Does your people pleasing come from a survival need?

If you google terms like people pleasers or people pleasing, you’ll find many articles on this topic, including definitions, symptoms, causes and how to stop being a people pleaser.

In this post, I don’t intend to repeat what’s already out there. Instead, I’ll do an honest deep dive into my own compulsion to please people. What you’ll discover is that underneath all the unhealthy sacrifices I make for people is a baby who desperately tries to make her mother smile but fails miserably every time.

The still face experiment

In the 1970’s, Dr. Ed Tronick developed the still face experiment to study babies’ emotional need to establish connection with their carers and how the lack of connection affects the baby.

Below is this eight-minute YouTube video of the experiment and Dr. Ed Tronick’s commentary. Pay attention to the baby’s reaction when the mother stops smiling. Please prepare yourself emotionally. This video may be triggering for you.

The first time I saw this video was five years ago in one of my therapy sessions. My therapist suggested it because she thought it would help me understand some of my unhealthy patterns.

I agreed to watch it out of curiosity because I had never heard of the experiment before. I was not prepared for its impact.

The moment the mother stopped smiling, I felt a painful desperation from within. It felt as though all the suffering in the world was collapsing upon me and the only way to lift that suffering was to make the mother smile again.

At that instant, I was the baby in the experiment. I regressed to the moment I was born and met with the pain I had discarded for aeons. I broke down and cried. The sadness and desperation felt insurmountable. Unlike the baby in the experiment, I never managed to make my mother smile. Reconciliation was unattainable to me.

After composing myself, I said to my therapist in a moment of deep realisation, “That still face is my mother’s face. It’s the face I see on everyone around me.”

If she doesn’t smile, I’m not safe

If you’ve read my post Born to be sold as a child bride, you’d appreciate that my need to see a smile started from the moment I left my mother’s womb.

The very first time I opened my eyes to this world, I saw the shock and horror on my mother’s face. She refused to hold me or even look at me. I was left in a cold straw bed all on my own until I saw my father’s loving face. But even the joy on his face was tarnished by the dread he had for my future.

Immediately, I knew I was not safe in this world.

But I was merely a newborn baby how could I know whether I was safe or not?

According to Dr. Paul C. Quinn (whose research has focused on how infants form concepts for people, places, and things) and many other researchers, infants are observing their world all the time, busy picking up faces and patterns from the moment they are born.

Just because infants don’t yet have the language skills to form thoughts and opinions, it doesn’t mean they’re not thinking. They think by using their intuition, which is strongly connected to their bodies. They rely on their bodily responses to tell whether they are safe or not.

As adults, many of us still resort to the connection between intuition and bodily responses to guide us through life. That’s why we get this uneasy feeling in the pit of our stomach when we’re not sure of a person or a situation.

The inner knowing that my birth was the beginning of my trauma had stayed with me all my life, and I spent every waking hour trying to suppress it. After a decade-long enquiry into my past I found my way back to the moment I was born and made peace with that baby.

My compulsion to make people smile

My compulsion to see smiles on people’s faces is driven by a survival instinct. The first thing I knew about this world was that if the people around me weren’t smiling, then I would be in danger of being discarded.

That knowing was supposed to keep me safe, but it became a firm belief lodged deep in my psyche as I grew older and as the threat of abandonment escalated to prolonged physical and emotional abuse from my mother and my siblings.

To survive and to avoid physical harm, I became very perceptive of people’s moods, extremely compliant and helpful to people around me, masking my emotions so I could attend to their needs and be a clown, if necessary, just to make them smile.

If people were in a bad mood, I’d feel responsible.

My compulsion to please people was further fuelled by childhood depression (please my art project post Lost Childhood Sculpture No. 3 – Secrets).

As an unhappy kid, I was shunned by people. To compensate for the way I was, I learned to be highly competent and self-sufficient from the age of five. All throughout my life, people had relied on me to fix their problems. Fixing people’s problems became my life purpose. Being useful to people became one of my many survival skills.

That’s why I was so good at my job as a tax advisor. I knew the tax legislation (four thick volumes) like the back of my hands. Solving clients’ problems was driven by a deep desperation for survival. Such desperation compelled me to fix my clients’ problems at the expense of my mental and physical health. Please read A Memoir – The Ugly Truth about Workaholism

Is your people pleasing a fawn response from childhood complex trauma?

In psychotherapy, fawning is one of the responses of childhood complex trauma. Pete Walker‘s book – Complex PTSD, from surviving to thriving talks about the fawning response.

The fawn response is an adaptive behaviour for survival. It is one of the oldest and most powerful survival skills of humanity. Children like me whose safety is threatened at home learn this skill from very young onwards to manage and appease their abuser.

I learned to fawn, praise and uplift people from very young onwards without realising that I was doing it for survival. But, due to my speech impediments (I hardly spoke as a kid, and if I did, I stuttered), I never learned flattery. Instead, I followed people around to find opportunities to help them. When they needed me to tell them how good they were, I’d tell them to comfort them.

When I reached adulthood, fawning had become a habit. In order to tell people how great they were, I made myself see only the good in them. I became gullible, naive and vulnerable.

My internal barometer for discernment was a pendulum swinging from one extreme to another. One moment I’d be blissfully believing that I’ve met wonderful people. Next moment I’d be heart-broken and hurt by the very people I thought were angels descending upon me.

The pendulum continued to swing, and I continued to have failed relationships. It took a major fallout with a married couple who befriended me and made me part of their family with an aim to groom me to be their sexual partner.

The fallout with the married couple was a turning point. I realised I had to take responsibility for the part I played in the drama. I’ll blog more about this in a later post.

Human interactions are exchanges of energies

In the first half of the 1800s, Michael Faraday demonstrated in the Royal Institution that all matter was interconnected in a field called the electromagnetic field. He proved his theory by using a device at one end of the table to make a needle move at the other end of the table when there was nothing physically connecting the two.

At that time, many scientists were sceptical and thought it was a trick. Today, we know it was no trick because we do it every day and multiple times a day by using our mobile phones to remotely operate devices, to communicate with each other and even influence strangers all over the world through social media. We do all this by tapping into the invisible field that connects us all, the electromagnetic field.

What Faraday proved about 200 years ago was that there is no separation between us. We’re all waves in one big ocean.

When we meet someone, before we speak to or even lay eyes on each other, our energies are already engaging, colliding and rippling. We sense and decipher each other through that exchange of energies. We also attract or repel each other through that exchange.

Why do I keep having the same kind of people in my life?

Do you ever wonder why you keep having the same type of people in your life? No matter what you do, you just end up having unfulfilling or even abusive relationships?

Well, I’ve definitely wrecked my mind about this for many years. After doing a tonne of work on myself, I now know why I kept attracting the same kind of people into my life, the kind that exploited me.

The answer is simple. Because of my desperate need to please people and elicit smiles on their faces, I sent out an energy that carried an imprint of a person who would do anything to make other people happy. It’s like I’m silently broadcasting, “I can make myself very useful to you because being useful is my life purpose. I wouldn’t know what to do with myself if I wasn’t useful to you. So, please help me by using me.”

This energy I was carrying was detected by abusive people (see Notes below) from miles away and they sniffed their way to me, or, maybe it was the other way around. I sniffed my way to them. In either case, my energy and the energies of abusive people fit perfectly together like magnets.

I needed to demagnetise myself by reprogramming my energy, starting from understanding the roots of my unhealthy compulsion to serve others.

Healing

It’s been five years since I watched the still face experiment video. I can honestly say that I’ve demagnetised myself and established clearly defined boundaries.

The depth of my complex trauma meant a longer and more painful learning process. During the last five years, I’ve let go of many friends whom I had held onto for the wrong reasons. Cutting people off went against my nature and was extremely taxing mentally and physically. It created a new type of anxiety and depression and aggravated my existing allergy, heart and GI tract problems.

As my mental and physical health was declining, I leaned into therapy and spiritual work to seek solace and wisdom. Although I had moments where I thought my life would end any moment, I knew I had to keep on doing the work and not give in to my fear.

For years, I was in the phase of rehabilitating myself, to wean myself off the sweetness of seeing smiles on people’s faces, to shine a light on my compulsion, and most importantly, to assuage the desperate need to see my mother smile. I learned to hold the baby that was me and tell her that she is safe and sound.

Being able to hold my baby-self and be the nurturing figure in my life was a major turning point in my healing.

What about you? What’s your story? Why are you a people-pleaser? Is it as simple as seeking acceptance or not being able to say no? Do you have a secret that compels you to be a people-pleaser? If so, have you uncovered it?

I would love to hear your story. Please leave a comment below.

See you in my next post.

Roulan

Notes

*I use the term “abusive people” for ease of communication. I don’t mean to generalise or pass moral judgement. Most of us have the tendency to take advantage of other people when an opportunity arises. Some go against that tendency because of their principles and values. Some will take the opportunity, but only if it doesn’t cause too much harm to others, whilst others will exploit the opportunity to the fullest extent because it benefits them. When I say abusive people, I refer to the third kind of people regardless of whether they exploit consciously or unconsciously, maliciously or not.