People Pleasers

I am one. I’ll admit that up front. Try as I have for many years, I still find this to be true about myself. But, hypocritically, when I see this behaviour in other people, I hate it.

Let me explain to you what I think a people pleaser is. It’s someone who, in every situation, tries to ingratiate themselves in really obvious ways: liking the same things you like, going out of their way to find out about all the things you like and then professing a personal interest and even encyclopaedic knowledge of them.

Another thing you might have encountered is people complimenting you on your hairstyle or clothes all the time because they think that, by giving you this small amount of satisfaction in yourself, they are serving a purpose for you and that this will, eventually, lead you to think of them as indispensible.

Or maybe it’s people who offer to do things for you when it’s clear they only want praise from you for doing it. Or people who give you expensive or personalized gifts for your birthday when they hardly know you, just because they really want you to think they’re a nice, thoughtful person, just right to be your friend.

Crawlers, basically. Bootlickers.

I have been one of these people before now and I can only hope that the severity of this has lessened over time. I recognize it as a hateful problem and try not to do it any more, but there are people who don’t see that they have this problem, or ever acknowledge how lonely, sad and desperate for attention they are.

I don’t want to spend the rest of this blog post writing about how much I hate crawlers . . . although I do . . . Instead, I want to try to analyze where this impulse to please other people comes from and why, even when you recognize what you’re doing, it is still impossible to stop.

With me, I think it goes back to childhood. If you come from the kind of family where your mother didn’t love you enough or make you feel secure enough in her love and appreciation of you then you do, automatically, seek out the approval of other people – it’s a natural impulse I think. That, of course, is where the teacher’s pets and school suck-ups come from. They are people who go out of their way to meet the “model student” requirements so that their teachers will like them and, perhaps, simulate the sort of parental love that those students crave. It’s something a lot of kids do. They view their teachers as sort of surrogate parents, or grandparents if they’re really old, and they like the comfort and security of being the good child and having a daily routine. Being presided over by a smiling, appreciative adult is just the icing on the cake there.

When I was a little kid I had a primary school teacher called Mrs. Timbergen. She was kind of old and she had grey hair and, I think, somewhere in my imagination, I equated her with my Granny. She was my favourite teacher and I was this nauseatingly nice child who always tried to be her special little pet . . . Oh, how other people must have hated me! But that’s where it started I think, and I’ve done it ever since. When I was first at university one of my friends actually accused me of being the favoured pet of one of the female lecturers and it was kind of true – I did go out of my way to try to make that woman like me. (I was still trying to make her like me years later when I was a PhD student and she was helping me through the final stages of my terrible thesis. That was about the time I finally snapped and realized I didn’t actually like her!)

So, when I analyzed my own need to please people I realized that, all through my life, I have tried to be this good child and model student, and, weirdly, I realized that I have mainly done this for older, stronger, nicer and more successful females. This only occurred to me very recently after I finished my PhD, having failed to gain it. The problem with my thesis, in the end, was not that it was based on a bad idea, or that I was a particularly bad researcher (although I certainly wasn’t the best), it was just that the argument I had made was solely constructed based on what other people told me they hoped to see in my writing.

This is mistake number one with writing. You should NEVER write what other people want you to; you will only get confused. This is why I now write for myself, as a “selfie”, and have no real inclination to have either an editor or a mainstream publisher breathing down my neck. It seems to me that all those people ever do is tell you that your ideas don’t work and that you should try theirs instead. And, the thing is, if you’re going to write anything that means something to you, you have to stick to your original ideas and NOT be derailed by other people. This was what I learned during my PhD really. I can’t write if I’m around other people because I’m far too susceptible to other people’s opinions and I will, inevitably, try to tailor my words according to what I think will impress them.

If I could give advice to other people, I would say: “Don’t be a people pleaser.” It gets you nowhere and you end up with no personality of your own. Added to which, you don’t actually secure anybody else’s liking or respect by doing it; people just feel sorry for you and laugh at you behind your back. It’s a way to become bitter and not produce anything of your own. (I guess I’m talking about writing and life together here.)

But the real problem for me is that I can’t seem to stop myself, in certain situations, from slipping back into those old teacher’s pet habits. I do it more with my mother than anyone else now. I tell myself, consciously, that I no longer have to do anything for anyone else, and that I no longer have to take any crap from other people; but then someone asks me for something, and I find myself, immediately, starting to think that I have to. Someone says “jump” and my impulse is to ask “how high?”

So I guess I still am really insecure.

There are things I know that I need to do about this, but bringing myself to do it is tricky. Making breaks with things that have screwed me up and are still screwing me up. But there is so much of this process to get through and there is, for all us, I think, a need for other people to give approval. We get frightened about what will happen to us on our own, so we try to keep people sweet so they won’t leave us. The best of us do it. But if you push it too far it really becomes a problem and people just start to see that, aside from the clinging attentiveness and simulated interest in other people’s lives, you really don’t have one of your own.

I suppose the easiest cure for all of this would just be to round up all the people in my life and treat them all to one giant blast of “FUCK OFF!!” before storming off into the sunset . . . But I can’t. The fear of the aftermath always stops me; especially with my mother, because she fucking terrifies me on a very deep and primal level. I’ve mentioned she’s schizophrenic right? If you tip her over the edge, she really GOES over it. The inner child in me will not face up to this and it’s just easier, always, to give her what she wants. The tricky thing about her is that she’s never pleased by anything, so I spend a hell of a lot of time doing things she says she wants and then discovering that she really wanted something else. Nothing I do is good enough, nor ever has been. But, like I said, the inner child keeps hoping.

This is where people pleasers come from then. They need to be liked and, if they are not, after a very long time of trying, they become bitter. . . . I don’t think I’m bitter exactly, except towards my mother, as you might all have gathered. But I’m not really bitter towards other people because I understand that they have real lives and don’t have the time, space and resources to make me feel better about the emptiness in mine. People are nice, usually, but I’ve always felt like kind of a charity case around people who professed to be my friends, and so, now, if I’m being really nice, I tend to just leave them alone. Now I keep away from people and just talk to a handful of old friends on Facebook or Twitter. With these people, I think, I really do have some things in common. Although, again, it may be that I am fooling myself about this. Maybe later I’ll realize that nobody likes me at all for myself because, in fact, there is no real me and just a simulated mish-mash of other people’s influences . . . Oh, incidentally, possible next blog post topic:

What is the self? Does individuality really exist or is it just a delusion that we give ourselves so we don’t have to realize that we’re all just randomly copying each other out of desperation?

. . .

Or not. Maybe that’s a bit heavy? What do you reckon?

I’m kind of interested actually about what people think of this blog. I don’t know if I have regular readers, although I suspect probably not, but if you’ve been reading consistently, or even if you’ve only read a couple of my posts, you might have picked up the running theme of sarcasm, depression, or perhaps out-and-out craziness.

I’m not admitting to any of these things here, nor will I deny them. And I wasn’t going to do this actually, because I thought that maybe it would be better just to write this thing for myself and, possibly, slip in a few plugs for my books (WHICH ARE AVAILABLE ON AMAZON – HA!). But I guess I should probably find out if it’s actually of interest to other people, or whether it’s just making everybody think I’m nuts.

Because, if you think I’m nuts then that’s ok. Sometimes I think the same thing.
And, somehow, this blog has become less about my writing and more about me and my personal problems. Actually, everything I do always DOES become about me and my personal problems, somehow or other . . . So maybe I am a complete mess after all! :-/

This is not me presuming that the rest of the world is going to want to hear my sob story. The most hits I’ve ever had for this blog in a single day was 27. Admittedly that’s better than nothing but it’s hardly the world and its wife, is it? So I’m under no illusions that I’m going to reach people with tales from my sad little life, or that I can make people feel sorry for me. But I am interested as to whether I sound like someone you’d want to keep reading, or whether my insanity is just a bit too much.

Suddenly though, it occurs to me that this might only facilitate my people pleasing problem. Or maybe it would cure it? . . . Oh I don’t know. Just tell me what you think of me and I’ll try not to cry.

Thanks.