What People-Pleasing Costs Us: With Selina Nguyen
By Selina Nguyen
The term ‘people-pleasing’ is often thrown around half-heartedly and has now become common language that people use to describe difficulty asserting themselves and saying what’s truly on their mind.
While not totally inaccurate, what gets lost when we make passing comments and jokes like “ha ha I’m such a people-pleaser” is the true depth and impact that it has on ourselves and our intimate relationships when we abandon ourselves in favour of our partner’s real or perceived experience.
We default to the safe option, and we choose being liked and being accommodating over authenticity. We choose protecting ourselves and the other person over the potential for conflict and thus, connection.
We say “whatever you want is fine” over the emotional risk in saying “I actually want this”.
We minimise our wants and needs, often not because it’s a conscious choice to do so but because we trick ourselves into thinking “maybe this isn’t so bad”, “maybe just this one time” or “I don’t want to make them feel bad”.
This can manifest in a spectrum of ways through sex and relationship therapy, for example:
The partner who has been stewing in resentment for years attends therapy because they’re questioning leaving their relationship
The partner who says yes to everything in order to not upset their partner attends therapy because they no longer desire sex
The partner who has never felt understood by their partner attends therapy because their erections are inconsistent or they don’t know what they want sexually
The Cost of Being the Easy Partner
Whether clients have come in to discuss sexual function, desire, anxiety, relationship conflict and anything in-between,part of the therapy process is an examination of our wants and needs, and our ability to identify, ask for, and receive them.
When we look behind the curtain at our unique individual histories, for many of us but especially for the common people-pleaser, we learnt somewhere along the way of living that it was not okay to express how we actually felt.
Sometimes we were told directly “don’t make a big deal out of this” or “you’re too much”. Other times, it was a series of subtle rejections when a parent didn’t know how to respond, a date ghosted you or a sexual experience went awry. What we tend to take away from these experiences is a belief that there are parts of ourselves that are acceptable to others and parts that are not. We learn that, at the core of it all, it’s better to have less needs.
When we think of babies, we see that this behaviour is learnt and socialised into us. There’s not a single baby that would hesitate to cry out if they needed something. In this way, we know that self-expression is innate and we do what we can with the tools we have at our disposal.
Somewhere along the way, we learn a formula that says ‘in order to maintain this connection, I need to be smaller, nicer, more easygoing, more accommodating, more independent or more helpful.’
We take on the role of ‘the one who keeps it all together’ or ‘the independent one who doesn’t have needs’. We over-function in the hopes that our partners will understand what we are silently asking, which is that they love us in the same ways or to the same intensity that we love them. This often shows up in feeling like our partners should “just know” or that we “shouldn’t have to ask” when it comes to our needs, hoping that they’ll see us without allowing space for our needs to really be seen.
They don’t hear the silent request and so we wonder why we feel so unseen or resentful in our relationships until it blows up. And then we rinse and we repeat, whether it’s within the same relationship or in the next.
These independent, needless roles we take on become masks, which become our relationships, which become our lives until we pause and take a look at how we got here. Each time we reflexively smooth things over with a “whatever you want is fine”, we sacrifice the opportunity to learn what we need and the opportunity to learn that relationships can be spaces where our needs are met.
The Practice of Taking Up Space
Whether we’re asking to go slower during sex, to open a relationship, to introduce a kink, asking for more quality time or simply voicing that something upset us in a relationship and that we want to repair the patch, it can feel immensely vulnerable to name that for ourselves and in front of our partners.
Breaking this pattern requires us to face the emotional risk of being witnessed and our held stories and beliefs about who is allowed to want. It asks that we sit with the uncertainty of not knowing how it will land with the other person and to loosen our grip on controlling how they see us. It demands the courage to potentially disappoint our partner.
When we take up space by sharing what we want, whether it’s for dinner or within sex, it is an invitation for our partners to get to know us in this deeper and more authentic way.
When we don’t name our desires, we have made the decision for our partners that they can’t or won’t meet our desire. When our partners have no idea that this is going on, everyone loses. We don’t get to experience our desire and our partners don’t get to experience knowing us in that way because they weren’t given the opportunity to do so.
In order to be in loving relationships, we have to allow our partners the chance to support us.
What Happens When the People-Pleaser Starts Asking
Having needs and desires is an invitation for closeness, communication and intimacy. This invitation doesn’t damn relationships, but it reveals them.
What’s difficult in long-term relationships when one partner starts the practice of taking up space after a long history of doing the opposite, is that it inherently requires the relationship to reconfigure itself in some way.
The relationship has to expand to accommodate the shift and this can be particularly difficult when we have years or decades of an engrained pattern of holding back in order to avoid conflict. It is even more difficult when the other partner did not even know that this was happening and were part of a game that they didn’t know they were playing.
This leaves us with layers of confusion about what was real in the relationship and what was people-pleasing, guilt over causing the disruption, and grief in how simpler the relationship used to be. It’s at this point where the next chapter of our relationship starts and we get a say in how it’s written.
What You Need Isn’t the Problem
Hiding our needs is not as kind, helpful or peaceful as we might initially think.
When we deny or sacrifice our needs on the altar of ‘being a good partner’, we sacrifice both ourselves, our relationship and our sex life. There is no sexual desire or connection to be found in “whatever you want is fine”.
As we start to find our own wants and desires, we begin the process of getting to know ourselves and each other in this deeper way. We also have to develop the skills that come alongside not always getting what we want.
Hearing a ‘no’ does not mean that you should never have asked, but it will provide you this opportunity to find another way to still meet each other without losing yourselves. To ask for your wants anyway is to make it an ongoing conversation and to see where the overlap of ‘what I want’ and ‘what you’re able to give’ actually exists.
It requires us to give up the strategy of being lovable through people-pleasing, and to let ourselves be witnessed, known and loved on our own accord. To do so is brave, vulnerable and erotic.
To seek individualised support around relationship patterns, book an Initial Session with Sex Therapist Selina Nguyen.