It’s ironic how the behaviors that I have always hated most about me, aspects I thought were my personality, are one by one being identified as trauma adaptations. In all my important relationships…the ones I cannot bear to lose…I aim to please…to serve…but I do it to a fault. Through the lens of Stephen Porges’s polyvagal theory, these efforts of desperately trying to please someone I love can be seen as a survival mechanism. They are please and appease behaviors.
I rarely recognize that I do it, but it drives my husband crazy…and probably my friends too. My husband will ask me for something and I respond with double, triple of what he has requested. If he has a complaint, I drop everything I am doing to fix it. When he is annoyed about the mess on the kitchen counter, I rush to clean the kitchen and then move on to cleaning everything else in the house that may irritate him later in the day. If he complains that it is too much work to decorate for Christmas I will wait until he leaves for work and then haul down all 10 heavy totes of decorations and a Christmas tree from the attic and decorate alone rather risk any negative feelings toward me if I asked again.
I love him so much and want to make him happy, but if I’m honest, that’s not my motivation. I wish I could claim that I am trying to be a badass independent woman that can get everything accomplished without help, but that’s not my motivation either. Although I was unaware of it all these years, the motivation for these efforts is to avoid an abusive attack by eliminating any negative feelings he may have toward me. My loving husband would never attack me like my ex did but my panicked body prepares for it anyway.
I am afraid of an attack that is not coming
In my second marriage, which is safe and secure with a wonderful husband, these please and appease behaviors continue to complicate my life. I constantly think ahead…when will he be hungry? What will he enjoy eating? Is there something that will make him happy when he walks in the door from work? What will annoy him? What did I forget to take care of? What could give him the slightest reason to get pissed off? I let him sleep longer as I get the kids ready for school. I try to have his coffee ready when he wakes up. I do my best to have his dinner ready when he gets home. I buy too many gifts for no reason. He asks for none of this!
Sure, he is grateful and appreciates some of it, but it also frustrates him. He wants me to feel secure, to be myself. Yet I get too nervous NOT doing it…as if something horrible is waiting for me if I stop. And when he makes me aware of my extremes I beat myself up, further ashamed that I am like this–which does nothing to improve the behavior. What neither of us realized is that the source of my behavior has nothing to do with our relationship or my personality, but rather with my past.
appearing socially connected
This please and appease behavior developed as a means to navigate the dangerous home of my first marriage. It was a way to appear connected, calm, and loving when my insides were screaming! Despite what it looked like on the outside, my fight or flight nervous system was highly activated and controlling all of my behaviors. It was a complex drive for survival.
I was probably already wired this way from childhood experiences. But from age 20-30, my primary purpose in life was to avoid activating a fight response in my ex-husband. This required that I stay highly alert, constantly scanning for ways to please him, to keep him as happy and calm as I possibly could.
So although it looked like I was socially connected to my husband, I was highly vigilant and anything BUT connected!
always waiting, preparing for an attack
I could always tell when a big blow up was coming. I could see the anger in his face, in his eyes…for several days leading up to it. Knowing it was coming was the worst part. Those were the days my please and appease behavior was extreme. My tension, fear, and anxiety levels were at their highest, waiting…wishing for it to be over.
His anger would spill in to every action. The look in his eyes was one of disgust. He talked to me like a child. I noticed him smoking more than normal. He stayed out late drinking with his friends. He stopped bothering to use words to correct me and just made a clicking sound with his tongue, like I was an animal being trained. If I didn’t understand what I was doing wrong (and I usually didn’t), this sparked far greater anger at my stupidity. There was no winning.
But through it all I smiled, I touched him lovingly. I acted like the most caring wife in the world while feeling nothing.
I kept my face turned away from him as much as possible as any emotion angered him. But he picked endless little fights and forced me to look him in the eyes while he spoke to me for hour after hour, his face just inches from mine. My chin would tremble. I’d bite my tongue, bite my cheeks, trying to distract myself from crying. If my face suddenly flushed with anger or sadness or the tears showed up, I knew that would be enough to cause the blow up.
every area of my life began to fall apart
He never beat me terribly. But he would do enough to keep me scared, always on edge. Frequently it was shoving me, or pinning me against a wall where I couldn’t get away. Often he’d back me into a tiny space, like the laundry room ,where I could not get around him to get out. Or he’d punch a hole in the wall next to me. Sometimes he punched me, just one hard punch. He’d search for the things I treasured most and shatter them on the floor.
During these days while I waited for him to explode, I could not think about work, school, my faith, my parents, not even my daughter’s needs…I began to fail in every other area of my life while every ounce of my being was turned toward pleasing him and keeping the anger at bay. But it was never much use.
please and appease behaviors create a solid barrier to pain
Once I was sitting at my desk working and he came in yelling, extremely angry with me. He pulled up a chair next to me, so close our knees touched as he faced me and yelled and yelled. I couldn’t keep the tears back. When he saw this he lifted both arms above his head, and brought his fists down as hard as he could on my legs. The force was so intense it knocked me off my chair and I laid on the floor in pain, afraid my legs were broken. But instead of feeling any anger, or even allowing my mind to go to my pain, I tried to calm him, reassure him that I cared and would do whatever he was asking of me.
It is exhausting to live pleasing someone else – having your whole world operate like this! I always felt I was living a lie, without consciously being aware that I was managing a dual life. I’d pace by the front window, watching for his car, trying to be ready. I lost all sense of self. No longer did I have any idea what I stood for, what I wanted in life, what I felt. I constantly asked myself:
Who is he wanting me to be? How do I change me? What does he want from me right now? How do I be successful in his world?
Living to only please someone you fear is was like being tightly tied up with no hope of freedom while everything inside you is raging!
please and appease behaviors continue to show up
Like the other trauma responses, this one keeps showing up in my life – despite being safe now. I understand that my mind and body adapted to operating in this way to protect me during those 10 years, but it bothers me how much it has damaged my ability to know myself; to know my needs, my thoughts. My husband now truly cares about who I am. He asks how I feel about something and I have no idea even how to know!
It is as if all of what was me was erased in my attempts to keep my ex-husband happy…or at least less severe towards me. When you have an abusive husband, and you know nothing you can do will truly avoid the impending explosion, you keep trying to please anyway – because shortening the attacks also feels worthwhile. We grasp on to any hope, even if it’s just shortening duration.
Please and appease behavior is most seen in individuals that have experienced child abuse, intimate partner violence, and sexual assault. It is especially common when the trauma is chronic. I learned quickly that if I could find all the little ways that make him happy, maybe I won’t get hurt. And with chronic trauma, this mode of operating becomes ingrained in us!
When we live with the person causing extreme pain, we are well aware that it’s not just about getting through a one-time assault, it’s about How the hell can I survive inside this home? How can I manage life in this suffocating world?
do please and appease behaviors impact therapy?
Sadly, please and appease behavior impacts all sorts of relationships and professional counseling is one of them. As a client, I am rarely aware that I act in this way, yet when I do it keeps me from making further progress. I attempt to find all the ways that I have improved and start spitting these out as soon as I walk into the therapy room. I want my counselor to know she is amazing at what she does and that she is the source of my healing and growth.
Fortunately, I have a counselor who is wise and balanced and ends my forced positive talk almost as quickly as it begins. But she does it gently with much care in her eyes. Thank God! If she did this harshly, pushing for me to be stronger and fight, I will feel like a failure and begin to resist. I know that much about me. She gently dismisses all of my questions about her well-being and brings my focus on where it needs to be – the trauma that keeps showing up in my life.
I censor my words in therapy
But then in the middle of the session it often happens again. I find myself in the middle of a distressing memory and I begin to carefully choose my words to only share the pieces, the details that sound “appropriate” – even for a therapist. I simply cannot use the words I wish to use for fear of her disapproval, her disappointment in my ugly details. The shame sets in and I try to please.
Sometimes she sees this when I do not and guides me to use the words I am scared to use. But I must be making progress because in my last session I caught myself doing this and I moved past it. Not perfectly, just a little, and with no eye contact whatsoever…but I shared details I would never normally speak aloud. Details that disgusted me. I didn’t use all of the words I wanted to use, but it was a start. And afterwards when my thoughts began to attack me that I had let her down, I was able to be kind to myself.
I wish I could walk in and honestly tell her life is amazing. I want to say, “I have come so far there is really nothing left to discuss right now. Nothing more to process.” But that is not why I am there. If I cannot be real with her, if my please and appease behaviors show up as self-censoring in therapy, I will never learn to be real with me. I will never know who I am. What do I want? What do I need? What do I feel? What do I believe?
how did I learn it was dangerous to be myself?
I don’t get angry much, but as I become aware of how chronic trauma changed who I am, it is making me incredibly angry! Was it not enough to endure a miserable, abusive marriage? Now I must do this painful work that I badly wish to avoid, to modify the way my brain and body work. It is slow work and rarely feels rewarding or even worthwhile most of the time! But the fact that I am finally getting angry now means I am making progress!
When we find ourselves working so hard to please a spouse, a partner, a friend, we have to pull back and ask ourselves: Where did I learn that it was risky to know my own thoughts and express them? What made it dangerous to have feelings? Who showed me I should not have my own needs? Who saw me as too much? We must find awareness in where we began this please and appease behavior.
It is only with this understanding that I can begin to find a connection with myself. When I find the words to describe why it felt safe to please someone else, I can be grateful to myself that I instinctively knew to do that. Thank you to that part of me for pleasing my aggressive husband. Thank you to that part that kept me surviving. My mind and body knew how to protect me and I am grateful.
If I slow down enough, be in the silence, feel the emotions that wait for me in that silence, even when they make me cry hard and shake uncontrollably, I recover piece by piece. I learn I am worthy simply because I am me. My worth comes from God; it does not come from making someone happy.
This post blew me away and really challenged my authenticity! Thank you for sharing uncensored in this post!
It was helpful to clarify some choices for me to make where I’ve held back.