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?
"Compassion for people's emotional investment and their intellectual passion" - this is covered by "empathy, and it's incredibly difficult to practice, so my sincere congratulations for working at it.
With everybody existing on a spectrum, you not pleasing people without limits will make you an a****** at some point. The limit is yours to figure out because you understand yourself best.
For me, I help people until or unless it is painfully obvious that they are taking advantage of a situation. I don't personally mind someone taking a little advantage. But once it's clear that they will not stop taking, I draw boundaries.
I think most people have different limits on how much they are willing to give and take. And you get to determine your own limits.
You set an initial boundary for yourself of how much you are willing to give and take and then remain consistently aware of progressive circumstances so that you can adjust your boundaries as necessary to your own health and well-being.
If you still feel good about yourself and you aren't hurting anybody else, great.
It is much easier to set static boundaries and adjust as necessary than immediately shouldering a dynamic boundary that changes every minute with each situation.