The article explores the concept of people pleasing, describing how it simplifies complex individual behaviors into reductive labels. The author shares personal insights from years of psychoanalysis, revealing that the tendency to please others masked a lack of self-identity. Once realizing this, a profound and sometimes unsettling question arises: who defines a 'better' life? Although often associated with women due to socialization, the article stresses that people pleasing can impact anyone, potentially linked to early childhood development and the formation of a 'false self' as proposed by psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott.
It was a shock to realise that I did not know who I was at all. That the self I had constructed was not really built out of my own character and qualities and desires.
To build a better life, you have to ask yourself who is deciding what better means.
Perhaps, as the psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott theorised, it is rooted in infancy, linked to the development of what he called the false self.
When people talk about people pleasing, they often seem to refer to women. But this way of relating to ourselves and to others can affect anyone.
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