The Disease to Please- Curing the People-Pleasing Syndrome by Harriet B. Braiker, Ph.D.

I believe that many people struggle with The Disease to Please in their life. This book has some great information that I think is incredibly beneficial. 

There are epidemic numbers of women and men plagued by the self-imposed pressure to please others at the expense of their own health and happiness. People’s lives become impaired by this compulsion to put others’ needs first, to never say “No”, to strive endlessly for everybody’s approval, and to try to make everyone else happy. People Pleasing is driven by a fixed thought that you need and must strive for everyone to like you. You believe that being nice will protect you from rejection and other hurtful treatment from others. 

People Pleasers can have the syndrome caused by the avoidance of frightening and uncomfortable feelings. 

The dilemma you face is that in staying so finely tuned to the real and perceived needs of others, you often turn a deaf ear to your own inner voice. Fulfilling the needs of others becomes the magic formula for gaining love and self-worth and for protection from abandonment and rejection. 

Conflict avoidance is not an ingredient of successful relationships. Rather, it is a serious symptom of dysfunctional ones. 

The disease the please is a set of self-defeating thoughts and flawed beliefs about yourself and other people that fuel compulsive behavior that, in turn, is driven by the need to avoid forbidden negative feelings. This triple combination of distorted thinking, compulsive behavior, and the need to avoid fearful feelings creates the syndrome of people pleasing and form the Disease to Please triangle.

Some of the people pleasing mindsets may have been appropriate and even beneficial in your childhood. But, today, most are operating against you as an adult. Your mind has been poisoned, or at least contaminated, by flawed and erroneous ways of processing your own thoughts. Your mind has a people pleasing virus that is messing up big portions of your hard drive including how you feel and how you continue to behave with other people.

Niceness is the psychological armor of the people-pleaser. In a deep part of your personality, you believe that by being nice, you will gain love and affection, and that you will be protected from meanness, rejection, anger, conflict, criticism, and disapproval. If you are rejected or hurt, you believe it is because you weren’t nice enough.

While people pleasers may think they excel at making others happy, their real talent lies in making themselves feel miserable an inadequate. 

The 10 Commandments of People-Pleasing 

1. I should always do what others want, expect, or need from me.
2. I should take care of everyone around me whether they ask for help or not. 
3. I should always listen to everyone’s problems and try my best to solve them.
4. I should always be nice and never hurt anyone’s feelings. 
5. I should always put other people first, before me. 
6. I should never say “no” to anyone who needs or requests something of me. 
7. I should never disappoint anyone or let others down in any way.
8. I should always be happy and upbeat and never show any negative feelings to others. 
9. I should always try to please other people and make them happy.
10. I should try never to burden others with my own needs or problems. 

The 7 Deadly SHOULD’S

1. Other people should appreciate and love me because of all the things I do for them.
2. Other people should always like and approve of me because of how hard I work to please them .
3. Other people should never reject or criticize me because I always try to live up to their desires and expectations.
4. Other people should be kind and caring to me in return because of how well I treat them.
5. Other people should never hurt me or treat me unfairly because I am so nice to them. 
6. Other people should never leave or abandon me because of how much I make them need me.
7. Other people should never be angry with me because I would go to any length to avoid conflict, anger, or confrontation with them. 

When you hear the commanding should in your thoughts or self-talk, you are hearing the voice of your judging conscience. That voice is the amalgamation of your parents, teachers, older siblings, coaches, or other authority figures that, at various points in your life, laid down rules that have stayed with you throughout your life. As a people-pleasing adult, your conscience still orients you to the expectations of others. 

Since you measure your performance according to a standard of whether others are pleased with you- and not just whether you are pleased with yourself-your guilt is further compounded by feelings of shame. 

The perfectionist standards to which you hold yourself are measured at two levels- 1) You require yourself to please everyone, all the time. 2) You demand that you maintain a positive emotional temperament at all times. Thus, you are to exude a happy and upbeat demeanor even while you exhaust and deplete yourself pleasing others and denying your own needs. If your mood should inadvertently slip, you are never to show your negative feelings to others. 

Being nice is shorthand for a full-blown belief system that dictates how to act with other people so that bad things won’t happen to you.

There is a substantial price to being nice which you should no longer be willing to pay. When you can endorse this seemingly simple statement, “It’s okay not to be nice”, you will have made giant inroads on curing your own Disease to Please problems. 

You are using niceness as a form of interpersonal protection, at least to some degree. 

This compelling, but ultimately flawed belief that being nice will protect you from being hurt by others is rooted in the magical thinking of childhood. 

Believing that your niceness should or could protect you from rejection, isolation, or other negative life experiences including trauma, places an onerous responsibility on your mood and behavior. 

There is a healthy way to operate in a state of enlightened self-interest. This means that you will take good care of yourself, even putting your needs first at times, while simultaneously considering the needs and welfare of others. The problem you now face is that years of people pleasing have made you nearly deaf to the inner voice of your own needs. 

You probably make Herculean sized “to do” lists, which you likely use to take note of all the things you don’t get around to doing by the end of any given day. You rarely give yourself enough credit for all you do accomplish and drive yourself relentlessly with “should’s”, “musts”, and perfectionist standards of self-evaluation. 

You probably delay and procrastinate your relaxation and other pleasurable activities until you have finished doing all the things that you think you have to do. 

Learning to say “no” is imperative to curing your people pleasing syndrome. Saying “no” is about establishing your boundaries. 

You have become hooked on people-pleasing in order to gain approval from significant others as well as from everyone and anyone who will give it to you. You are also hooked because you have “learned” to believe that your people pleasing behaviors will avoid disapproval from others. In behavioral terms, the disease to please syndrome entails taking on too much and spreading your finite resources too thin because you rarely say “no” and fail to delegate effectively. 

Hardwired versus Learned Habits

Human behavior can be divided broadly into two basic categories. The first is innate behavior that is built into our hardwiring. Babies- for example- will roll over, sit up, crawl, and eventually stand up and walk without anybody teaching them how. So, innate behavior does not require learning. The second category of behavior consists of that which is acquired or learned. People pleasing is acquired behavior that is developed through a process in which other people play major roles. 

Nobody is born a people pleaser. Importantly, since people pleasing is a learned behavior, it can be unlearned; or perhaps more accurately for our purposes, it can be relearned in ways that are more effective and less costly emotionally and physically. 

Your people pleasing habits were learned through both positive and negative reinforcement. When people pleasing behavior earns approval through praise, appreciation, acceptance, affection, or love, the habit is positively reinforced or rewarded. However, when your people pleasing habits result in avoiding or stopping disapproval in the form of criticism, rejection, withholding of affection, punishment, or abandonment, your behavior is negatively reinforced. 

Approval from significant others is a powerful source of reward for nearly every human being. 

People pleasers’ fear of anger can develop for many different reasons. The deepest roots of the fear are buried in childhood trauma. To a young child, a parent who displays a volatile temper or explosive anger can become terrifying. Because of their nearly total dependence, young children need adults to appear to be in control. The child needs adults to behave rationally and consistently and to provide feelings of safety and security. Worse if the parents anger also fuels aggression or physical violence, the child’s world turns into a frightening place fraught with very real, potentially fatal danger. Instead of providing refuge from stress and fear, the child’s home and family become the source of terror. The child, who may also be subjected to physical abuse, absorbs damning psychological messages about the danger and destructiveness of anger from this nightmarish scene of domestic terror. Many, though not all, people who struggle with the disease to please report abusive family backgrounds. 

Teasing, by definition, is hostile. Whenever a joke or tease is made at another’s expense some degree of anger and aggression are the undercurrents. 

Telling a child or adult not to be hurt by teasing is as bewildering as telling her not to flinch or cry when someone slaps her in the face because the assaulter was “just having fun”. 

You have put your own needs on a back burner for so long that the pot is stewing with frustration, resentment, and anger. You must set your intention to truly change.

When anyone tells me that they never fight or have disagreements with their spouse or partner, I become dubious and concerned. Conflict avoidance is not a psychological strength about which to boast. Instead, it is a symptom of worrisome dysfunction in a relationship that chills intimacy and belies closeness and trust. In any relationship, conflict is inevitable. Sooner or later differences in opinion, preference, style, and/or interest will arise. How those differences are expressed and whether they are effectively resolved determine if the conflict is constructive or destructive in nature. 

This is your time. You earned it…a long time ago. Now, use it to help yourself get over your depleting and exhausting people pleasing habits, thoughts, and feelings. 

Replace with your corrected thought: “I know that I don’t always have to do what others want, need, or expect from me. I can choose to give to certain people when and if I want to do so”. 

By definition, the disease to please has put your needs perennially behind those of others. As a recovered people pleaser, things are going to be different- starting now. 

The big attitude adjustment you will make today is this: Unless you take better care of yourself physically and psychologically, you won’t be able to take good care of the people that matter most in your life. 

The one source of approval that is critically important is your own. Using self-approval as a way to reward and motivate yourself is also a key skill to develop as a recovered people pleaser. 

In the past, you have tended to overestimate the likelihood that people would get angry with you, reject you, disapprove of or abandon you if you failed to please them or comply with their wishes. 

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