"People-pleasing behavior" has been one of my particular struggles for a long time. The general idea, as I understand the term, is that you take on a lot of responsibility, run yourself ragged trying to meet other people's demands, never say "no" to anyone, and eventually burn out. This is a struggle for a lot of people, as I have learned, both inside and outside the church.Now, one of the typical solutions offered by the secular world is the idea of "self care." The idea is that you're supposed to explicitly take time to rest and recharge - to allow yourself to be "selfish" from time to time so that you do not stress yourself out and die from a wicked case of acid reflux. There is a certain amount of sense to this - even if your whole goal in life is to meet your responsibility to other people, it certain doesn't help your cause to make yourself sick by overwork. Taking time to rest is important, and that's a perfectly fair and even Biblical concept.
But this idea is, at the very least, remarkably incomplete, and possibly even problematic. This is because I think the secular world frequently misdiagnoses the true root of people-pleasing behavior. One of the underlying assumptions behind the idea of "self care" is that there's this fundamental split between "others" and "self." The people-pleasing person is way too far on the "others" side, so they need to come more to the "self" side. Generally, the diagnosis is that the people-pleasing person suffers from misplaced guilt about taking time for self, and so they need to question or even reject whatever moral standard it is that's causing them to ignore their own needs. Therefore, the principal villain, in much of the secular world's eyes, is moral guilt.
This is not really my personal experience.
For me at least, the principal driving factor behind people-pleasing behavior is not guilt but fear - fear of people being angry at you, fear of being rejected. In some people that have shared with me, this can come from a long history of actually being rejected. As a result, people feel like they don't know how not to be rejected other than to do everything in their power to keep everyone around them happy. People-pleasing frequently equates to a high degree of sensitivity to other people's anger or disapproval. Because we people-pleasers fear rejection, we preemptively act in ways designed to eliminate the threat - take on all the responsibilities, meet all the needs, etc.
The issue is that, from a Christian perspective, a lot of the things that people-pleasers do are perfectly good and wonderful things to be doing. They're frequently not wrong to be doing them. After all, are we not told that the greatest commandments include loving your neighbor as yourself? (Leviticus 19:18) The Bible teaches a pretty radical kind of selflessness.
It's therefore not entirely out of left field that many in the secular world would love to saddle traditional moral authorities with the blame. If the poor people-pleasers would just throw off the shackles of a higher moral authority, they would go binge watch Netflix and pornography and not care what anyone thought of them and be happy. Right?
I've known a number of people throughout my life who appear to have reached precisely this conclusion - and at least one has told me so outright. Sick of being "good" all their lives, such people decide that "self care" involves giving themselves permission to be "bad." For them, the real enemy of their happiness was the moral authority they perceived to be condemning them. If there are no more "shoulds" and "oughts," there's no more stress.
For a believing Christian, of course, this attitude is a complete non-starter. But even for a secular person, I wonder whether it misses the point. The people that I have observed to have made the decision to throw off moral authorities do not, from my vantage point, appear any more "free" than they did before. Rather, they have swapped one emotional slavemaster for another. Instead of being controlled by fear, they have given themselves over to resentment.
It kind of makes sense, though. The people-pleaser, motivated by fear, gradually builds up a huge wad of unexpressed rage at the world around them - the world that rejected them in the first place and constantly threatens to reject them again lest they meet all the demands - until eventually anger kicks fear out of the driver's seat.
This is not, in my personal opinion, much of a win for the people-pleaser. Neither the fear nor the resentment comes from a place of security, a place of love and acceptance. You can trade a passive reaction for an active reaction (or vice versa) all day long but the problem isn't really being solved either way. Whether giving ourselves up to please others, or raging at others in frustration, the underlying, incontrovertible fact of the matter is:
We don't have much control over whether other people reject us.
Not really. We can fear it, we can react to it, but that little fact will still be true either way. So what is to be done? What's the real answer for a believing Christian who struggles with people-pleasing?
Well, I would propose that rather than trying to draw a line between "others" and "self," the truly important line is between pleasing people vs. pleasing God. How can this be, you may ask? Can't people run themselves just as ragged pleasing God as they can pleasing people? How can that possibly help? What's the difference?
I would propose to you that the difference is this:
God already loves and accepts you.
In Christ, we can be secure in God's acceptance of us. People will sin. People may hurt you or reject you and there's nothing you can do to prevent it. God isn't like that. For those who have turned their hearts to them, they have no need to fear his rejection. By accepting ourselves that we are accepted by God through Christ, we can allow his love to inform who we are - I can become someone who is beloved, rather than someone who is always afraid of not being loved, or angry at having not been loved. My desire to please God then comes from a place of security and love rather than a place of fear or anger. God loved me first. I didn't have to earn it - I received it by his grace alone.
Notice that Paul, who understood better than anyone else how radical and transformative God's grace is, still speaks of his desire to please God:
"So we make it our goal to please him, whether we are at home in the body or away from it." (2 Corinthians 5:9)There's nothing wrong with being a God-pleaser. Truly pleasing God doesn't come from a place of insecurity, but a place of security. Shortly before this verse in 2 Corinthians, Paul talks about how much he's longing for his eternal home in heaven - he has no doubt in his mind that he has a reward prepared for him. He has no doubt that he's accepted and loved. The presence of the Holy Spirit in him proves it -
"Now it is God who has made us for this very purpose and has given us the Spirit as a deposit, guaranteeing what is to come." (2 Corinthians 5:5)The purpose he speaks of is to be clothed in immortality - it's what we were made for! Paul works to please God, but not from a place of fear or resentment. God-pleasing, when one properly understands the nature of God, can only come from a place of love and acceptance - because that's what God wants.
Now, a lot of believing Christians have trouble with this. For many of us, God appears almost exclusively as a judge - a condemning moral authority. And God absolutely is a judge. There's no denying it.
But if the people-pleaser struggles with feeling accepted by God, I would encourage them to read over passages like Jesus's parable of the Pharisee and the tax collector. If you don't know it, please read it - I think it's really important. I promise I'll still be here when you get back!
The Pharisee, although he was, in fact, a sinner, refused to admit his sins before God, and consequently was not justified. The tax collector, however, arguably a much worse sinner, "went home justified." For having done what? He confessed what he had done. And he found justification - acceptance by God - waiting for him.
It therefore seems to me that a believing Christian who struggles with feeling accepted by God does so because they have not really allowed themselves to be broken before him - to admit their sin to themselves and to God. God will absolutely show you what grace means - what it means to be accepted in spite of anything you've done - if you only turn to him. He longs for reconciliation with you. And he will work in you, transforming your very nature into someone who pleases him.
So that's the paradox then. The people-pleaser's real enemy isn't fear or anger, but pride. This is because pride is the only thing that prevents us from taking the solution to our insecurities that God is longing to give us. But if we do take it - if we do turn our hearts to him, if we have the Holy Spirit - then we have all the acceptance and love of God that comes from being adopted as his children.
"For those who are led by the Spirit of God are the children of God. The Spirit you received does not make you slaves, so that you live in fear again; rather, the Spirit you received brought about your adoption to sonship. And by him we cry, “Abba, Father.” The Spirit himself testifies with our spirit that we are God’s children." (Romans 8:14-16)Take the security that God is offering you.
(P.S. If you are already someone who understands God's love and acceptance, I encourage you to show that same love and acceptance to others. Since God's love can feel very abstract to people, help make it real by demonstrating it at a personal level.)
