People pleasing as self abandonment

A while ago, I saw an Instagram meme that said:

What if we stopped calling it people pleasing and starting calling it what it is: Self-abandonment.

I couldn’t un-read it. I’ve been thinking about it for weeks.

Because of course we’ve been calling it people pleasing. Of course it sounds delightful, because it benefits other people and disempowers us.

The truth is that people pleasing is not benign. I can say, based on coaching hundreds of people pleasers (and being one myself), that the effects of people pleasing can be horrific. For many of us, this response to the world has led to chronic illnesses — both mental and physical — and a life that looks entirely disembodied. It is, indeed, an act of abandonment.

When we talk about nervous system regulation, we’re talking about the ways our parasympathetic and sympathetic circuitry lights up in relation to the world around us. The goal is to be able to move back into a parasympathetic response (rest and digest) when we’re stressed; to be able to regulate ourselves.

When you’re in a sympathetic response state, you’re typically reacting in one of four ways: fight, flight, freeze or fawn.

• Fight is the response you hear about most often. When something difficult happens and you feel in danger, you get angry and fight back.
• Flight is another fairly common response. When you’re afraid, you run. In the wild, this was a very reasonable…