Flying purple people-pleasers
May I have your attention, please, ladies? Yes, you there with the sweet smile on your face, scanning the room to make sure everyone is comfortable, setting down that platter of cookies and turning your attention towards me because I’ve asked for it and it would be rude to ignore me.
We women are well-trained in people-pleasing. Our mothers before us were trained by their mothers before them, who were trained by their mothers before them, and so on, until we are all walking around wearing the one-eyed, one-horned uniform of the peacekeeping, placating, pacifying, propitiating, perfectionistic purple people-pleasers of the world.
We Southern ladies are particularly comfortable in this role, and it’s not really a terrible quality to have. Who doesn’t like the one you can always count on to say yes, the one who takes on more than they should in order to keep from asking anyone else to do it? The people-pleasers are the ones who will always show up with more than was required and stay the latest to make sure everything is done. They never disagree, always validate and will never make you feel that you have done anything wrong, even if you have.
Psychology Today magazine published a list of “10 Signs You’re a People-Pleaser”:
You pretend to agree with everyone.
You feel responsible for how other people feel. You apologize often.
You feel burdened by the things you have to do. You can’t say no.
You feel uncomfortable if someone is angry at you. You act like the people around you. You need praise to feel good. You go to great lengths to avoid conflict. You don’t admit when your feelings are hurt. I’ll not go into too much discussion on these and leave it to you to decide where you fall on the spectrum. For myself, though, I will admit that I am sometimes guilty of a lot of them, but not always. They say that self-awareness is the first step to healing and I have been thinking about this for a while. I hope I am making some strides.
There is no question that we, as a society, are used to women behaving this way, so it is no wonder it makes us uncomfortable when women speak up and refuse to back down. You’d think, here in the 21st century, that we’d be to a point that women could be heard without judgment. Clearly, we are not.
Back at the turn of the 20th century when women began asking for the right to vote, it was downright disturbing for not only the men whom they had hitherto trusted to
vote for them, but also for the women who were perfectly comfortable with keeping their place in the world. Those rabble-rousing women were seen as pushy and obnoxious and disrespectful of our country and its traditions. How dare they suggest that there was a need for change?
When the concept of a woman’s right to vote was first proposed in a serious manner at the Seneca Falls Woman’s Rights Convention in July of 1848, not all the women in attendance agreed it was a good idea. Can you imagine there being any argument against it in such a setting? The amendment to the Constitution didn’t pass until 1920, a long and arduous battle for the women behind the movement. In fact, an interesting side bar is that Charlotte Woodward, a 19-yearold woman from New York, was at that 1848 Convention and was the only participant still living and able to vote once the measure finally passed.
That was a long time to hold strong to an unpopular perspective, but it seems ridiculous today to imagine women not being able to vote. Thank goodness those women checked their peoplepleasing tendencies at the door!
I tend to steer clear of politics in this column. I am moderate in my views on most political topics and believe that we get further by being willing to listen to and respect each other than we do with the barn-burning, stump-stomping, rigid judgment I often see displayed from the opposing sides. We have determined a great number of hills we are willing to die on, which often leaves us with a singular perspective while reason gets left at the bottom of whichever hill we choose.
I am increasingly concerned by the tone surrounding politics in our country and the latest words about four women who are standing strong in their beliefs has me particularly worried. The idea that “if they don’t like it they should leave” is about the least patriotic position I can imagine, and yet it is bantered about with flag-waving fury by people who feel threatened by their views. Whether you agree with what they espouse or not, they have every right to be here as not only citizens of this country but as citizens who were elected by a majority in their communities to represent them within our system of government. While I don’t agree with everything they have to say, I at least realize that we people-pleasing ladies could learn a lot from them. Perhaps we can all search our hearts and find our voices and start standing a bit stronger in our views, regardless of who we might offend.