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?
I think people pleasing is when your whole identity and emotions are all based on someone else’s emotions.
If you completely lack the ability to be okay when anyone else in the room is not okay, then you might be a people pleaser. A people pleaser especially doesn’t know how to be okay when someone is disappointed in them.
You can still be kind and attentive to other people and take accountability for your actions without being thrown into mental and emotional chaos because someone else is feeling bad. This begins with realizing that other people’s thoughts and feelings should not always automatically hold more weight than your own thoughts and feelings. Yes, It can sometimes be good to consider how people are doing or the words they say about us, but you are also a human on this planet and how you’re doing deserves plenty of attention too—especially if nobody else in your life is genuinely caring for you.
The ideal healthy balance is being able to allow others to feel bad and not automatically feel shame, cast blame on yourself, or make it your own responsibility. People pleasers have made this a habit, and it takes time and practice to break down, but it’s such a simple and healthy place to be when you can start to approach situations with a clear head instead of constant internal shame.