So, I had an incredibly fucked-up childhood in a toxic abusive environment and never really learned how to people.
When I was younger I was… abrasive, let’s say. Or possibly just an insufferable prick. I would argue with people on the internet a lot and generate a lot of conflict - not from a desire to troll (as many assumed), I was just raised in a test-to-destruction environment where loud table-slapping debate was just how you learned things - kind of cage-match debugging sessions kind of thing.
This didn’t make me many friends, understandably.
Anyway, decades passed and I learned to mellow out a bit, to go along to get along, and to develop some soft skills like y’know, tact, and… compassion for people’s emotional investment in their intellectual position, if that has a name.
Well and good, the people I talk to don’t generally want to strangle me, chalk it up as a win.
But increasingly of late I’ve been hearing disparaging talk of ‘people pleasers’, which as best I can tell seems to refer to people who do all the things I was yelled for not doing half my life: going along to get along, valuing other people’s needs and emotional sore spots, taking a cooperative, defensive-driving kind of approach to social ineraction - and I am confuse.
I lack a proper framework to parse this all intuitively; I had to build my social skillset manually by trial and error, and things obvious to others remain somewhat mysterious to me.
I’m not actually ASD (just ADHD), but my lack-of-intuitive-grasp on certain things presents a similar profile. Can someone give me a longhand explanation of the border between not-an-asshole and people-pleasing?
“People pleasing” is the sort of neurotic belief that people won’t like or value you if you’re not actively working to make them happy constantly. From the inside, you can manage it by:
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prioritizing self-care (pleasers tend to throw it to the wayside to care for others)
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limiting the people you seek to please (ie family and close friends, or people who reciprocate)
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reminding yourself that no one likes a doormat
But that doesn’t really address the root of the problem, which is externalizing our self-worth.
