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 way to stay safe.
• Freeze is less-talked-about. When you’re in freeze mode, you stop moving (literally, play dead if you’re in the wild) to protect yourself. I recently had a client realize that what she thought was procrastination was actually a deeply entrenched freeze response she’d learned during the pandemic, after various family members got incredibly sick.
• Fawn is even less well-known. And guess what? It’s people pleasing! It says: I will keep everyone else around me happy so they don’t notice me. I will attempt to disappear by looking around the room, assessing what everyone else needs, and delivering that care while I abandon myself.

This is where the benign term “people pleasing” really doesn’t sum up what’s happening. When you’re fawning over someone else, you are deep in a cortisol bath. Your body becomes inflamed. You’re ignoring yourself — often, disassociating from your body — in service of…