People Pleasing and Looking for Mr./Ms. Right

April 18th, 2011
By Beverly Amsel, Ph.D., Individuation Topic Expert Contributor

When I think about many of the clients I see in therapy, men and women who want to develop relationships, find partners, and have families of their own, there are many who become so focused on giving the other what they think the other wants that they simply don’t consider what they want. All they know is that they want to feel desirable. There is not much thought given to what kind of person the other is and what he/she might provide for me. Is the other a good person? Do they think about what I need? Can I depend on them? These questions are not considered. Instead, they worry: Will he call me again? Does she like my looks? Was I pleasing in bed? Did I respond to him the right way emotionally? Did I seem too detached? There is no thinking about: What do I want? Did he ask about me? Does he call when he says he will? Is she reliable, honest, trustworthy?

Janet came into my office, sat down and started to cry. “I can’t believe he didn’t call me or text me.” She then described a familiar pattern: She met Paul online and, after emailing and texting for a few days, agreed to meet him for a drink at a local bar. He was as good looking as his online photo. She was thrilled. She was very nervous and had too much to drink. They had something to eat at the bar and he invited her back to his place to watch the basketball game. She told herself that he seemed really nice. He had a good job and was interesting. He really wanted her to come back with him. Why not? He had a nice place. He brought out a couple of beers and they started to watch the game and fool around. The next thing she remembered was that it was morning and he was getting ready to go to work. He kissed her and said he had a really good time. That was Tuesday. Today is Friday. Janet waited in a panic to hear from Paul, who had’t contacted her. She couldn’t stand it. Didn’t they have a good time? Didn’t he like her? She texted him on Friday morning before coming to her session with me. He responded with “Hello, had fun. Busy at work be in touch soon.”

Janet wanted to know what I thought this meant. Was he interested? Did he like her? Was there some right response to his text? I can’t believe this is happening again. What is wrong with me? Why do men find me so unattractive and undesirable? What am I going to do?

This is a familiar scenario in my psychotherapy office. Many young women come to my office describing experiences of trying to please the other and feeling they have failed. My male clients also tell of similar experiences where they call a girl the next day and feel “blown off” and wonder what is wrong with them. What these clients have in common is a need to please the other in order to feel they are valuable, acceptable people.

People pleasing is about being liked. It is about defining character: If I am liked, I am a good person and acceptable in the world. If I am not liked, it means I am unacceptable as a person in the world: something is wrong with me. The act of people pleasing is frequently not calculated, but is a way of being in the world that is developed in one’s early years. Growing up, the infant needs the mothering one to mirror back satisfaction to the baby. Mother smiles and makes baby feel wonderful. When mother doesn’t mirror baby’s loving gestures, baby becomes anxious and keeps trying to get mother to respond. When this doesn’t occur, baby may give up trying to have this satisfying relationship with mother or she may keep trying without ever getting mother’s pleasure mirrored to her. Either way, baby has been deprived of the experience of having her goodness confirmed by mother’s reflected pleasure in baby. This can result in a lasting need to have one’s value and goodness validated. It can leave the developing child feeling insecure and unsafe. Over time, the need to please in order to feel that I am a likeable, valuable person grows. Encounters with significant others become repetitions of the child’s need to please the other at all costs. When there is success in pleasing the other, the pleasure and delight that mother was unable to provide is reflected back by this substitute other. Now the pleaser can finally feel she has good stuff and must be special, good, competent, and desirable.

Success at pleasing the other feels intensely satisfying, but the costs are high: the delay in the development of a separate, individual self with a sense of who I am, what I like, what I want. The cost is the absence of a voice that represents the person’s desire and ability to say “Yes” and “No” to things. Not knowing what I want makes it difficult to say “Yes.” Perhaps more destructive is the inability to have a voice that can say “No, you can’t treat me that way,” or “I need more from you,” or “I want a reciprocal relationship.”

The absence of this separate, developed self means that the question of what I want, what I like, what I need, is not addressed. An almost total focus is on providing whatever it takes to please the other so that I can feel great about myself. People who need to please others rarely stop and think if the other is pleasing to them. That tends to be irrelevant. There is a certain safety in this dynamic. When one’s sense of self is based on the appraisals of others and one can succeed in eliciting positive responses, there is likely to be no criticism felt, and bad feelings about self can be avoided. There is typically no consideration that the other is limited or not that wonderful. The view of oneself and the other is black and white. I am liked by her and that makes me a good, funny, terrific person. Or, I am not liked by her and I am therefore not a likeable or worthwhile person to anyone. This makes the stakes high, and the urgency to be liked intensifies as long as not being liked by the designated important other means one is an unlikeable person in the world.

When dating, the pattern for many people pleasers is to meet a person and then panic if they are not responded to quickly or in a particular way. Underlying the panic is the question: Does he/she like me, want me? When it feels that rejection is likely, there is often a dread of devastation, as if one is being told they are a person with a fundamental, unfixable deficit. There is an inability to consider that I simply wasn’t his/her type, he/she is busy at work, or whatever ordinary reason someone may have for not calling for another date. It becomes difficult to consider that I have vested this person with such power that they can define me. There is little thought that this other may be flawed or have preferences that, sadly, didn’t result in choosing me this time. But the all powerful other has the ability to make me feel unwanted, abandoned, like nothing.

As we saw with Janet, the intense need to be liked can result in a lot of pain since it isn’t always so easy to successfully get the response we wish for from the other. Working in therapy to develop a sense of self can be a powerful antidote to the need to people please. One begins to think about what is pleasing and satisfying to me, not what someone else thinks I should like or what I should do to impress someone else. What do I like? What do I want? These are questions that have been neglected when the focus has been on what would he/she like from me? It takes time to develop the ability to reflect and struggle and explore. The goal is to figure out all the wonderful parts of who I am and what I am about. The developing self experiments with new things: new people, jobs, classes, new thoughts, travel, sports, art, having new feelings, reading, running, being still. This is about engaging in the process of individuation: becoming your unique self.

When we develop our unique selves, we develop the capacity to tolerate differences. We are not the same as everyone else. Some people will admire our differences, some will criticize. It is impossible to always get positive responses. When the focus is not on pleasing, the ego strengthens and one comes to recognize that criticism is not about defining our character as good or bad. It becomes possible to get comfortable with the idea that someone doesn’t like what I’m doing or even doesn’t like me!

It is very liberating to be able to tolerate not being liked. The reality is that it is rare for even the most expert people pleaser to succeed at being liked by everybody. When you can tolerate other people’s negative feelings, there is the space and the freedom to be allowed to develop and become a self that YOU like. To feel good about you, to take pride in yourself, these are attributes that are very attractive and become a more constructive basis for developing a relationship: two people who are capable of knowing and accepting themselves as imperfect but loveable and desirable.