People pleasing and neurodiversity

If there’s a single trait I see most often in my work that consistently gets clients into trouble with their mental health, it would be the tendency to people please. I’m not keen on the term people pleasing. Commonly, it’s connected with a pre-occupying need to be liked, a trait we’re conditioned to look down in our highly individualistic societies. Clients will often visibly wince and shift uncomfortably when I raise it. However, the purpose of people pleasing, and the circumstances in which most commonly develops, are nearly always more concerned with avoiding dislike than they are subconscious attempts to accrue praise or positive attention. In fact, many people pleasers engage with this behaviour to not be noticed at all, and that is often especially true for clients who are on the autistic spectrum.

Why are people pleasing tendencies so common with neurodiversity?

To understand this I think it’s best to look at how people pleasing typically develops. There are notable exceptions, but in the neurotypical, people pleasing often develops in early childhood (1–8 years old) when one or more of the primary caregivers is either inconsistent or emotionally absent. On a fundamental and primitive level, a child has an implicit understanding of who their primary caregivers are supposed to be, and that their survival depends on the availability of these people to meet their needs.

In familial situations where there aren’t sufficient emotional resources in the home to accommodate the child’s anger, sadness, or even joy, the child is forced to make an adaptation in order to survive. To give this adaptation a voice it would be along the lines of, “If the person, upon which my ability to survive absolutely depends, is not able to fulfil my needs unconditionally then that will be the case for all people.” So the blueprints of conditional worth are drawn. Your value as a person is dependent on you identifying and meeting the conditions of desirable characteristics and behaviours you perceive others will need from you in order to meet your emotional needs.

It’s not hard to see then that neurotypical children, whose responses and affectations will more often fall outside the bell curve of “typical” childhood behaviours, will more consistently fall victim to this dynamic. More of their instinctive responses and behaviours will cause friction with those around them. Chattiness, fidgeting, hyperactivity in ADD; the tendency towards solitude, lower visible emotional affectation and lower tolerance towards change and pattern disruption in ASD as some of the more typical examples. The neurodiverse child has a greater chance of learning at an earlier age that some of their behaviours and tendencies are undesirable or even unacceptable. If it doesn’t happen at home, it is very likely to happen once the child starts going to school.

This is why masking is such a cornerstone of neurodivergent development. Repressing, second guessing and hiding their authentic feelings and responses becomes second nature. If we cannot rely on internal resources to navigate our environments, we have no choice but to obtain them externally. And so it is that we learn how to use other people to give us the boundaries by which we navigate our world.

In earlier years, this adaptation is often very successful, if precarious. When we’re children, our chances of being in an environment that’s willing to nurture and care for us is higher, even if it does often require certain conditions to be met first. As that diminishes, and the people in positions of power and authority over us become more apathetic to our wellbeing and increasingly concerned with our productivity—i.e. University and the workplace—clients with undiagnosed neurodiversity will often come unstuck for the first time. The people to whom they look to provide the conditions for their worth are less likely to be aware of the responsibility being implicitly put upon them by the people pleaser, and especially in the case of the workplace, much less likely to be careful with that responsibility.

If there is no version of ourselves we can become to get our needs met or to avoid conflict or feelings of inadequacy, the people pleaser will become completely untethered, and will often burn themselves out in a frantic effort to give more and more of themselves.

Responsibility and anxiety

Whenever anything goes wrong for any of us, we all start at the point of, “What is it that I’ve done, or failed to do, that has caused this outcome.” A people pleaser will often be unable to move past this idea. “There MUST be something I did, or failed to do, that caused this outcome.” This is useful in the sense that if we can make ourselves retroactively responsible for any difficulty or conflict, there must be something we can do to prevent it from reoccurring. It’s entrenched thought and behaviour patterns like this that are regularly at the heart of anxiety. Taking excessive responsibility for circumstances and outcomes well outside a reasonable sphere of control is also, unsurprisingly, characteristic of neurodivergence.

Why are these adaptations and behaviours so consistent in the neurodiverse? My working theory is because it ties back to those earliest adjustments. At its heart, it’s abandonment fear. “If I don’t bend and break myself to meet these unknowable conditions, the people I need will walk away from me.” It cuts right to the most primitive part of us as an innately social and communal species. Isolation is death. It is hardwired into all of us, in the most stark and binary terms within the parts of our brain where conscious control and reasoning has the least sway.

The paradox of people pleasing

Heartbreakingly and counter-intuitively, people pleasing often results in increased isolation. In healthy, intimate relationships and friendships, both parties meet each other’s needs relatively equally. People pleasers will often unconsciously neglect to give the people they’re in relationship with the opportunity to feel needed by them. The people pleaser finds safety and familiarity in making each interaction about the other person, ensuring that person is happy, so that, in theory, the people pleaser can be happy or at the very least avoid unhappiness or conflict.

Beyond a certain point however, an implicit message is imparted from the people pleaser to others: “I don’t trust you enough to tell you what it is that I need.” After a few unsuccessful attempts to overcome this implicit rejection, many people will give up and start to detach.

What can be done?

People pleasing is a learned behaviour, it can be unlearned. If we learn a different relational language, we’ll probably always keep the accent. My clients often express a fear of the change in them going too far, that they might become selfish or overly self-indulgent (a fear often mirrored in those who suspect themselves of being neurodiverse but are reticent to seek assessment).

Not only is the chance of that vanishingly small in practice, but the changes necessary to make an appreciable difference when it comes to people pleasing tendencies are surprisingly small once the hurdle of the first attempt is overcome. For more on this have a look at my Five Pillars of People Pleasing.

It’s important to appreciate that, like any adjustment to our oldest internal habits, even small changes can be hard work. Not relying on our most well trodden behavioural paths takes time and resources, two things that neurodiverse people will often struggle to spare, especially for themselves. The most common internal reactions a people pleaser will have to prioritizing themselves or holding a boundary for the first time will be guilt and shame. There can be an enormous level of anxiety in the build up, and overwhelming doubt and regret in the immediate aftermath.

However, we have to build a body of experiential evidence that says not only do the people we need not turn their backs on us in our time of need, but more often than not they take a step closer. There is no way for us to tell our anxious brain this is what will happen without experience, and there’s no way to make that first step without a sense of risk. Resist the instinct to do it alone.