It took me until starting therapy to understand that being a people pleaser is an unyielding trauma response. I used to think it was a quaint little quality to have, as being a martyr was a valuable trait in my family; it was currency. What you did for people, I was told through action, was how you determined your goodness.
If one parent is relationally off — then a child’s only recourse, especially if that parent is abusive and persuasive, is to determine how that parent is constantly feeling in order to meditate violence. It was through early childhood that I learned it was preferable if I put my needs to the side and if I found a way, instead, to be in service. Dutifully, moralistically. My obsession with God was fostered young because how else do you accept a painful home life? You find scripture to fortify you and your condition, you find ways to believe this is the only way and that God is testing your devotion.
In Rachel Cusk’s Coventry, she writes: “What Jesus did was sacrifice himself, use his body to translate word to deed, to make evil visible. While being crucified, he remained for the most part polite. He gave others much to regret. Their regret sustained two thousand years of Christianity.”
I think when you are a people pleaser you rely on this tension — that being in servitude will inevitably determine reciprocity, because the hope is that the other person’s regret (hopefully) will turn into devotion. That, inevitably, those you are beholden to you will also be shaken into service, out of guilt that hopefully turns into love, or at the very least, into gratitude.
So much of the time what I want most is not even reciprocity of the action itself, but an acknowledgment of my goodness, of my kindness, and I want my sacrifice to turn a person’s regret into dedication. As Cusk writes in a later essay, “A helpful person is someone who performs duties outside their own sphere of responsibility, out of the kindness of their heart. Help is dangerous because it exists outside the human economy: the only payment for help is gratitude.”
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