How People-Pleasing Is Sabotaging Your Relationships
We learned to people-please to achieve love, safety, and affection. Often, we adapted these behaviors at a young age as a way to feel connected to our caregivers. It was a necessity that came with a great price, losing our authenticity and sense of self.
We learned to suppress the feelings and parts of ourself that were rejected, dismissed, or ignored. We learned to minimize and shrink our needs to be as easy as possible so people would stick around. We learned that our feelings could be uncomfortable for others, so we learned to express them only with ourselves or to compartmentalize, distracting with productivity and accolades.
These behaviors protected us back then, but are sabotaging us now. We believe that people-pleasing brings us closer to those we love, creating the connection & intimacy we long for. But, what if it’s actually the very thing blocking you from getting what you want?
Because the reality is you can’t have intimacy and trust without authenticity. You can’t feel seen, heard, and understood without letting the people in your life see you, the real you, all of you: quirks, flaws, complexities, uncomfortable feelings, and all.
4 Ways People-Pleasing Sabotages Your Relationships
Avoiding Conflict Doesn’t Keep The Peace, It Keeps The Tension
A relationship without conflict is a relationship without trust. Love requires you to talk about hard things and uncomfortable feelings. When your relationship is only “good,” because you’re avoiding tough topics and negative feelings, that’s a false sense of safety and security. You might try to believe things are okay, but you secretly know you can feel the tension that’s building from walking on eggshells. Love requires vulnerability, which means showing up as yourself, expressing how you feel and what you need even if it means it might upset the other person. Avoiding conflict isn’t the goal - learning how to repair after a difficult conversation or argument is.
Miscommunication + Passive-Aggression
The feelings and needs you’re trying to suppress don’t go away. They just come out passive-aggressively. Maybe you nitpick or criticize when you’re desperately feeling alone. Maybe you say you’re fine when you’re really not, hoping they’ll love you enough to “know” you’re not okay. Mind-reading isn’t love and expecting your partner to read between the lines creates a sense of fear and anxiety. Relationships require you to directly and clearly communicate your feelings and needs, repeatedly. It takes work. When you expect your partner to “know” things, you’re projecting unfair expectations that were placed on you onto them. And when you try to communicate from a passive-aggressive place, you increase the chances that you won’t be heard and your needs won’t be met.
Builds Resentment
People-pleasers are thoughtful, empathetic, and incredibly sensitive. We truly enjoy and care for our loved ones on a deep level, but we also think to be caring means to be self-sacrificial. We give, give, and give until we can’t anymore and we build up a LOT of resentment. We place responsibility for this resentment on others, when really its ours. We feel we can’t choose or prioritize ourselves because we don’t deserve it, so we over-give. But, this is unsustainable and when we hit our threshold, we’re furious that our relationship feels off balanced and not reciprocal. Yes, it might mean that your partner or friend needs to give more, but it also means you need to pull back by setting internal and external boundaries.
Passivity Creates Labor
When you are go-with-the-flow and consistently not having an opinion, you think this makes you easy and agreeable. And yes, while it does do that, it also puts the mental load and labor of decision-making and planning on the people around you. Sometimes you can unintentionally exhaust your loved ones because you’re trying to skirt responsibility and potentially upsetting someone.
Healthy relationships require trust and intimacy. To have real intimacy, you must have authenticity and reciprocity. You have to show up as your true self, being vulnerable in taking risks that you might upset someone and choosing to communicate your feelings anyways. Endlessly sacrificing and abandoning yourself won’t lead to more love, it leads to greater disconnection and dissatisfaction.
