Ep 34: Breaking Cycles of People Pleasing: Attachment Theory Meets Power Analysis

[INTRODUCTION]

Sawadee ka, and welcome to the Come Back to Care podcast. A place where we’re re-imagining parenting to be deeply decolonized and intentionally intergenerational. If you’ve been looking for ways to practice social justice in your daily parenting and nurture your child’s development while re-parenting your inner child, I’m so glad you’re here. I am your host, Nat Nadha Vikitsreth, a decolonized and licensed clinical psychotherapist, somatic abolitionist, and founder of Come Back to Care. A dot connector, norm agitator and lover of liberation. In this podcast, we turn down the volume of oppressive social norms and outdated family patterns so that we can hear our inner voice and raise our children by our own values too. We come back home to our body and the goodness within. We come back to our lineages and communities. And we come back to care… together. So come curious and come as you are.

[EPISODE]

Welcome to episode 34 of the Come Back to Care Podcast. 

How do we teach our children to do what they’re told without coercing them to override their boundaries for the sake of being compliant? How do we teach our children to be nice to others without negating their own needs? How do we teach our children to be polite without putting their needs last? How do we teach our children to be respectful without reducing their dignity and humanity for someone else’s comfort? 

In this episode, you and I are going to unpack people pleasing or appeasement -- a survival strategy that our nervous system uses so we stay protected and safe in both our families and in society. We’ll unpack what’s going on in our body and nervous system when we people please. Then, we’ll zoom out and look at people pleasing in our social, cultural, and political contexts and root people pleasing in equity. And we’ll close out by discussing ways to address people pleasing in parenting. I hope we can shift the question from “am I raising my child to be a people pleaser?” to “how do I teach my child to use people pleasing when they need to be safe and then set it aside and be their whole self when they no longer need it?” This way our children have choices and aren’t stuck in survival. If that sounds generative to you, let’s get started. 

Defining People Pleasing & its Neurobiology

What is people pleasing exactly? As a recovering and award-winning people pleaser, I’m so glad you asked. People pleasing is a relationship management strategy that maximizes safety and connection and minimizes aggression, abandonment, and other types of harm in a relationship. It’s not a character flaw. It’s a survival strategy that often gets mistaken for a personality trait like being a pushover, a brown noser, a teacher’s pet, or an anxious person. 

People pleasing is a survival strategy that can be really expensive to our wellbeing. The higher the power imbalance between you and the other person in the relationship, the higher the cost to whomever is doing the people pleasing. And this power imbalance can be in any relationship: you and your boss; you and your in-laws; you and your partners who have more financial independence; you and someone who’s from the dominant group…someone who’s white, cisgender, heteronormative, Christian, middle class, educated, and able bodied; and more importantly you and your child. 

I’ll share two scenarios with you to illustrate what people pleasing looks like in social settings. Then we’ll peel a layer off to look at what’s going on in the nervous system when you and I engage in people pleasing. 

Imagine you and your close friend are out getting coffee together. You’re having a blast talking about the books you can’t put down and podcasts you’ve been enjoying lately. Then, your friend gets a text message on their phone and the mood suddenly shifts. They seem visibly upset. So, as a good friend, you cheer them up by being extra smiley, making jokes, complimenting them on their outfit. Nothing works. You keep smiling but deep inside you’re kind of nervous. You cleared your schedule to come have a good time plus you’ve been dying to try some pastries from this coffee shop. To be the good and supportive friend that you are, you set your desire to try those triple chocolate, butterscotch swirl brownies aside because your friend is about to turn into a puddle of tears. So you decide to end this coffee date early so your friend can go home. 

Does this example bring to mind other scenarios where you set your needs aside to be extra caring and helpful, to lighten up the mood and keep the harmony in a relationship? This is one example on the people pleasing spectrum.

In the second example of people pleasing, I’ll bump up the intensity to show what people pleasing can look like when the power imbalance is more significant. First a content warning, I’ll be sharing an incident where someone used racial slurs and other racist verbal attacks on me a week ago. I didn’t get physically harmed and I promise not to over share details. I’ll only share what’s relevant to our discussion on people pleasing. Lastly, I’m moving through this pain and grieving over this hateful and hurtful attack with people I love. That’s my way of saying I’m okay when I’m okay and when I’m not okay I’m deeply supported by those I trust. Here we go.

My good friend and I were walking down the street to volunteer at a Juneteenth event. And I felt someone walked up right behind me and I heard this person saying to me all the stereotypical anti-Asian statements you can imagine. I won’t waste my calories repeating them here. I reached into my purse for my pocketknife. I turned around and I was ready to fight. This person- male presenting- seemed to be twice my size, they were riding on their electric scooter and they were with another person. So…I gave these two people the biggest smile and I said “Hi, how are you?” I was the most charming I could ever be. They said a few more hurtful things and rode their scooters in front of us and left. 

I need a moment to unclench my jaws and open my clenched fists and shake my hands real quick. If you need a moment to recenter and anchor yourself back into what feels safe-ish, I invite you to take care of your body. If you’d like, perhaps feel your feet on the floor, rock your body, hum, make audible sighs, or look around where you are to locate an object, person, pet, or plant that brings back a sense of safety and connection. Hmm. If your nervous system’s still bracing just in case you’ll be hearing more details about this incident, I’m done…no more details. [Exhale] Alright, I’m feeling anchored enough and safe enough right now and I hope you are as well. If so, shall we analyze my people pleasing to see what’s going on in my body? 

I was with my friend. We looked really cute and we were excited to volunteer at this Juneteenth event. I was in my neurological bandwidth where I felt curious, caring, and connected. Then, I heard racial slurs and hurtful statements. My nervous system detected threats and it got activated to prepare my body to either fight or flee. I was no longer in my bandwidth. I was in my stress response of fight or flight. When I turned around and saw that the threat was literally larger than what I could handle, rage turned into terror as my fight mode turned into freeze mode. In this freeze mode, my nervous system went straight to people pleasing to diffuse threat, disarm that perpetrator, and protect myself from further harm. Nkem Ndefo and Rae Johnson, two leading embodied anti-oppression practitioners, wrote quote “we appease when the nature of the relationship makes escape impossible, defensive attack is not prudent, and playing dead is not realistic.” End quote. In that moment, the safest way for me to get out of harm’s way was to people please, not fight, flee, or faint. So I did what I had to do to protect myself. This survival strategy was successful at protecting me from harm but as I said earlier it’s quite taxing on my body. And here’s how. 

If you were to watch this scene on a TV screen but on mute, it would look like two people talking and I would seem to be happy, safe, and smiling. But if you were to put on special x-ray glasses that can see inside my body, you might see how tensed my muscles were, how my breathing was small and shallow but fast, and how fast my heart was beating underneath that calming and charming smile. I was masking the terror underneath with a smile. To keep up with this illusion of calm, my nervous system had to work twice as hard because I had one foot on the gas and the other on the brake at the same time. I had to press the gas pedal to be ready to fight but it wasn’t safe to fight so I needed to press on the brake to quote unquote “dampen that arousal” of the fight mode to use the words of trauma experts Dr. Kathy Kain and Dr. Stephen Terrell. I felt drained and depleted afterwards as if the gas in my tank was used up from pressing the gas and the brake at the same time without going anywhere. People pleasing or appeasement is very depleting not just to humans but also to our animal siblings. 

Stephen Stringham, a wildlife ecologist, observed that when subordinate bears appeased dominant bears to minimize aggression during a confrontation, the subordinate bears a.k.a. the bear pleasers needed to recover by sitting down or lying down. Stringham also wrote quote “I have seen a mother who saved her cub from a predatory male soon lie down and hardly move for more than 6 hours, providing no care to the injured cub and ignoring pleas by both her cubs to nurse.” End quote. 

In addition to bears, horses also engage in appeasement to diffuse threat. In one study, researchers from Nottingham Trent University found that in a stressful situation with a power imbalance, even though the horses in the study were compliant and agreeable, these social behaviors were correlated with high levels of the stress hormone cortisol. As Sarah Schlote, a trauma and equine therapist, wrote about appeasement quote “The appearance of sociality can be convincing, supporting the notion that not all stillness is calm and that pro-social behavior does not necessarily mean all is well.” End quote. 

If you’re already wondering about your child’s behaviors when they’re agreeable and compliant, that’s beautiful. We’ll connect the dots among people pleasing, child development, and attachment so we can apply it to decolonized parenting in a bit.  

As much as people pleasing is depleting to the nervous system, when the threat is gone, the nervous system organically metabolizes that stress activation and returns to baseline. To say it differently, when the threat is gone, we come back to our bandwidth where we’re curious, connecting, caring, and compassionate. 

But what if the threat is never gone because it’s systemic, historical, and intergenerational? What if your disabled body, queer body, and fat body are perceived as a threat to capitalism and that makes you quote unquote undesirable and therefore disposable? What if your skin color is perceived as superhuman by the medical industrial complex and that prevents you from getting compassionate and affirming medical care? When the threat is institutional and systemic, our nervous system rarely has a chance to reset and come back to the bandwidth because we might need to be in survival mode of people pleasing most of the time. According to the Harvard University’s Center on the Developing Child, when survival instead of safety becomes our baseline, the stress hormones from this chronic stress or toxic stress are damaging to our blood pressure, immune system, cardiovascular system, reproductive system, and more.

People pleasing’s price tag is high not just physically but also psychologically. 

It’s been one week since the incident and I’m still thinking about all the what ifs that I could have done differently. What if I used my knife? Did I wear something that’s too much? Was I walking in his way? What if I screamed? Why didn’t I say something or fight back? I go back and forth between shame for not taking an active defense and self-gaslighting by saying “oh but it was no big deal. No one was bleeding. I was smiling so it was all good.”  

Whether you use people pleasing as a relationship management strategy to be a good friend or you use it as a survival strategy under capitalism to please your employers and keep your job or you use it as a survival strategy against interpersonal harm from racism…

Pleasing those who have more power than you to keep yourself safe and protected requires a level of self-abandonment. When we’re forced to abandon ourselves to live for others, we decenter our own dignity to center others’ comfort. Instead of living our own values and living up to our full dignity and humanity, we only live inside other people’s narrow expectations of us and their desires for us.

People Pleasing & Parenting

As a parent and caregiver with no structural support like universal childcare or paid parental leave, I honor the real need to do what you need to do to get through the day. And sometimes that means you may only have enough energy left to parent your child by the good parenting script written by white, colonial, capitalist, patriarchy. Many families I work with who are practicing decolonized parenting share with me that some days they’re so tired, triggered, and isolated that urgency, perfectionism, coercion, and domination take the driver’s seat in parenting. When (not if) that happens, they try to plug back into their communities, fill their own cups, work through that guilt and self-judgment like we discussed in episodes 31 and 32 and remember their intention to parent without appeasing the oppressive dominant norms. Then, they maybe apologize to their children and partners and re-align their parenting with their values again.  

For families who are new to decolonized parenting, like the families I’m working with in the In-Out-N-Through parenting cohort, they share that they’ve been conforming and appeasing to the dominant norms for so long that sometimes it takes a lot of unlearning to rediscover what they value and to remember what they like and what they want. Being forced to conform to the dominant norms, they have to over learn people pleasing and under learn listening to their own voices. Wherever you fall on this spectrum, please know that this work is lifelong and we’re in this together. 

If a small part inside of you is feeling some fear of abandonment at the thought of reclaiming your whole self by unlearning people pleasing, this fear is valid like we discussed in Episode 17: Why it’s so hard to get free Pt.1.

Sam Dylan Finch, a queer neurodivergent mental health advocate and author, also echoed this sentiment and wrote quote “For people who benefited from our passivity and eagerness to please, we might encounter a lot of resistance when we start asserting ourselves and owning how we feel. We might even find that relationships that once felt safe now feel completely incompatible with our needs and desires. This is normal and totally okay… As we accept ourselves as emotional beings with needs and desires, letting people walk away or choosing to sever ties can be very distressing at times. So as you begin to unpack and unlearn your people-pleasing, remember that it’s okay to be afraid… But I can promise you that the work is undoubtedly worth the struggle.” End quote.

And in our context of decolonized family building, I’d like to add that it’s worth the struggle because your children are witnessing you unlearning conformity and people pleasing to come back home to your whole self, come back to your community, to your land and lineages. On one hand, you’re modeling how your child can honor themselves and set boundaries. On the other hand, you’re embodying your whole self for those of your ancestors who couldn’t afford to. I think this intergenerational family healing is worth the struggle and then some. 

Plus…(sigh) from the attachment perspectives, little children are little people pleasers. To unpack this, I invite you to take a breath and roll up your sleeves so we can first talk about power imbalance.

People Pleasing & Power Analysis

You and I may have different intersecting identities and social privileges; therefore, our proximity to the dominant norm is different. The closer we are to a white, cis-heteronormative, middle class, Christian, and able-bodied standard, the higher the chances that we have access to resources and opportunities…or the more power we have. So, when you and I sit down together, this power imbalance is in the room.

And when there’s power imbalance, two things happen that are relevant to our parenting work. First, the people who have more power (let’s call them the one-up) don’t see that they have more power than those who have less (or the one-down). As you can imagine it can be pretty dangerous to wield your power without knowing how powerful you are. This idea is not new to us, one-downs, or people who are forced to be at the margins: we constantly people please, contort our bodies, and conform to the one-ups’ norms to keep them comfortable and keep them from hurting us. But all of this is invisible to the one-ups. Scholars from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill call it powerblindness. Between you and your child, even if it feels like your child’s running the household because they’re learning to be independent, parents are likely to be the one-up and children are the one-down. In addition to powerblindness, power imbalance brings out another dynamic that psychotherapist Leticia Nieto and co-authors called unconscious supremacy. Those with power are conditioned by their privileges and reinforced by institutions that were built for them to believe that their worldviews are more legitimate, credible, and correct than those without power. And this unconscious supremacy might justify and add even more pressure on you to teach your child, mold them, and shape them to be a well-rounded human so much so that you might miss those little moments that your child is teaching you beautiful life lessons too. Or the pressure to be a good parent gets added to this unconscious supremacy and it places more emphasis on doing, fixing, and teaching your child over being with, showing up, and providing emotional safety…most of the time…which we know that this emotional reciprocity and availability is essential for children’s brain development and social-emotional development. I’m not advocating for you to not teach your child at all. It’s actually quite the opposite. Given this power imbalance between you and your child, the invitation is how might you balance all the teaching, molding, and doing with being with, holding space, and witnessing your child’s unfolding? [Pause to reflect]

Shall we connect the dots back to some child development science and attachment theories?

People Pleasing & Attachment

Through the lens of power analysis, children are the one-downs and their caregivers are the one-ups. Children adapt and adjust their behaviors to fit with their caregivers’ rules and belief systems. To say it differently, children people please their caregivers to keep peace in the family dynamics. 

Through the lens of attachment, young children adapt and adjust their behaviors to maximize safety and connection in their relationships with those who are raising them. To young babies making sure that their caregivers are close by and available to care for them is a survival need…so much so that when caregivers can’t provide safety, stability, and co-regulation, babies register this distress as quote “intolerable pain and existential anxiety” end quote according to a psychoanalyst Bernard Brandchaft. Young children protect themselves against intolerable pain of humiliation, criticism, rejection, and abandonment by their caregivers by learning to give up on their own experiences to accommodate and appease their caregivers. For example, when a baby reaches out to their parent for connection and it causes so much discomfort in the parent, the baby learns that asking for connection might not be the safest idea. So the baby accommodates and people pleases by over learning how to rely on themself and how to be independent and at the same time under learning how to ask for help and receive support. Because the baby has learned again and again that a bid for connection is painful.   

If your worry and “oh shoot I did that to my child last night” are getting stirred up, allow me to reiterate that children accommodating and appeasing grownups is very human. In many families, you might have moments when you yell “do as I said because I’m your parent” to your child. And I know it’s painful to think about because you’ve probably set a firm intention to not repeat the pattern of yelling or practicing power-over that you grew up with, with your own child. But if we get real and zoom out from that moment, you might remember the moments after the yelling when you might apologize to your child and reconnect. And if not, I know you have plenty of moments when your child can make choices and be seen, heard, and loved for who they are. This rhythm of connection-disconnection-and-reconnection is a part of the parenting package like we discussed in Ep 27: Why Your Childs’ Resilience Needs Your Parenting Mistakes. 

But if the disconnection happens again and again and there’s not enough reconnection, children have to use their survival strategies over and over again to protect themselves from the pain of criticism, humiliation, or rejection from their caregivers. Again I’m not implying that the reconnection after disconnection has to be your responsibility alone…not today individualism. In many cultures, children have a village of primary caretakers from the auntie next door to grandparents and so on. When children use people pleasing to protect themselves from their caregivers, especially in the context of harsh parenting, marital conflict, or controlling parental behaviors, children’s behaviors might appear calm, friendly, and easy going. And caregivers and teachers might mistake these pro-social behaviors for children being polite, following directions, and being respectful to elders aka filial piety… when in fact children are in their stress response of fight-flight-freeze-people please mode. Some researchers like El-Sheikh and Erath found that when children constantly have to people please their caregivers who exercise harsh parenting, children’s stress response can manifest in their behaviors as anxiety. 

And all the links to every research study and book mentioned in this episode and the transcript are organized for you in the episode show notes at comebacktocare.com/podcast.

People Pleasing & School

People pleasing doesn’t just take place between individuals because when white, colonial, capitalist patriarchy demands conformity, people pleasing is also systemic. The people pleasing pipeline, if you will, continues from home to school and then to the workplace. Bill Ayers, an activist and author, described classrooms as quote “the laborious programs of regulating, indoctrinating, inspecting, disciplining, censuring, correcting, counting, appraising, assessing and judging, testing and grading- all of it makes these places feel like institutions of punishment rather than sites of enlightenment and liberation…the goals are obedience, standardization, and conformity; the watchword is control.” End quote. 

It's almost like we strengthen our people pleasing skills in classrooms to get ready for the same obedience, standardization, and conformity in the workplace that goes by the name of “professionalism.”

Then we carry people pleasing over to our most intimate relationships with our partners and children. That might look like automatically abandoning your own needs and wellbeing to anxiously take care of your child even when your child has the capacity to meet their own needs too while you’re finishing your half-eaten sandwich. Or, automatically stuffing down your feelings and opinions because you don’t want your authenticity to risk driving your partners or co-parents away.  

An outdated survival strategy- in this case people pleasing- turns up like a bad penny. Have you seen someone who’s bullied at work only to come home and bully someone else at home? Jane Middleton-Moz, a faculty member in the department of Social Work at the University of Toronto, wrote quote: “When individuals feel inferior, inadequate and afraid, they take on the qualities of the oppressor as a way of acquiring strength and an illusion of power.” End quote. To avoid unintentionally training our children to be stuck in people pleasing, I truly believe that the healing starts with us unlearning outdated patterns of people pleasing in ourselves. And you and I have explored parts of this unlearning in this episode today. 

To recap, we’ve contextualized people pleasing by looking at it through the lenses of both power analysis and attachment theories. So that we can identify our patterns of people pleasing and name them when they show up. And we can ask is using people pleasing adaptive or outdated right now? If it’s outdated, what other tools can I use to feel safe and connected in this relationship? By applying this discernment to our survival strategies, we’re not getting rid of them. Instead, we’re consciously choosing people pleasing as a strategy which is different from getting stuck in using people pleasing all the time and mistaking it as our personality. 

People Pleasing & Parenting

Now that we’ve tended to our inner child, let’s explore our final section and apply what we’ve unlearned and relearned to the children we’re raising. I have two reflection questions for you to sit with as you explore ways to break the cycle of people pleasing and transform rigid power hierarchies between you and your child. Every invitation as always is a choice. 

First, how are you making room for your child’s behaviors and needs that are harder to like? How are you embracing and appreciating your child’s behaviors and needs that aren’t acceptable and valued by the status quo – behaviors and needs that don’t people-please the powers that be? 

In the In-Out-N-Through parenting cohort, the families and I often experiment with ways to uninstall the productivity programming from capitalism in parenting. One invitation is to reflect on moments when the families praise their children when they work hard, push through, and persevere. These are all wonderful qualities when they’re balanced. So, the families also reflect with me: how about moments when their children rest, play, be creative, zone out, or do anything that capitalism would consider unproductive? Would their children receive the same kind of praise, support, and acceptance? What’s that balance like for you when you hold space for your child to be both hard working and playful? 

The second reflection question is this: Does your child have a permission to say no to you? Is there room for your child to disagree, ask questions, or share different opinions without being shamed for being disrespectful or ungrateful? When white supremacy’s control, coercion, and domination take the driver’s seat in parenting, it’s easy to demand total compliance from the one-downs aka our children because a good child needs to always do what they’re told. But compliance doesn’t always mean children do what they’re told out of respect. I know you know this already too. Following family rules doesn’t always mean children do it out of trust, it can also be out of fear…fear of being rejected, abandoned, humiliated, or criticized. So, when the conditioning of control and coercion arises, how might you replace compliance with cooperation or find a balance between the two? 

I remember one family who was working with me on how to talk to their children about how to behave when police stop them. The parents grew up with “the talk” from their uncle who was very much “my way or the highway,” which makes sense because safety and survival were of the utmost importance here because of the family’s skin color. In this case where survival is at the heart of it, getting the children to follow the directions of how to behave in front of the police to minimize threat is very adaptive. And the parents want to maybe bring cooperation into the picture to balance that compliance a bit. The parents and I experimented with a few things and what landed for them was to add a discussion about their family values to the talk. They would lay out all the steps for their two children, role play it… Then, instead of sending the children to bed right away, the parents break the intergenerational family cycle of total compliance by talking to their children about how they value the concept of “doing no harm.” And learning how to protect themselves, the children are practicing this family value too. I love that discussing the family value that the children are participating in nurtures that sense of agency in the face of systemic violence and injustice of racism. So, the balance between compliance and cooperation for this family looks like 90% compliance and 10% cooperation. What would the compliance-cooperation balance look like for you and your family? How might you share your values with your child too in addition to only correcting their behaviors or only laying down the family rules?

To recap, our reflective questions are number one how are you making room for your child’s behaviors and needs that are harder to like? How are you embracing and appreciating your child’s behaviors and needs that aren’t acceptable and valued by the status quo? Number two Is there room for your child to disagree, ask questions, or share different opinions without being shamed for being disrespectful or ungrateful? How might you replace compliance with cooperation or find a balance between the two? 

Are you still with me? If there’s one thing I’d love to invite you to hold in your heart and play with when the urge to control and to enforce compliance bubbles up, it’s this… your child’s behaviors are not a reflection of how good a parent you are. They’re a reflection of your child’s unfolding dignity and humanity. And you’re doing one of the most important things you can do: holding space for your child to feel safe enough to be all of who they are becoming. 

And if the people-pleasing part of you is keeping you stuck on the idea that you need to abandon yourself and people please to be nice… (I have that part too), I’ll leave you with another bit of medicine from Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. This was a part of her 2022 commencement speech at Yale Law School quote: “Please do not be nice. Be kind because kindness is a measure of our humanity. But do not be nice. Nice means wanting always to be liked. And this is a particular affliction of female socialization. Nice means silencing inconvenient truth. Nice means choosing always to be comfortable. Nice means letting go of courage. Nice means talking about peace but not about justice. Nice will not remake the world and there is so much about our world that needs remaking.” End quote

Every link to the research studies, books, and extra resources mentioned in this episode along with the transcript is in the episode show notes for you at comebacktocare.com/podcast.

To support my work and keep our psychoeducation and political education free and accessible, please consider leaving a rating and review or offering a one-time financial redistribution by heading to comebacktocare.com/support. 

As always, in solidarity and sass. Until next time, please take care.