People pleasers’ ‘selflessness’ can have serious roots
Since he was 8 years old, Mikah Jones felt like everyone’s on-call therapist. He provided unconditional advice and comfort to peers, classmates and even adults – while they rarely reciprocated.
Jones knew he was a people-pleaser. However, he didn’t realize his inability to say no had roots deeper than a fear of rejection: a trauma response to the emotional neglect from his abusive father.
“My father barely ever told me he loved me,” says Jones, now 20. “I thought my father would only be happy whenever I did something that made him happy.”
After years of being berated or underappreciated, Jones put his own needs aside in order to avoid the emotional, verbal and physical abuse. This perpetuated a cycle of his “very strong responsibility to give everything” to his father, friends and even strangers in order to gain their approval.
People cope with and survive traumatic childhood experiences in different ways. Most people are familiar with fight, flight and freeze in order to achieve safety and escape a negative situation. But some, like Jones, engage in what trauma experts call “fawning,” or attempt to please the threat in order to avoid conflict.
“Fawners or people pleasers will be deeply attached to the idea of being overly nice, because often the belief is is that by being nice, that will protect me against unpleasant situations with friends or family,” says Katie Mckenna, a psychotherapist and co-host of the “In Sight” podcast.
While this lesser-known trauma response seems harmless, experts warn that “being too nice” is actually a maladaptive coping mechanism with serious consequences.
Fawning involves “consistently abandoning your own wants and needs to serve others to avoid conflict, criticism or disapproval,” Mckenna says. It’s also known as people-pleasing or codependence and includes over-apologizing, being hyper-aware of what others think and having an inability to set
boundaries.
Trauma experts say fawning is most common in victims of relational abuse, referring to environments where parents, siblings or loved ones are emotionally controlling, abusive or neglectful.
“When people think of trauma, they usually think of abuse – either physical abuse or sexual abuse. But there is another type of abuse,” Mckenna says. “If you were brought up by non-nurturing or abusive parents, you still need to form that attachment in order to feel safe. But in order to do this, you'd have to adjust to who your parents are.”
As a result, some children may instinctively “restore that sense of safety” by fawning.
“Because the child is feeling as though they're in danger, they become conditioned to appease the caregiver in adulthood in order to become connected again,” says Jaclyn Bsales, a psychotherapist and licensed clinical social worker at Hillcrest Counseling.
On the outside, Jones appeared selfless and kind, but few people knew that he was struggling with what would be considered an unhealed attachment wound.
“Those (compliments) are pretty common things for me to hear. And at some point, I became tone-deaf to them. They didn't mean anything to me anymore,” Jones says.
Unlike fight, flight and freeze responses, fawning is often overlooked because it's mistaken for generosity. But glorifying these behaviors as “selfless” can have serious repercussions. For instance, Bsales warns that someone who is conditioned not to say no may lose their sense of self and identity.
“Oftentimes, this impacts their ability to be their true authentic self, to set boundaries, and to really prioritize their own emotions and needs because they're so fixated on others,” Bsales says.
It can also lead to future unhealthy relationships; Mckenna says fawners are more likely to seek familiar interactions with those who reject or ignore their needs. But even though fawners may seem co-dependent, the opposite is also true: Often, they are hyper-independent when it comes to their own problems and avoid seeking help out of fear of appearing “selfish.”
In recent years, Jones' fawning tendencies stopped when he looked inward and reflected on his past – specifically, his relationship with his father. And ultimately, he learned it's OK to prioritize yourself at the expense of disappointing others.
“People think it's a bad thing when you take care of yourself, because society wants you to fit their role of, ‘I need you to be things for me and and just let me take advantage of you and do whatever I want to you,' “Jones says.
When he started setting boundaries and saying no, Jones admits he lost many people in his life including his high school friends and even his father, temporarily. However, he says it was crucial to his self-healing journey.
As an expert in anxiety, domestic violence and trauma, Bsales agrees that the “number one step” in recovery is self-awareness, which includes checking in with yourself and making sure your needs aren't being compromised. She also recommends traumabased therapy like eye movement desensitization and reprocessing therapy.
“It's specialized for complex and regular PTSD and it's phenomenal for actually breaking down the trauma responses, whatever they may be, by healing the actual attachment wounds that created them in the first place,” Bsales says.
After taking the time to understand and cope with his own underlying trauma, Jones says he no longer relies on external validation to feel adequate. Instead, he not only learned to love himself, but also rekindled a healthier, yet conditional relationship with his father – which could not be possible without “the work I've done on myself.”
“I finally started to find that balance of self boundaries, things I'm willing to tolerate and starting to define the kind of people I want to have in my life,” he says. “But most importantly, I learned how I wanted to feel around myself.”