People Pleasing Has Ruined My Life

Added: 2026-05-11

[00:00:18]Hello and welcome back to Autistic After Hours. I'm your host Asha. Today I wanted to talk about people pleasing and I wanted to try and reflect in real time on the depth of ways that people pleasing has impacted me when it comes to my sense of self, my self-esteem and my relationships. What inspired this episode today was actually a comment that I received on my last podcast episode and I'm not specifically going to call the comment out or call the person out because I don't know if they would be comfortable with that but this comment made me think a lot and it was actually really helpful for me. It was about people pleasing talking about my feelings of needing to make conversations entertaining for other people and I feel like I knew this was a people pleasing behavior but it didn't actually like register in my mind that that's what was happening until I read this person's comment and so I just wanted to thank you if you were the person that commented if you know that you're the person that I'm talking about because it really opened up my eyes and has inspired me to want to talk more about this today. Before we get into the episode quick reminder to follow Autistic After Hours on Instagram. That is where I post original content every single week. We're almost at 70,000 followers which is awesome. Thank you all for the support on there and also a quick reminder to follow wherever you are listening right now whether that is on Spotify, Apple or YouTube. It helps me so much when you actually subscribe or follow along. As a high masking autistic person people pleasing is something that I have engaged in for a very very long time and it's really hard for me to separate what is people pleasing versus what is me just wanting to connect with with other people versus what is my actual personality. Like it's really hard to disentangle all of these things as an adult because I've been engaging in these behaviors for so long.

[00:02:33]If you're also high masking you may be familiar with people pleasing but it's really any sort of behavior or action that is designed to keep people around you happy. It's to please other people without really any regard for how it affects you and for a really long time and still sometimes now people pleasing has been my main way of approaching social experiences and I feel like I didn't realize until very recently just how much of my social anxiety and social difficulties are stemming literally directly from people pleasing. I want to try [clears throat] and separate some of my masking behaviors and when I say masking I'm talking about really what is more broadly referred to as camouflaging.

[00:03:27]There are different parts of camouflaging like compensation, assimilation, masking but when I say masking I think a lot of people including myself are meaning to refer to all of these behaviors like trying to fit in, trying to make people around you happy, trying to hide your autistic traits. So when I say masking I'm referring to all of these things even though the technical correct word would be camouflaging. On this journey of unmasking what has been probably the most difficult to get rid of are my people pleasing tendencies.

[00:04:03]This is because as I've become more myself, more strongly understanding like who I am, a stronger sense of identity I feel like it's gotten easier for me to be more openly myself meaning that I'm hiding my autistic traits a lot less.

[00:04:21]They are a lot more noticeable to me and other people and so that aspect of masking like the hiding autistic traits that has gotten better. I don't hide my autistic traits as much. I do not mask in that way where it's like me directly trying to hide or camouflage my autistic traits anymore. I just don't hide myself as much as I used to and so that's gotten a lot better as I've been unmasking but really my biggest struggle to this day still has been the way that I show up socially, the way that I engage in social experiences, in social interactions, the ways that I position myself in social interactions and just the way that I feel and I think after reading this person's comment I'm realizing that a big reason why this is still such a huge struggle for me is because of people pleasing because of this deep rooted feeling that I have inside of needing to show up a certain way for other people.

[00:05:22]I feel like even though I've been unmasking, even though I have this stronger sense of self and I have so much self love these days and confidence I still feel I have this like idea so strongly rooted in my mind that my only sort of like worthiness in social interactions is to be of service to other people, to make the interaction positive for the other person and I think a lot of this also has to do with all or nothing thinking I have really like high standards for myself and I feel like this applies heavily in social situations where my brain tells me that I have to be fully liked by everybody. Like I have to be 100% liked. I have to be 100% like the funniest, like the best. I have to be the best version of myself all the time and it's so tiring because it makes you feel like you're not connecting with other people out of a genuine desire to connect but you're doing it because you want to be seen a certain way and it's not like this thing of vanity. It's not that I have this feeling of wanting to be better than other people. It's that I know that people in the past might have seen me a certain way like when I was high masking and my brain constantly compares myself to that version of feedback that I got when people might have seen me as like oh my god Asha is so funny or Asha is so X Y or Z. When people have given me positive feedback in the past my brain now constantly because of the all or nothing thinking will compare myself to that and be like oh they didn't think I was funny. Like I didn't do a good job. I need to do better next time. And so I constantly feel like I have this deep rooted I guess false belief that my only role in socializing is to make the experience good for other people or to show up as like this best version of myself that is liked by everybody and it's really really hard to actively work against that because even that at times feels inauthentic because either way it feels like I'm sort of playing this role of like trying to meet my own expectations of myself or purposefully trying not to. I don't know if I've ever gone into a social experience like in adulthood, like a fresh new sort of experience with like a new person. I don't know if I've ever done that fully without this idea of feeling like I need to make the experience good for them.

[00:08:14]Like I need to people please.

[00:08:16]And I say in adulthood because as a kid I definitely did not do this. I think it started probably like in college honestly but before that social experiences felt a lot more like they were self-driven, self-motivated. Like I was doing it because I genuinely wanted to connect with other people and I wasn't so worried about how I was being perceived.

[00:08:41]I wasn't so worried about making the experience positive for other people and because of that socializing felt a lot more genuine, the connections felt more real and I had more friendships and I had more strong relationships. Now I have way fewer relationships. I still do have strong relationships but I have way way way fewer because as I've gotten older a lot of those relationships have fizzled out or died out for whatever reason but I haven't really been able to make new strong friendships because of this people pleasing thing I think because I continuously show up in relationships new relationships when I'm trying to make new friends and such I have this feeling of like this deep anxiety or this deep weight on me of needing to please them and it makes it so that I feel like I can't show up as myself because I'm worried that myself isn't good enough and it's really confusing because like I said I feel like I have so much more self love, self confidence, self assurance, a strong sense of identity yet the second that I'm around other people it feels like this crumbles or dissolves because this other belief that I have, this false belief that I have in the back of my mind, is so deep-rooted.

[00:10:04]It is so strong and it is so tied to that people-pleasing behavior of feeling like my only role in this life is to like be of service other people, to make other people happy.

[00:10:16]And it shows up in all of my interactions, especially like my new interactions, when I'm meeting a new friend and trying to develop a friendship. When I'm talking to people in the store, like whatever it is, I feel so tied to this false belief that I need to please other people without any regard for how it's impacting me. To give you some more context of how this feels is like, let's say I have a new friend and we're going to hang out. I will have so much anxiety leading up to hanging out because I will constantly be second-guessing everything about myself and I will constantly be thinking like, I hope I don't waste their time. I hope that I can make sure they have fun. It's almost like I feel like the hangout is like them hiring me to like entertain them. That's actually how it feels and so I feel like I'm walking into a job and like I have to perform well. That is how socializing feels for me, except for if I'm socializing with somebody who like is already a best friend of mine and I have like one or two of those people. It doesn't feel like that and those are relationships that I've had for years. But like any new relationships where I haven't already established like the connection yet. It feels like they're hiring me to like entertain them and I have to do a good job. I have to perform well or else I will beat myself up about it for literally years. Years.

[00:11:41]And I think this is all about people-pleasing and like self-worthiness and I guess this episode is me just saying that I haven't really taken the time to pause and reflect on just how much people-pleasing has impacted me and reading that person's comment last week helped me to understand that there is still so much residual people-pleasing behaviors that are really deep-rooted in my belief system that I have to work through. And I think the people-pleasing is truly the reason why I still feel as though in interactions I can't show up as myself because even though I have a strong sense of self, that feeling overrides it. This feeling of needing to entertain people, of needing to make sure they have a good time of needing to make sure that they think I'm funny, that they think I'm entertaining, that they think that their time was well spent with me.

[00:12:38]And any sort of sense of me is thrown out the window because it's swapped out for this feeling of needing to be a certain way to make sure they have a good time. I feel like that's why I have this feeling of abandoning myself and I've talked about that so many times and I didn't really know exactly where it was stemming from, but I think now I understand it's stemming from people-pleasing. And I've talked about people-pleasing so much, but I don't think I realized just how impacting it has been on me and how much it has affected my ability to be present and be myself when socializing.

[00:13:17]I don't like to admit it because it feels almost embarrassing somehow. I don't know why because I feel like I want to portray this idea of myself as like being this really strong person and I want to feel like I really know who I am and I'm really kind of this tough person who can like be me and I I want to say that I know who I am and that I I'm confident and I am, but I still have these feelings that I have to admit that I have of feeling like my only sense of worthiness is based on how people see me and based on how funny they think I am, based on how pretty they think I am, based on how much they like me and I feel really shattered by the idea of people thinking I'm not worthy. And so I think ultimately what I'm saying is I need to work on dismantling these false beliefs that I have about myself and about my way of interacting with other people and I need to strengthen my confidence and my sense of self-worthiness intrinsically independent of how anyone else feels about me. So I'm really glad I got that comment last week because it inspired all of this and I'm realizing that this is bigger than I thought it was and it's something that I I'm excited to keep working on.

[00:14:43]And I feel really happy to have this understanding of where a lot of my difficulties with socializing are stemming from now because even though I knew people-pleasing was a huge part of masking for me, I don't think I realized how much it impacted me and how much it's still impacting me.

[00:14:59]I think I was really focused on unmasking regarding like showing my autistic traits and being very proudly and openly autistic when it feels safe to do so, but I didn't realize how much of my people-pleasing beliefs were really impacting my ability to feel like myself in social situations. I kind of chalked it all up to feeling like I couldn't present autistically, whereas now I understand it's more so related to feeling like I need to present a certain way to get people to like me. I honestly didn't realize how much that was affecting me and I see now that it really is. I wanted to thank you so much for being here. As always, remember autistic adults exist. We deserve awareness, support, community and acceptance and I'm so grateful that you're here. I'll talk to you again soon.

[00:15:46]Bye.