My intense need to make sure people like me comes from trauma.
As a kid, I had Stockholm Syndrome.
I had no choice — I absolutely had to put all my energy into making the psychopaths who raised me feel connected to me to survive.
While not everyone’s caretakers are as sick and damaged as mine were, the reality is that many of us knew on a psychological level that we needed to help our caretakers care for us.
We needed to make ourselves as likable as possible so they would perform the caretaking we needed to survive.
We “helped them” “help us.”
So it makes sense that now, as adults, we feel survival terror if people don’t like us.
Because if our caretakers had not liked us, our survival actually was in danger!
I won’t get into just how dangerous my childhood was, but as an example, these people who were charged with my care sometimes starved me because it failed to register that I needed food after surgery, or money for food while I was in college.
These patterns are very deeply ingrained and tough to root out.
As usual, Chris, I love this friendly opener to these issues.
I love how you normalize the experience of the deep and sometimes intense urge to get people to like us.
And I also want to invite an Internal Family Systems perspective — if these deep rooted urges to people please don’t respond to initial efforts, it may be simply because they are wound up in traumas that need deeper healing.
So if you can’t get on top of them, I invite you not to criticize yourself.
Simply consider it may take deeper therapy to really get to the root of the issues.
I couldn’t get this solved without deeper work.
As I unwind the traumas that fuel these patterns in me, my people pleasing is diminishing. It’s such a relief.
This inner work is ridiculously hard, but ridiculously worth it!
Thank you, Chris. For the first time, I have been ghosted. I rediscovered a former classmate after many years. I wanted to be friends. She had no interest in the past, of which I was a remote part of. It was HARD not to take that personally.
This made me think of something I read in an event planning book... I might be getting the exact verbiage wrong, but it was something like "Event planners who try to please everyone, thrill no one"... I've decided that I'm going for thrills!
This article also made me think about one of my favorite books for content creators: Fire the Haters by Jillian Johnsrud. That book helped me a ton... One of her most powerful statements: Creating anything requires the willingness to be misunderstood.
It's been puzzling me for many years, especially the counter-intuitive PREE - Partial Reinforcement Extinction Effect, whereby _less_ reinforcement creates _more_ persistent behaviour. I've spent way too long researching later studies on PREE, since reading your post :). And although some people have been persistently trying to explain it for decades, I've yet to find a plausible mechanism that's supported by modern neuroscience - what we actually know about how the brains of vertebrates work.
Guess I'll just have to keep trying ... --- but only to please myself! ;)
My intense need to make sure people like me comes from trauma.
As a kid, I had Stockholm Syndrome.
I had no choice — I absolutely had to put all my energy into making the psychopaths who raised me feel connected to me to survive.
While not everyone’s caretakers are as sick and damaged as mine were, the reality is that many of us knew on a psychological level that we needed to help our caretakers care for us.
We needed to make ourselves as likable as possible so they would perform the caretaking we needed to survive.
We “helped them” “help us.”
So it makes sense that now, as adults, we feel survival terror if people don’t like us.
Because if our caretakers had not liked us, our survival actually was in danger!
I won’t get into just how dangerous my childhood was, but as an example, these people who were charged with my care sometimes starved me because it failed to register that I needed food after surgery, or money for food while I was in college.
These patterns are very deeply ingrained and tough to root out.
As usual, Chris, I love this friendly opener to these issues.
I love how you normalize the experience of the deep and sometimes intense urge to get people to like us.
And I also want to invite an Internal Family Systems perspective — if these deep rooted urges to people please don’t respond to initial efforts, it may be simply because they are wound up in traumas that need deeper healing.
So if you can’t get on top of them, I invite you not to criticize yourself.
Simply consider it may take deeper therapy to really get to the root of the issues.
I couldn’t get this solved without deeper work.
As I unwind the traumas that fuel these patterns in me, my people pleasing is diminishing. It’s such a relief.
This inner work is ridiculously hard, but ridiculously worth it!
Thank you, Chris. For the first time, I have been ghosted. I rediscovered a former classmate after many years. I wanted to be friends. She had no interest in the past, of which I was a remote part of. It was HARD not to take that personally.
I have been there. The exact same thing happened to me. Being ghosted is hard. All the best to you! Don't give up. Find another friend.
Chris, this is a difficult one for me, and your read couldn't have appeared at a more important moment. Many thanks.
🙏
Quite Essential To Read, Understand, and Imbibe. Kudos to the author! Keep Teaching!
This made me think of something I read in an event planning book... I might be getting the exact verbiage wrong, but it was something like "Event planners who try to please everyone, thrill no one"... I've decided that I'm going for thrills!
This article also made me think about one of my favorite books for content creators: Fire the Haters by Jillian Johnsrud. That book helped me a ton... One of her most powerful statements: Creating anything requires the willingness to be misunderstood.
Why, indeed!
It's been puzzling me for many years, especially the counter-intuitive PREE - Partial Reinforcement Extinction Effect, whereby _less_ reinforcement creates _more_ persistent behaviour. I've spent way too long researching later studies on PREE, since reading your post :). And although some people have been persistently trying to explain it for decades, I've yet to find a plausible mechanism that's supported by modern neuroscience - what we actually know about how the brains of vertebrates work.
Guess I'll just have to keep trying ... --- but only to please myself! ;)
Thank you, Chris. This really resonated with me. I am getting better at pleasing myself instead of others.
This really resonated with me today, thanks!