her love and acceptance. The behaviours that didn’t work get suppressed or disowned. So if her parents or teachers repeatedly told her that she was ‘selfish’ and needed to ‘put others first’, this can lead to the development of a strong Pleaser personality which allows her to adapt to her parents’ values. While this is helpful as an adaptation strategy as a child, it can become crippling as an adult.

A grown up woman needs the ability to look after herself as well as others, to learn to receive as well as give and to find her own fulfilment. I have spoken to many women with strong Pleaser personalities who are unable to do anything for themselves. One woman had never taken herself out for coffee, was horrified by the suggestion that she should buy herself a lipstick or get her nails done and felt terribly guilty at the thought of having a massage. Another woman found it impossible to say no to anyone and spent much of her time mopping up after friends, rescuing people at all hours and generally being a doormat for all and sundry.

Being a Pleaser is very different from being loving, however, many people support Pleaser behaviour in others because they get things done for them! The Pleaser is essentially brokering a business deal. She is saying ‘I will do whatever you want, if you love me’ or ‘I will give you whatever you want if you stick around and make me feel secure’. She will do anything to achieve this outcome. So while love gives unconditionally with no desire for getting anything back, the Pleaser is actually manipulating the other person to get love and acceptance back. While with love, the focus is on the other, with the Pleaser, the focus is actually on oneself.

It is vital for clients to recognise the depth of this pattern and to see that in order to truly give from a place of unconditional love, rather than bartering, they need to be able to fulfil their own needs first. These women need to move through fear and guilt of giving to themselves so that they can learn to self love, self nurture and fulfil their own needs. This includes the often scary step of learning to ask for what they want from others and set boundaries about what they don’t want.

Clients then need to embrace the ‘selfish’ and ‘what about me’ sides of them, so that they can start to find ways to express their creativity, talents and learn to have fun again. It can be amazing how challenging they find it to take themselves to a movie, or an exhibition or play tennis, but once they have given themselves permission and dealt with their underlying fear of being rejected for being selfish, then they can start to get connected to their essence again and feel alive.

As the old adage goes, you need to fit your own oxygen mask before you can fit others’. Women need to learn that the more they can replenish their own energy, look after their own needs and become light, energetic, fulfilled, open, happy women, the more their relationships will thrive and people will want to be with them and give to them. It is much better to inspire people to be with you, rather than manipulate them through fear. They may lose some friends along the way who were used to having everything done for them, however, they will learn who their true friends are and develop real, lasting, two-way relationships.

While women often get rewarded for being ‘nice’, if this niceness is coming from a strong Pleaser, it is actually just a symptom of repression and fear. Supporting a woman to move into a healthy, non co-dependent way of relating that allows her to develop emotional independence and give love to others without pleaser hooks is a delight to be part of. Once women can let go of the Pleaser pattern, they can really start to live their own lives, find true fulfilment and learn to give and receive unconditional love.