Lying My Way to Love

A look inside the mind of a pathological people-pleaser.

When asked to describe a people-pleaser, most people will go with: always eager to help, incapable of saying no, conflict avoidant, and over-apologizer. When they don’t go straight to “pushover,” or “doormat,” that is.

But how about “compulsive liar”?

While people-pleasers can be agreeable to a fault, they’re often seen as essentially good people. And lying isn’t what good people do, is it?

It’s what people who want to be perceived as being good do. All the time.

I should know, I’ve suffered with being a people-pleaser my whole life. I’m used to the sense of low self-worth and the fear of abandonment that pushes me to say yes to everything, even to things I don’t want to do. I’m used to my subconscious telling me I should do what other people want and expect of me, otherwise I won’t deserve their love.

In my never-ending quest for love and acceptance, lying has evolved from an occasional resource to save face to an essential tool for survival to a habit. And so it has for many other people-pleasers out there.

To understand the instinctual motivation for so much lying, it’s necessary to first understand the people-pleaser mindset.

As people-pleasers, our ultimate goal is to be loved and accepted. Our craving for validation, however, manifests in a way that may seem contradictory, but only at first glance.

It can be hard to understand how someone with low self-esteem can believe everyone else’s happiness depends on her, but in people-pleaser logic, it makes perfect sense. If we’re ultimately responsible for the happiness and well-being of others, we matter, even if that happiness and well-being is always placed ahead of our own (hence the paradox).

Most of us first experience it in childhood, with parents that made us the center of their lives, except the love they offered us came with conditions.

These parents opened little room for authentic self-expression, and set many rules that could never, under any circumstances, be challenged. With these parents, love and acceptance were not a given, they had to be earned.

That’s how the people-pleaser ends up believing that everyone’s route to happiness traces a path that goes directly through them, while at the same time having so little self-esteem that they put everyone else’s feelings ahead of their own.

If the price to being relevant in someone else’s life (starting with our parents) is to do everything right (aka: as they expect it to be), then we can’t afford to do anything wrong — or to admit to our mistakes.

Cue the lying.

As a people-pleaser, disappointing others is my worse nightmare. So I lie that I’m excited to join their latest project, that I’m looking forward to meeting them for coffee, that I’m eager to keep in touch even when I’d rather die.

Being seen as less than good, less than kind, less than that person they can always count on hurts me at a deep, not always conscious level. So I lie to make it seem like a certain issue is not my fault, that I had nothing to do with the latest problem in my department, that I didn’t even see what happened and have no idea what’s been upsetting everyone so much these days.

At a discussion or party conversation, I pretend I understand other people’s arguments and agree with their opinions even when I don’t. It often makes me wonder if I’m capable of having opinions of my own, but the lying is so instinctive it comes up before I can muster the courage to say what I’m really thinking.

Sparing other people’s feelings has a lot to do with maintaining the illusion that I’m good.

When around my colleagues, I join in complaining about our boss and his annoying habits. When my boss invites me to an open and honest conversation and asks what he can do better, I say, “nothing. Everything is fine.”

In my people-pleaser mind, pointing out what someone could do better is no different than being the cause of this person’s inadequate behavior. It’s as if pointing out that the emperor has no clothes automatically meant I was the one who tricked him into going out in the street buck naked in the first place.

That’s where the people-pleasers’ reputations as doormats come from, by the way. Because we’ll lie and pretend that everything is fine when it’s not, just so we can be the person who never hurts anyone’s feelings.

We’re the insincere “it’s not you, it’s me” crowd. We can never handle how great everyone else is and always need “some space to work on ourselves.”

It doesn’t matter that we’re the ones who are left hurting in the end. It doesn't matter that we’re preventing other people from learning from their mistakes and growing as humans. As long as their feelings are kept safe, everything is fine.

A few months back, a friend I used to be in a writers’ group with asked me to read the latest draft of her novel. I was extremely busy and couldn't deal with the extra work, so I had to tell her, “I’m sorry, but I can’t do it. I’m swamped at my job, and I’m using every minute of my free time to work on my own writing projects.”

I didn’t like saying that. My natural instinct was to try to find some time to read her stuff and send her some feedback, even if it messed with my own writing schedule. It didn’t matter that I wouldn’t read her work with proper care. I might even skip a page or two and tell her that her stuff is good even though I didn’t read half of it and was unsure about the other half — I’d just lie to spare her feelings.

Because people-pleasing often has little to do with actually doing people a favor. It has everything to do with keeping up the illusion of a favor, the pretense that you’re there for them, always willing to help, the good buddy that never says no.

But I had been making progress with my own projects, and I realized that being fiercely protective of my time, and not waste her time by making her think she was getting her work carefully reviewed when she wasn’t, was the best thing I could possibly do for the both of us.

“I appreciate you saying that instead of having me send you my draft and waiting for a response,” was her answer.

I’d like to say that, in the end, all was well, but the truth is that she hasn’t contacted me again. For anything. Not even to ask how I’m doing.

My people-pleaser fear of abandonment has proved to be accurate. I guess that’ll never change, some people will always take their fill of you, and then leave. That particular experience has, however, helped me to care a bit less. So she left. I have one less “friend”. Now what?

Now life goes on.

And once it was done, that “no can do” didn't seem like a big deal, but to me it was like winning a significant battle in a much bigger war. The war against my instinct to put the needs of others above my own.

The war against feeling like I can never say no, or everyone will leave me (guess what? Yes, some of them will. Now that I know that I can shrug it off). The war against feeling like I have to lie and project a certain image of myself so that I’m worthy of love.

I don’t know if I’ll ever fully renounce my people-pleasing instincts. Psychological traits established in childhood are hard to break away from. I have, however, been learning to identify the moments in which my lies turn against me, and when the effort to be honest instead (and in turn protect my time, my energy and my happiness), although an herculean task, is worth it.

I’ve been learning that no amount of bending over backwards to please will guarantee that others will like me, but that when I set my boundaries, I can at least guarantee that they will respect me.

Long-term respect is more valuable than the fickle kind of love I get from blindly giving people what they need when they need it.

Related posts:

TLPF is a charitable organization that focuses on restoring peace and fostering economic empowerment among pastoralists. It was established in 2003 by Tegla Loroupe, a Kenyan marathon legend who is…

Wanted to use it as an intro, We’ve been passionate about becoming a more environmentally friendly family since our first baby came along. Like most people I was filled with sadness seeing those…

Me niego a aceptar este tipo de amor incompleto, furtivo, condicional y unitario. Si me vas a amar que sea al contado, las muestras de amor en cómodos plazos no van conmigo. Es inaceptable cargar con…