1) Fear of negative emotions, and a denial of those negative emotions. This is rooted in childhoood trauma and abuse. Sometimes the abuse we received is passive, and sometimes it is more direct. You’re afraid to put people into a bad mood. You never want to make anyone feel disappointed. “The audience” becomes the parent. You strive to please, and you imagine severe consequences for blunders. A people pleaser will often say things like “get over yourself”. He’s acquired this idea from bullies, who he submissively follows for protection. A people pleaser is often just a few steps away from becoming a bully himself. It really depends on who he is with, as his self is a mask, a false self.
2) Neurotic levels of naivety. This means you might see too much good in people, but it also means you tend to see too much bad in certain groups of people, or in a person. You might project all the evil on one group of people, such as police, Islam, politicians, or on natives peoples. Nothing is black and white, but people-pleasers often have naive, black and white ways of thinking that stem from neurotic worries. You are not seeing reality as it presents itself, but you are imagining things for the worse, or you swing into the opposite, having unrealistic hopes. A good example of an unrealistic is hope is putting up with abuse, and then hoping that the abuser will change into a non-abuser. If someone is abusing you, he’s probably not going to change. A people pleaser continues hoping for changes that will never actually change. They keep doing the same thing over and over, hoping for a different result.
3) A neurotic desire to be liked by certain people. Why? Because you didn’t get that approval at home. The message you got at home was that there was something about you that needed to be changed, fixed, hidden, and improved. You were criticized by your parents in inappropriate ways. This produces the entertainer, who later becomes the drama-king, or drama-queen. Drama is created by a person who is hell-bent on proving him or herself to a higher status audience. His initial efforts are simply to be entertaining, but when the attempt at positivity backfires into negativity, there is a stink of drama. The drama-king will react to that drama, creating more drama. Emotional reactions tend to create more emotional reactions. Evil can creates more evil. In Buddhism, they call this samsara. An endless sequence of cause and effect, evil causes creating evil effects. A ring of fire.
4) Reliance on external authority to act. The people-pleaser isn’t going to be able to stand on his or her own two feet. He has an idol, or likely, he has many idols. The worse case scenario is that the idol is a family member, even a child. A mother looking to her son to lean on is going to make her son very unhappy. Authorities, idols and heroes give the people pleaser the confidence to take action, but his actions are really just an echo of greater men, or sometimes his actions are merely the echo of his parents, or of her children. His or her spirit is an echo of authority figures in general, such as government, celebrities and politicians who loom large over him like parents. Everything comes from the outside, and the people-pleaser really needs permission to do anything. If he is a musician, he’s usually only interested in doing cover songs, as he’s just living in the shadow of his idol.
5) An inability to say no. An inability to say no indicates a lack of self-worth. A people pleaser can be pressured into doing bad things, and they often end up defined as a tool.
6) Excessive conscientiousness. The people pleaser is worried about what other people think. Unfavorable judgements are scary. Therefore, you pay excessive attention to other people’s ideas and leadership, with very little to say yourself. You end up just following along with the mainstream current. Very few people ever hear your point of view because you worry about wasting their time. You are a follower.
7) A blurry sense of self or no boundaries. You don’t know where you stop and the other person begins. This makes you extremely vulnerable to abuse. People pleasers are very vulnerable to abuse and bullying. You start feeling other people’s emotions, and you start feeling like you are going crazy. Other peoples ideas start coming into your head. You are excessively empathetic and compassionate, and this is exhausting, particularly if you are attached to an abuser. Very few abusers can be helped, but a people-pleaser will remain attached to an abuser. Exhaustion will follow as a result of being interrupted so much. It is exhausting have to say no.
8) You are emotionally dependent to the point where you fear the disapproval of people. You will avoid people out of a fear of what they might say to you. So you start to isolate yourself, seeking solitude more and more. In that solitude, you notice that the abuse you’ve received stays inside you. You continue the abuse by replaying it in your isolation. You will seek partners who share your trauma, and when damaged people pair up with each other, they tend to damage each other even further, because they are escaping from the world into each other. But there is no room in either person for an escape to occur. Each person is stockpiled with negative energy and demons. There’s no where to escape.
9) People pleasers have no sense of self worth. Their self worth comes from their parents. Or sometimes, even worse, a parent will find her self worth from the performance and grace of her child. Having a lack of self worth stems from neglect or abuse. Sometimes a parent will directly insult her child. Other times the abuse is more passive and indirect, an insinuation that the child needs to be fixed, changed, or hidden. A sense of inner deficiency is conditioned in the child.
10) Over-Intellectualization of an abusive experience. There is a justification of something that is unjust. So rather than deal with evil directly, the people pleaser will brush the evil under the carpet by over intellectualizing it. This is also known as excuse making, or justification. Boy named Sue. “Dad was an asshole, but he did it to make us strong!”
11) There is an addiction to approval. Your need for approval goes beyond what is actually being supplied. You end up experiencing withdrawal symptoms from not getting attention and approval, which you think is love. When there is not enough of this love to go around, you experience withdrawal. Like a junkie, you are not getting the dopamine release.
12) Immaturity. A people pleaser is emotionally and psychologically immature. There is a naive approach to following cultural fashions and trends. An immature person is trying too hard to impress and to belong and to fit in. An immature adult is still functioning like someone in junior high school. Popularity is really the only barometer that such a person has to measure what is good and valuable. Abuse retards the inner and spiritual growth of a person. It can keep the person locked into an earlier phase of development. We see this with celebrities like Michael Jackson and even Beyonce and Anthony Kiedis. Grown adults acting like teenagers (and even pre-teens) is common in hollywood. People who are trained to be entertainers as kids can be neurotically naive and immature as adults.
13) Too altruistic. Excessive amounts of compassion and philanthropy. Always bending over backwards for other people because you’re afraid of negative emotions. Neurotically helping to escape the sense that something negative could happen.
14) loneliness and isolation. You aren’t really connecting with anyone because you can’t accept the negative side that all things have.
15) You are excessively impressionable by new trends, jumping on the bandwagon too quickly. This will open you up to abuse. Bullies prey upon peoples flaws, their weaknesses, their naivety, and their errors of judgment. The best way to discover if someone is a bully is to share something with them that is very personal to you, something that embarrasses you and has hurt you. If this person you’ve confided to suddenly disappears and changes his personality, becoming more brazen towards you and starts making snide, disrespectful remarks that upset you, then you’re attached to a bully. His behavior will probably get worse over time, as he’ll find increasingly direct ways to harm you. The appeal of harming people is that it softens them up and makes them easier to control and exploit. The bully’s ability to hurt you also keeps you at a lower status level than your bully, at least in his own eyes. He goes with what he instinctively feels, which is an urge to dominate on the grid of a baboon-like value system.
“It starts with an adult male who loses a fight. He chases a sub-adult, who then bites an adult female, who slaps a juvenile who knocks an infant out of a tree. There is a lack of control. A lack of predictability. You’re sitting there watching a Zebra peacefully. But if someone else is having a bad day, it’s your rear end that is going to get slashed.
It sounds like a terrible thing to confess after thirty years of studying them, but I don’t actually like baboons all that much.” (Robert Sapolsky)
“Be submissive so that he will trust you and you will thereby learn about his true situation. Accept his ideas and respond to his affairs as if you were twins. Once you have learned everything, subtly gather in his power. Thus when the ultimate day arrives, it will seem as if Heaven itself destroyed him.” (Tai Kung, Six Secret Teachings)
Patrick Watts 