People-Pleasing Is What Happens When Safety Depends on Approval
You hangout with friends for hours and have a great time and then come home and start to question a lot of what you said. You replay the conversation on a loop, dissecting every word. Maybe you reach out to one of those friends to see what they thought. You’re afraid that you were too bold or maybe hurt someone’s feelings by accident and that that person wouldn’t tell you. You’re afraid of losing connection with people you care about. Sound familiar? This is one way people-pleasing quietly interferes with real intimacy.
People-pleasing isn’t about being “too nice.”
It’s what happens when your nervous system learns that approval equals safety.
People-Pleasing Isn’t a Personality — It’s a Survival Strategy
People-pleasing is an everyday word that we all use but maybe don’t completely understand. Typically we mean people who have a hard time saying what they want, but there’s something deeper here. I would define people-pleasing as depending on others’ approval for your sense of safety and identity.
This pattern could come from growing up in a home environment that felt unpredictable. Maybe you didn’t know how mom and dad were feeling so you kept to yourself or made sure that mom and dad were okay so that there wasn’t any conflict or tension in the home. These kids often learned to read the room before they were taught to understand their own feelings or needs.
They also learned that: conflict is unsafe, disapproval feels like rejection, and rejection is dangerous because it leads to disconnection.
If you’ve felt like disapproval is rejection, that conflict felt unsafe, or that you could never tell someone you love what you need because it would be too much of a burden, this post is for you. People-pleasing isn’t who you are–it’s how your body learned to survive in a household that didn’t make space for what you needed. It’s not a weakness, it’s adaptation.
When Approval Becomes Your Nervous System’s Safety Signal
Really quick: the nervous system is a fancy way of saying your body’s control center. When your nervous system is “activated” that typically means that you’re feeling a little nervous or on edge. When your nervous system is “calm” that means that you feel safe and grounded.
What happens when you’re a people-pleaser is that your nervous system is constantly on the lookout for how to meet other people’s needs. Do they need a glass of water? Are the lights too bright? Do they need me to bring them dinner? These can seem very thoughtful on the surface and are often acts of love, but for a people-pleaser they are ways of trying to get a feeling of safety. If I bring them dinner, then they will feel loved and our relationship will be solid.
There’s nothing wrong with being kind, but when you constantly do for others in this way it teaches your body to never relax. It tells your nervous system: it was good to constantly be on the lookout and I should keep doing that. And when you inevitably can’t meet a need for someone you start to feel guilty for not dropping everything to be there for that person, or even fearful that this will be a big conflict in the relationship. You might even feel your stomach drop, your chest tighten, racing thoughts, the urge to over explain why you can’t be there, and this immediate need to repair with that person. That’s your nervous system saying: we aren’t safe, fix this immediately. And your body doesn’t distinguish between relational tension and real danger — it just knows something feels threatening.
Even though that was potentially true in your childhood–it doesn’t have to be true now.
Subtle Signs Your Sense of Safety Is Tied to Approval
So how can we tell that our safety is tied to others’ approval? Here are some examples:
You say yes when you really mean/want to say no
You often drop whatever you're doing to meet someone else’s need
You’re always worrying about what other people need
You struggle to identify what you want and need
You avoid conflict at all cost
You feel anxious when you set boundaries
You feel responsible for other’s feelings
You apologize automatically
How This Pattern Often Develops
As we grow up, we often look to our parents for approval. Because of this, parents hold power to teach children about what they mean to others and where their value comes from. Sometimes parents unknowingly send signals to their children that they don’t often mean. This could look like parents only praising the child when they got an “A” or praising their child for being “low maintenance”. This could teach a child that “I’ll only get love if I don’t need anything or if I achieve” and they start to believe that their worth is tied up in what they provide for others.
Other times if there’s a lot of chaos in a home and the parents are fighting between each other–the children could get the message that “I better not add to this chaos by asking for my needs” or “in order to keep myself safe I better not need anything from them”.
In both of these examples, kids are looking to get love and safety from their parents and they learn that by achieving, being “good”, or keeping their needs to themself they are more likely to get what they want from their parents. These are some of the beginnings of people-pleasing.
Why “Just Stop Caring What People Think” Doesn’t Work
You’ve probably heard advice like “just let them” or “stop caring what people think.” It’s great in concept, but for people-pleasers the reality is much more challenging. Because their worth and identity are tied up in who they are to other people it’s almost impossible to just stop caring about what other people think.
Your nervous system learned to keep you safe by making sure you stay connected to others, so it has to untangle your wellbeing from how other people view you. That’s why your body reads disapproval as a threat, why setting boundaries brings up guilt, and why conflict brings up old wounds and causes you to want to resolve it as soon as possible.
You can’t solve years of learning your worth comes from what you provide to others with just telling yourself to let them think what they want about you. Your body won’t let you because this is how you survived. Instead you need some deeper exploration and healing to let your body know that you are safe and you don’t need other’s approval to be safe.
What Happens When Safety Isn’t Dependent on Approval
So what does it look like when you don’t need other people’s approval to feel safe?
You can tolerate someone being disappointed
You pause before automatically saying yes
You notice your preferences
You let other adults manage their own emotions
You feel calm after setting a boundary (eventually)
Healing doesn’t make you selfish. It makes you secure.
Approval From People vs. Security in God
If you’re a Christian you might be wondering how faith plays into all of this. When our sense of safety becomes tied to other people’s approval, it can also affect how we relate to God. This can bleed into our relationship with God because if we’re constantly seeking approval from others, inevitably we will be focusing on how we perform with God too.
Thankfully, we get to come back to a foundation of knowing that God created us with innate worth. We don’t have to strive to earn His love, and because of Jesus’ sacrifice we get to have a right relationship with God. We don’t earn it but we receive it.
If This Is You
I want you to know that if any of this sounds like you: you are not weak, you’re not “too sensitive”, and you’re not a burden if you knew and asked for what you wanted and needed. Your nervous system learned something that it thought would keep you safe. Maybe you’re realizing that maybe you’re outgrowing this old way of being and you want to move past it. You don’t have to untangle this alone.
Therapy can help your body learn that connection doesn’t require self-abandonment.