Are you too nice for your own good? How people-pleasing feeds your loneliness

Struggling to say no or put yourself first? As a reforming people-pleaser, I’ve been there—and I’ve got something that might help.

Hello my friend

I want to start by asking you a few questions:

• Do you look at your day and see that it’s full of meetings and events that other people have put into your schedule?

  
  

• Do you find yourself apologising for things that are not your fault?

• Are you wracked with guilt at the mere thought of pushing back and saying no?

• When socialising, are you consumed with thoughts about how other people perceive you?

• Do you struggle to give someone honest feedback?

• Do you feel horrible at the thought of putting your own needs first?

Fellow people pleasers, unite!

Come and join me for the next few minutes. I have some support for you if you know you need to wrestle back some time to prioritise yourself and are worried that it’ll upset the good order of everything – and everyone – around you.

The thing that needs no introduction: people-pleasing

I’m confident that you already know what people-pleasing is. Indeed, it’s hard to not know about people-pleasing when you live the definition daily.

But I’m nothing if not thorough – and the people-pleaser within me wants you to think good of me – so a definition is needed.

I like this one from PsychCentral:

People-pleasers are individuals who often disregard their own needs to please others. You may get caught up in giving all of yourself to others.

People-pleasers may have challenges distinguishing their likes, dislikes, and hobbies from others. Knowing their true desires, wishes, and goals may be hard for them.

They may also have difficulty saying no, or they say yes to things they don’t want to do.

People-pleasers will often go to great lengths to be liked, avoid disagreements, and mitigate the feeling that they will be abandoned.

People-pleasing behavior[sic] can often lead to resentment and relationship burnout, leaving the person experiencing it feeling drained and exhausted. If you exhibit people-pleasing behaviors[sic], you may also be prone to experiencing other mental health conditions, such as depression and anxiety.

Resentment. Burnout. Exhaustion. Anxious. Depressed. It's quite a checklist.

I’ll add lonely to PsychCentral’s list.

My friend Mike Campbell talks about people-pleasing in Episode 24 of the HUMANS:CONNECTING podcast. That episode is called ‘Creating Connected Men’ and speaks to the issues that feed the loneliness and disconnection within men in his coaching programs (on which I am also a coach).

In that episode, Campbell speaks about what he calls the ‘Nice Guy Syndrome’. This is another way of saying people-pleasing. Campbell says:

‘What’s wrong with being nice? In isolation, of course, nothing. Be nice, please. But, I think, what we see is – certainly for a lot of the men that I work for is – is this idea of the ‘Nice Guy Syndrome’. Which, broadly speaking, is characterised as someone who is nice in service of his own insecurity as opposed to being in service to the person he’s being nice to. And so, the niceness is conditional.’

Campbell adds:

‘What’s going on beneath the surface matters. And a lot of that is, I am, in part – because I don’t think it’s fair to say entirely – but I am in part driven […] to be nice so that I get something in return. And that might simply be ‘you approve of me’ or ‘you don’t disapprove of me’.

Ouch. That stings. Let’s go deeper.

Why do we people please? Where does it come from?

As you’ve been scouring the internet looking for support, you may have noticed many articles and other advice talk about people-pleasing and why it’s bad (like the PsychCentral definition). For me, these articles were great sources of information but left me without meaningful ways to change my behaviour. 

Image: canva.com

It was helpful for me to understand that people-pleasing is a symptom of something deeper. I needed to understand what that deeper issue was.

As any good diagnostician – or episode of House -  will tell you: Investigate and address the underlying issue and the symptoms will resolve.

We commonly see one underlying issue in our work at HUMANS:CONNECTING: a response to an event in our past that was traumatic and upsetting.

In trying to make sense of the event, we can resolve to be nice and to be accommodating to those around us, so we don’t put ourselves in the position of experiencing those negative consequences again.

Nobody gets angry at or hates the nice person, right?

That event could be messages you received from adults, peers and society. You may remember the event very clearly, others not.

You edit yourself, so you fit the spoken or unspoken expectations or at least not make others feel uncomfortable or judge you negatively.

In many cases, it works. It’s a supremely effective way to keep safe and small. As the nice person, we escape the wrath of anyone or anything who could torment us.

We keep doing it.

It becomes the way that we settle into social situations. It’s how we make friends. It’s how we navigate the relationships within our families, communities and workplaces.

We become so relentlessly nice.   

What people-pleasing really is

This next part can be heavy. I suggest that you go through this content gently, but go through it all the same.

I want to return to the PsychCentral definition and sit with the point that people-pleasers will ‘often go to great lengths to be liked, avoid disagreements, and mitigate the feeling that they will be abandoned.’

Those great lengths can include doing something nice for someone – without being prompted or asked – in exchange for connection: feeling seen, feeling heard and feeling that they belong.

In a sense, this is living out Ralph Waldo Emerson’s words: The best way to have a friend is to be one. It’s sage advice. It’s advice that we put into practice as we navigate our social lives. It’s hard to make friends with someone who’s unfriendly and mean.

Campbell’s interpretation is important: they do this in service of their own needs, not in the service of those they’re being nice to.

In return for not feeling abandoned – and hopefully feeling some kind of connection – people-pleasers become cunning social manipulators who enter others into unspoken social contracts. This is done in the hope that the other person will give them the connection that they need.  

We outsource our own connection needs when we people-please. 

Worthiness for love and belonging

Feeling and believing that you're worthy for love and belonging is key.

If you feel that you’re worthy of love and belonging, the connection offered will be seen and received.

If you don’t feel worthy, the connection given back in response to your people-pleasing act will not be received.

That previous sentence is important, because people pleasers often do not feel worthy of love and belonging and so deny the connection that is being offered them.

We become trapped in a spiral in which no connection is ever received nor is it ever enough.

Fuelling the rage inside us

We can feel elated when the return connection registers, if only for a moment. Then we’re back on the hunt for more.

We are crushed if the connection does not register.

We are filled with resentment. We can rage with indignation: ‘I did all of this for them, and they didn’t even say thank you!’

But do we people pleasers say anything? Of course we don’t. We hate conflict. We want to avoid it, lest someone think that we’re an asshole.

Our identity is in being nice and pleasant. Saying something would not be nice.

This dilemma is torment.

It’s always important to remember the words variously attributed to St. Augustine, Nelson Mandela, the Buddha and Carrie Fisher about resentment: resentment is like drinking poison and expecting the other person to die. 

This inner rage fuels a war within ourselves. We keep it under wraps and hidden from others most of the time.

This personal war’s battles are fought internally. We are filled with hateful self-talk. We become master storytellers who can be both the protagonist and the antagonist in the drama. We attribute cause and motive to others without any evidence at all.

But we keep it all inside. Then something happens – something very minor, like someone leaving the butter out – and we explode.

The explosion may be about the butter being left out, but it is not at all about the butter.

Of this, PsychCentral’s definition says: People-pleasing behavior[sic] can often lead to resentment and relationship burnout, leaving the person experiencing it feeling drained and exhausted.

We go nuclear. The rage is fuelled by our deep existential loneliness and the belief that we’re unworthy of love and belonging.    

How people-pleasing feeds disconnection

In people-pleasing, we disconnect from our authentic selves. And connection to self is the first of the three pillars of connection.

We deny ourselves our own needs in the service of our own insecurities. We’re caught in the dilemma of outsourcing our connection needs to others in the hope that they see us, hear us and help us feel that we belong.

As people-pleasers, we rarely allow others to see the real us. We fear that if someone does see us for who we really are, they’ll leave us. It’s a rehashing of previous wounds.

The spiral we’re trapped in means that we’re always hunting for the next hit, but the connection hit we receive – if we register it – is never enough and will never be enough.

We don’t know how to arrest our descent once in the spiral because we believe that if we show up authentically then we’ll be alone and lonely because the world will think that we’re some kind selfish monster.

Consider this:

• People-pleasing creates loneliness, so the fear of the loneliness that comes from people abandoning us when we are our authentic selves (thus becoming lonely) ignores the fact that we’re experiencing loneliness now.

  
  

• You’re not alone. I invite you to listen to episode 23 of the HUMANS:CONNECTING podcast where Ari Lowinsky shares his experience of loneliness fed by people-pleasing.

Keep reading. There’s some great support coming. 

My experience

This part of the article mentions Phil’s suicide and self-harm attempt. Discretion is advised over the next part. If you need, we have support resources linked on our crisis support page.

I’m a reforming people-pleaser.

I learned early that being accepted, feeling safe and loved often meant editing myself. Curiosity was welcome in school but sometimes punished at home—especially when it made others uncomfortable. That punishment came as silence, rejection, or being hit.

Boarding school in regional Victoria in the early 1990s only deepened that lesson. I was different: sensitive, smart, uninterested in sport, and desperately trying to hide my sexuality. I was bullied, beaten, watched, judged. I tried to take my own life to make it stop.

I was grateful that there were some adults who saw what was happening, alerted my parents, and I got some support. The support helped, but the thing that really helped me get through the endless, tortuous days was becoming so pleasingly nice and friendly.

Perfection and pleasantness became my armour. It worked. The bullying and tormenting stopped when they realised that there was no joy to be had when targeting someone who was so relentlessly nice (I also developed a savage tongue, so that I could verbally eviscerate someone targeting me also made people pause for thought before taking me on). This strategy worked for such a long time. I received good attention – and not the stonewalling and silence I dreaded – when I made people happy and did the right thing. I made great friends at university and in the workplace with my enduring and eternal niceness. I met a wonderful woman; we got married and had two wonderful children together.

At work, I was promoted and given all sorts of opportunities because I have the great ability to say the right thing to the right person at the right time to affect the right outcome.

Indeed, the profession of diplomacy is built upon people who have that skill.

After a great run of being my default strategy for connecting with the world around me, people-pleasing’s effectiveness started to falter. Just like we do when the car starts to lose power, I pumped the accelerator hoping that doubling down on the niceness would spark things back to how they were. 

I was paying the price for all this niceness. I was experiencing a deep loneliness. I was being nice in the service of my own insecurities. I was cunningly manipulating others into social contracts. I would be devastated and fall into a deep shame storm when they did not abide by their end of the unspoken, secret social contract that I had entered them into.

The absence of any sense of worthiness for love and belonging as I was – whatever that looked like – meant that any connection went to Mr Nice Phil, not Phil.

I was terrified of not being so nice when confronted with what I’d been doing (by Mike Campbell in his coaching program).

I’d been living in terror that upsetting someone – anyone – would jeopardise my life, my family and my job.

I feared that everyone would leave me when they found out who I was. I was terrified that I’d be seen as a selfish asshole.

I was terrified that I did not know who I was beneath Mr Nice Phil.

But the way through my loneliness was to come back to myself and then be myself.   

How I came back to myself

I’ll be diving into each of these in future content, but here’s a quick run-down of how I found my way back to real, authentic connection.

Coming back to myself and then being myself was exhilarating like a roller coaster: fun and terrifying all at once.

The process started by knowing my values and then living them. My values are a tremendously helpful compass when I need to make a decision. I used to make decisions based on what would please others and keep the peace: even if a war would rage within myself. Making decisions based on my values brings internal peace and others can adapt and respond for themselves.  

Then came creating and maintaining boundaries. This was particularly helpful when someone would be disappointed with a values-aligned decision I’d made. I felt like I stood on firm ground within myself. This was tough, as it’s easier to create boundaries than to maintain them, but never as tough as I feared.

The last piece was – on reflection – one of the toughest to implement: practice. I needed to give myself the grace to not get it perfect, but to keep showing up. This helped me tame my savage inner critic.

Feeding authentic connection

I could not master my connection needs immediately. Connection takes time and attention. I needed to be persistent and continually prioritise decisions that would feed authentic connection.

There have been hits and misses.

The wins usually came after making a values-based decision that is met with respect. I feel seen, heard and respected. I’d allow myself to receive the respect given to me. I would become proud of myself for the courage it took to state my needs. I felt empowered.

The misses are usually about my poorly worded response. My response would become the issue rather than the focus staying on the issue. But even then, there were hits within the misses. Often the variously-attributed quote ‘Be who you are and say what you feel, because those who mind don’t matter and those who matter don’t mind’ would come to me.

The people who would be most upset by me communicating a need or a boundary often were the ones who benefitted most from me not expressing my needs or boundaries. Those who didn’t mind were those who respected me. This has been a huge lesson for me. 

I feel that there’s a lesson in this for you, too.   

 

A realisation

I wanted to share with you that I noticed that I’d relapsed into people-pleasing as I wrote this article. I noticed that I’d been avoiding communicating my needs and clearly expressing my boundaries. I realised that I was frustrated and disappointed, but that I’d not clearly expressed my expectations.

Happily, I’ve met myself with grace and kindness, rather than the self-loathing of my past. This is a huge win. I’m working to express my needs and expectations and reminding myself that I’m a reforming people pleaser, after all.

How you can come back to connection (Let’s end your loneliness)

You’ve made it to this point because what I’ve shared in this article is resonating with you.

If you’re a people pleaser and work to keep the peace around you, I have a question for you: Whose peace are you keeping?

Image: canva.com

It’s not your peace you’re keeping. You’re paying a price for keeping the peace and not expressing your needs and expectations. You’re manipulating people into an unspoken social contract in the hope that they see you and respect you. You will feel seen and respected when you allow your authentic self to be seen.

Another question: Whose permission are you waiting for? 

As people-pleasers, it’s been my experience that we wait for permission to change. Whose permission are you waiting for? Is it their permission to give?

Final question: What does ‘nice’ mean for you?

Does ‘nice’ always need to mean ‘putting other’s interests ahead of my own’? Is being kind and honest a form of nice you could embrace? Being kind and honest is important: kindness without honesty is people-pleasing, honesty without kindness can be cruel. The and is important.

It’s time to give yourself the permission you seek and take a step.

Those steps can include:

• Knowing your values and then living your values; and

• Creating and maintaining boundaries  

It takes courage to take these steps. You’ll fight yourself the whole way. You may even come into conflict with others. Remember my point above, those who have the most to lose from you changing and living in alignment will make the most noise.

It will also feel like you’re going from meek and mild people-pleaser to A-grade asshole faster than an F1 car down the back straight at Monza. Adopting a practice and experimental mindset where you learn from the hits and misses will have you finding your equilibrium faster than you expect.

And if you need some inspiration to get started, I suggest listening to ‘This is Me’ very loudly, because there’s nothing you’re not worthy of.

Turn this up!

It’s not selfish to honour your needs. It’s the first step back to yourself.

That’s it for this article

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Until next time, be awesomely you.

~ Phil   

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