Effective communication is essential for building a strong and lasting relationship, particularly in romantic partnerships that are closely intertwined. Understanding each other's communication styles and practicing assertive, respectful, and compassionate...
A Caffeinated Inquiry of Sorts
Something strange happens when your people find out that you wrote a blog post. They read it when you aren’t looking and then come back with questions. My kids have never been shy about asking questions or for a farther explanation when they have a hard time following my thought trains. It’s a family dynamic that we have enjoyed since they were old enough to talk. Saturday was our monthly family fun night, and the theme was “90s Coffee House/Bad Poetry Night”, so you know the coffee was flowing around our table. They came prepared with their questions and the conversation rolled like the steam from our different cups. In general, they confirmed that the term ‘people pleasing’ was sort of a buzz word that a lot of people like to label themselves but confessed that they didn’t know what it was or how it started. That got me thinking that perhaps not everyone reads research articles about maladaptive relationship styles. Imagine that!
The truth of the matter is ‘people pleasing’ isn’t an easy label to pick up and a much harder one to lay down. It is born from a clinical term, sociotropy, which is defined by the APA as the tendency to place an inordinate value on relationships over personal independence. A marriage and family therapist named Pete Walker came up with the less imposing synonym of people pleasing. Sociotropy can be the result of a few different things such as a trauma response, a learned or socialized way to receive love, or a ramification to subjugations.
When a person experiences a traumatic event, survival mode is triggered. In the case of people pleasing, one is apt to “fawn” in that response, which is when they do everything possible to squash the perceived danger by appeasing the threat. As children, we are taught how to love and how to receive love. Unfortunately, for those who have had emotionally unavailable or abusive care givers, the lesson learned is often to reduce their own needs to be able to tend to the needs of the caregiver. Another realm where people pleasing is a result is in situations where an individual must suffer a disadvantageous family or work environment to have a basic need met, such as food and shelter. Any combination of these catalysts can and often result in a lessening of normal behaviors such as prominent anxiety, increased feelings of guilt and helplessness or hopelessness and failure, or depressed mood. There is also the possibility of increased crying spells and the presentation of somatic symptoms.
When I explained all of this to my girls, I was met with a collection of scrunched faces and the repetitive question, “How or can you fix that?” I smiled back at their concern and told them it wasn’t my job to fix anyone, but my favorite thing was helping them learn what they can do to fix themselves. Honestly, there are a few things that people work on when they are laying down the dreaded label of people pleasing. The first big thing is finding their own identity. It doesn’t sound like much, but for PP’s, it is huge. The next part of the excavation process is paying attention to how emotions feel in their own body. PP’s have spent a long time squishing and discarding their own feelings to better perform for other people. After that, I get to help them learn boundaries and that “no” is, indeed, a complete sentence.
And just like that, we heard the call of my beatnik husband and his bongo drum. It was time for the bad poetry of the night and the inquiry dried up but my cup still ran over.
