[Image ID: tags from Tumblr user strawberri-syrup that read: #how do u translate knowing u do this into actually fixing it #my lack of communication has killed all my friendships and idk where to start /End ID]
Hey, good question! It's one thing to know about what your behaviors are and another thing to know how to change them into new (hopefully helpful) behaviors. Idk if this will help you, but I'm going to bring up some strategies to help folks break free of their people pleasing habits.
Let's focus on you, first. Being a people pleaser requires you to objectify and dehumanize yourself in the process, so that is what you're working against. When you people please, there is a part of yourself that has decided your comfort and your needs are not as important or worthy as other people's comfort and needs. This isn't usually a conscious decision, but rather learned through past experiences and current insecurities. It's why a lot of people pleasers have a history of emotional abuse: the abuser requires you to shut down your emotional needs and predict their moods, and when you can't do that (no one can forever) they punish you. So you might very well have picked up the message that you are only as good as you are useful or only as good as you are patient/nice and that any amount of "negative emotion" (anger, sadness, disappointment, etc) will not be tolerated even by people you love.
That is a hard cycle to break out of. So, to start, I think it's good to take some time to reflect on what emotion or belief drives your need to people please and bottle yourself up. Working against feelings of insecurity, fear of abandonment, fear of ridicule, fear of conflict... that's the hardest part of this, but it's also the most important thing to practice. But there are things that will help you.
So let's say you've already figured out why you act like this. You know why you tend to people please and you're in the middle of processing your feelings about it. Good! That will be an ongoing process. But reflection and wanting to change aren't much without action behind them, and that is much harder than just thinking about things.
So! First really actionable thing you can do is set some boundaries! You don't have to do the scary telling your friends part yet, you just need to know what your boundaries are. A lot of people pleasers don't know what their boundaries are. They might have boundaries, but they let people walk over those boundaries because they don't recognize that they were boundaries to begin with. So, define those. Maybe you don't like being touched in certain ways. Maybe you get anxious and need to leave in certain situations. Maybe you need to have a dedicated time for just yourself without anyone contacting you... idk what your needs are; I'm not you. But you are you and you know what you need and want -- or at least have a better chance of figuring it out than I do.
Remember!! Boundaries are something *you* enforce for yourself. Obviously, a good friend will respect your boundaries, but if someone doesn't respect your boundaries, it is your job to respond to that. Let's say you have the boundary, "Don't yell at me/raise your voice in anger when we're having a disagreement." Well, you can't control someone who doesn't care about your feelings and will walk over your boundary even after you told them about it. What you can do is control your response. So, when you think of the boundaries you have, you should also consider what you will do in response to someone crossing that boundary. In our example, perhaps a good response would be to walk away, leave the conversation until the other person can talk to you with respect for your needs.
I've spent a long time on boundaries, but that's because it's one of the most important things for a people pleaser to understand about themselves. Think of people pleasing like muscle memory. If you do it enough, it will be your default mode of action. You won't have to think about it to do it. But breaking your current muscle memory and rebuilding that memory into something else will require intention and dedication. Boundaries help you focus your intentions and define your needs. Many smarter people than me have talked about boundaries before, so look into some resources about how to make and maintain boundaries if you want to learn more.
Next, setting expectations. This is about understanding where your limits are and having conversations with the people you love before it becomes an issue. Best example I have is one of my own experiences. I am very bad at responding to texts and messages when I'm overwhelmed or busy. I can go weeks without responding if the matter isn't urgent. But this can be a problem in my relationships if that behavior goes fully unaddressed. People start to feel like you're avoiding them or blowing them off. So I started setting expectations for folks -- I was open about the fact that my response times are bad. I was clear that it was not a personal thing when I didn't get back to people. And I made sure to reassure people that even if I'm not responding, I am *looking* at the messages soon after they're sent, and I *will* respond if there is an emergency or if there's a time sensitive question. I haven't had a problem with this since having open and honest conversations up front *before* it became a real problem.
All that to say, if you know you have preferences or behaviors that might conflict with your relationships, talk to your friends about it and make sure y'all are on the same page. A lot of times, people pleasers feel like they need to anticipate the needs of the people around them. That can be good and bad, depending on how you go about it. But it is much easier when you actually talk to them about their needs and expectations. This should be a two-way conversation. Everyone involved should state their needs and together you should define expectations within the relationship.
The communication part is really the key here. It isn't bad to want to care for your friends. It isn't even bad to occasionally put your own preferences aside in order to compromise. But if your friends don't know that something is upsetting you, they can't do anything about it. Which cycles around to the emotional abuse pattern of "mind reading." When you hide your anger or resentment, you are essentially making your friends read your emotions and anticipate your needs. It destabilizes the friendship. If your friends don't know what upsets you, how can they know that they're upsetting you if you don't speak up? Not only that, but if they're trying to figure out why you're upset, they might read it wrong and find solutions for problems you don't have while the original problem continues to churn inside you. That is ALSO a thing people pleasers do.
Another example. I have a people pleaser friend who has the history of emotional abuse etc etc. There was a time (years ago) when she'd get drunk and show me her tits and like. Yeah. I appreciated looking at tits. Love that stuff. But what she anticipated is that I would want to have sex with her. So she offered one day (she was sober, fwiw) and I said sure! But I always like to have a conversation about what people are into and all that. She dodged so many of my questions about what she liked, what she wanted, etc. Not only that, but I felt like she wasn't really listening to me when I was talking about what I liked and she didn't ask any questions to get to know my preferences better. So when we finally got to the sex part, I was stressed out. She sounded like she was faking her pleasure. She didn't want to touch me in any way that really felt good to me. She just expected me to use my strap and have my fun. It made me feel absolutely terrible about myself. Like, I didn't need to have sex with her. I didn't think that her showing me her boobs was naturally going to lead to sex. Looking back, this was a particularly rough time for our friendship, so we eventually had a conversation about it. It came out that she only had sex with me because she assumed that's what I not only wanted but expected from her. I honestly felt extremely hurt. I'd originally thought she *wanted* to have sex with me, and that was the only reason I agreed to do it. I felt ugly and undesirable when she didn't want to touch me. I felt like her fake pleasure sounds were condescending. Not to mention she tried to dirty talk in a way that supremely turned me off, which might have been avoided if she was actually engaged in our conversation talking about what we wanted/liked in bed.
The point of that story, though, is that it really damaged our friendship and was a blow to my (at the time) fragile self-esteem. These days, I'd be able to spot some of these red flags and choose not to have sex under those conditions, but at the time it was hard to recognize what was happening until it was over. I learned that she would not be forthright with her own needs and desires and whatnot, so I had to start checking in with her when she offered to do certain things. Questioning her like, "Do you really want that? Do you *know* what you want right now?" And being clear that she could not read my mind and that I didn't appreciate her trying to. That if I wanted something from her, I would ask directly and respectfully and that she was always allowed to say no if she didn't want to and I wouldn't get angry at her for refusing me. Years later, we are still friends. There are still rough spots we need to work out, but she has gone to therapy and is finally dating someone who doesn't treat her like an emotional support girlfriend. It has taken her years, but she is finally working to correct some of her people pleasing behaviors, and we have a better relationship for it. It took her awhile to believe me when I said I would tell her directly if I was upset and that she didn't need to worry about me dropping subtle hints at her.
Which, I think, finally brings me to my last point. So far, I've talked about defining your boundaries and setting expectations within your friendships. I've explained through example why the behavior can actually recreate patterns of abuse or cause harm. A lot of this stuff you can work on alone, but there is another thing you need to be able to work on changing your people pleasing ways: a good, trustworthy friend.
I started being able to talk about my emotions, my needs, my annoyances, my angers when I finally felt like I had someone who would listen to them without getting angry and flying off the handle. When I first started dating my current partner, I was in awe of how level headed our conversations were when there was conflict. They listened to me. They told me how they were feeling. We worked together to see where the issue was and what we could do to address the issue in the future. It was my partner who brought up problems they had, and it was those direct conversations that made me feel safe enough to speak up when I had a problem. It gave me a space to practice being vulnerable with someone I knew loved me and wanted the best for both of us. On the other side of this, I believe my friend that I mentioned above really started to make progress when she started therapy and when I showed her that I was serious about being open and honest with my emotions and that she wasn't obligated to fix my problems for me. It also helped that she got out of a cycle of dating toxic fuckheads who enabled/encouraged her people pleasing behaviors so they could take advantage of her.
The fear of abandonment, fear of ridicule... the stuff I talked about up front. Those are not illogical fears when most of your life you've been taught that you will be punished for your emotions. You need to surround yourself with people who will encourage you to speak up for yourself. You need a friend who will check in with you and make sure you're not just saying "yes" because you feel like you should. You need people who are clear about what they want and need from your friendship.
Standing up for yourself, expressing your emotions, stating your needs, setting boundaries -- you can only do so much alone. The hardest part is deciding to take that leap of faith in your friends and gritting your teeth hoping for a good outcome. Hopefully, you have decent friends who care about your feelings and who will make an effort to support you. But let me be clear: if your friends treat you badly because you've done the hard emotional work to start setting and maintaining boundaries, those are not good friends. I am a big believer in cutting toxic people out of your life when you can, because you *do* deserve better. And, thankfully, most people are not going to react badly to you having preferences and opinions and feelings. It's normal for someone to have their best interests in mind, and as long as they aren't hurting other people, it's okay to have hard emotions like anger, disappointment, sadness, etc. But it's okay for you to have standards for how you are treated in your friendships/relationships. It's not just okay, but it's absolutely essential for healthy relationships to thrive. And it is hard to trust when you've had a lifetime of feeling like you can't trust others to treat you with respect, but you still have to try. And you don't have to be emotionally invested in people who treat you like an object whose job it is to keep them happy. Even just having one friend that you feel safe to be vulnerable with can make a huge difference and give you a way to practice these things.
Tl;dr -- define your boundaries, have a plan for how to respond if someone crosses a boundary, have conversations with your friends to set expectations within the friendships even if there is no current conflict, and believe that you deserve to have a voice and that you are worthy of the full range of human emotion. Ultimately, you have to find a way to convince yourself that you are worth caring about, and you need to surround yourself with people who do care about you and who will help you learn healthier behavioral habits.
Sorry for the long post, but hopefully there's something you can take away from it. Perhaps others will have other strategies they'd like to add, but knowing your boundaries and learning to care about yourself are at the core no matter what.
