Many of us tend to diminish ourselves and others with some snappy, reductive phrase rather than dig more deeply in search of understanding. Enter the idea of the “people pleaser”. The term has a ring to it; it rolls off the tongue and its meaning seems self-evident. It feels comfortable and anodyne. We know where we are with a people pleaser.
But do we really? I hadn’t taken the time to think about it until recently. And the more I did, the more I found the phrase, and the possible unconscious dynamics reduced by it, discomfiting and disturbing. It took several years of psychoanalysis for me to be able to see more clearly what my tendency for people pleasing was hiding, and what I saw did not please me at all. What I saw was not anodyne. I saw that at the core of me, where something real and solid should be, sat a mirror, reflecting whatever I thought others wanted to see.
