People Pleasing & The Anxious Attachment Style

If you're anxiously attached, you learned that dismissing your own feelings & people pleasing was the way to approval, acceptance, & safety. This was an adaptive survival response that makes sense. However, now as an adult, it may be doing you more harm than good.

Transcript

Welcome back.

Let's talk about people pleasing and the anxious attachment style.

A brief explainer.

It's known that the anxious attachment style begins in early childhood,

Stemming from inconsistent attunement from the parent.

Attunement basically means the parent's demeanor toward the child is curious about who the child is,

Mirrors back to the infant what the infant is feeling,

And does their best to understand the kid and make sure he or she consistently feels accepted.

In the strange situation,

A study done to assess attachment styles,

When mom left the anxious child with a stranger,

A safe therapist,

The child protested vigorously while mom was leaving,

Was unable to be comforted by the safe stranger during mom's absence,

And when mom returned,

The child was still agitated and clingy,

Never finding that soothed,

Settled state.

This is fascinating stuff,

And this anxiously attached child's reactions differ greatly from the securely attached and the avoidantly attached children.

Because of a lack of attunement,

There's lots of room to do a deeper dive into what that actually looked,

Sounded and felt like growing up.

The child had to adapt to mom's and dad's needs as a matter of survival,

As opposed to feeling free to express the entire spectrum of his or her authenticity,

As well as the entire spectrum of feelings.

If your parents couldn't tolerate and accept your whole range of feeling and authenticity,

You probably had to swallow these parts of yourself or certain feelings in order to get approval and feel safe.

This is how people pleasing begins.

A reminder,

As adults and especially as children,

We have core needs.

These needs are basically,

One,

The need to feel emotionally safe.

This is the reliable and consistent attunement from the parent.

Two,

The need to feel seen.

This is the felt experience of being understood by parents,

Including the child's full range of authenticity and feelings being tolerated and accepted.

Three,

The need to be soothed,

A gentle touch by the parent when the child is upset,

Settling the kid's nervous system.

And four,

The need to be appreciated.

This is when the parents celebrate in the child's small wins and are there in an understanding way when it isn't a win.

A little boy or girl,

Or you if you're anxiously attached,

Never felt safe to disagree with others because your entire authentic being wasn't consistently accepted.

So your natural adaptation was to please others.

The message you internalize as a result is basically you're not entitled to have your own point of view.

Because of your parents own trauma or stress,

They often misinterpreted or invalidated your feelings or needs.

If this happened consistently enough,

The message you internalized is that your feelings and needs don't matter.

Peeling away the onion layer even further,

A child may develop a core sense of shame or unworthiness.

And with good reason,

Their little brains concluded because why else wouldn't my parents be there for me in this way that makes me feel safe?

There must be something wrong with me.

Because your parents were emotionally unavailable and because a child longs for connection,

The absence of that connection can be traumatic.

The child learns to dismiss their own feelings and needs and even disconnect from them in order to accommodate the parent and whatever the parent is needing.

Of course this adaptation is a survival response.

It makes complete sense.

The child only has one set of parents.

So it's basically interpreted as a life or death situation.

The child must learn to do whatever it takes to earn the parents love,

Approval,

And attention.

If you're anxiously attached,

You'll learn that being nice,

Dismissing your own feelings,

And putting others first is the way to be worthy of love.

This is what finally felt safe in childhood.

And this belief has now carried over into adulthood and into your adult relationships.

This can lead to resentment and feeling anxious and just shitty because basically it's living inauthentic in authentically.

And who feels good when doing that?

People pleasing is essentially trying to control how someone sees you.

An important reminder,

It makes sense.

This is a big first step toward healing,

Validating that inner child,

That part of you now,

Who has learned to survive in this way.

People pleasing looks like one,

Over explaining or apologizing.

Two,

Saying yes out of fear when you want to say no.

Three,

Overbooking yourself at work,

Socially,

Etc.

Even if you feel burned out.

Four,

A deep fear of conflict,

An inability to express healthy anger.

Five,

Inability or difficulty having someone be disappointed or upset with you.

Six,

Not stating your own opinions,

Not trusting yourself.

Seven,

Defaulting to someone else's opinion.

Eight,

Passive aggressive behavior,

Not directly stating what you need.

More reminders.

One,

You are not responsible for other people's happiness.

Two,

Your worth doesn't come from the approval of others.

Three,

All healthy relationships have boundaries and limits.

Four,

Other people don't need to agree with or like your boundaries and limits.

Five,

Upsetting or disappointing others doesn't mean you're bad or wrong.

Lastly,

How to heal.

One,

Be aware of this felt experience or thought.

If I can placate the people around me,

I will feel safe.

Remember that placating others is a safety behavior to avoid conflict or minimize the risk of being hurt.

Two,

Learn to say,

Let me get back to you on that.

Three,

Practice awareness of the pattern.

People pleasing was an adaptive coping skill to stay safe.

Be kind to yourself when you notice this behavior.

Four,

Practice meeting your needs.

You've probably learned to abandon your needs to control how others see you.

Practice meeting your needs by small acts of self-care each day.

Five,

Practice placing boundaries.

This will initially feel uncomfortable and even cause guilt or fear.

That's OK.

It will get easier.

And six,

Practice emotional regulation.

When that fear and discomfort arises,

Practice noticing and sitting with it.

The root of people pleasing is an inability to sit with discomfort.

Learning to sit with these difficult emotions is healing.

Thanks for listening.

I hope I hope this was helpful.

Reviews

So helpful! I could breathe through this.. I’ve read about attachment styles before, but you get right to the point and explain it so it’s relatable. Thank you for providing the tools so I can move through the unworthiness and shame I’ve lived under for so long. 🙏🏼🧡

I like the clarity and conciseness of this talk. Thanks 🙏

Wonderful explanation and summation of people pleasing behavior. I very much want to learn how to sit with this unchosen discomfort I feel because of forces outside of my control that occurred before I could begin learning to act on my own.

I will continue to practice siting with my discomfort no matter how challenging it feels, to hold self compassion for myself, while letting go of the need to do it perfectly.

Thank you very much for your talks. This is very helpful. I appreciate the recommendations for what to say to respond differently and heal. I also listened to the avoidant one, and it really resonated. I’d love to hear one on anxious-avoidant attachment, if you are taking requests:). Thank you!

Thank you 🙏🏼 this is the story of my life. Only now knowing who I am is an adaptation and inauthentic can I reconnect to who I am ✨. This is going to be good, what a privilege.
Getting used to asking myself where I’m operating from in each moment.
Thank you again for sharing and helping me along my way 💛

Well, you described me to a T. Now to try and fix myself :-(
Thank you so much for your insight!

Concise and clear! Love it

This was a fantastic distillation of my entire life. I have been working with a therapist for a few years to change this deeply ingrained pattern. Thank you. So helpful to have this clear, concise explanation with action steps. Very good.

I have been a people-pleaser pretty much my entire life and I honestly believed that it was my personality and just the way I was born. This meditation is life changing for me! To have this new understanding and perspective of myself is so freeing and I feel as light as a feather after that weight was lifted from my soul. Now to start the journey of discovering who I actually am myself without influence or what I think I should or shouldn’t be. I cannot thank you enough for this!

Really Excellent summary of people pleasing, and the motivations for it. Also gave great insight into patterns and ways to work with them. Thanks!

Brilliant talk, hit the spot in so many ways! I'm trying hard and have been to give myself metta (self love) instead of making everyone else happy and loved
I will go back to this talk.
Namaste 🙏🧡

Thank you. That was a very direct explanation of People Pleasing, what it looks like and some ways to begin to deal with it. I really like your gentle approach, not blaming the parents or the self.

Very good talk and helpful advice also
Thanks for sharing your insights 😊

Thank you for sharing this in such an understandable way. I appreciate being able to listen to it multiple times.

Very well explained. I recognise myself. Mixed feelings. Need to know more. Thank you.

This was extremely illuminating and helpful. Thank you ☮️

Clear explanation of the anxious attachment style and its frequent compensatory behavior, people pleasing.

That was an uncomfortable listen as I recognised myself a lot there, but I will listen over and over as it will be very helpful. Thank you.

Very enlightening, thank you. A lot of the things you mention seem to apply. Now trying to work out what happened in childhood that might have caused this...I guess 70's & 80's parenting styles were still dominant parenting which didn't cater much to different kids & different emotions. I'm also curious how to reconcile being an anxious people pleaser, with being a nice, helpful person. Lots of food for thought.

Thank you, this was very helpful. I have been on my healing from people pleasing journey for some time. I am pleased to say that a work colleague has given me lots of opportunities to demonstrate my progress, uncomfortable as it has been. I have also benefitted from Inner Child healing. I enjoy listening to your very clear and enlightening teachings 🙏