Fostering Dignity: How Tyranny Creates People-Pleasing Behavior

Sometimes, you’re just someone who has nothing to say.

The avoidant personality type is marked by extreme shyness, fear of criticism, and an excessive worry about appearing ridiculous, needy, or predatory. Avoidance, fundamentally, is a defensive strategy aimed at mitigating anxiety and self-reproach. If you aren’t around others, you, in turn, aren’t taking up unearned space. And what does it mean to earn it? Essentially, you’re always pleasing, making sure that others feel seen, heard, and validated, regardless of your own needs.

The fear of rejection, expressed in one’s anxiety about being invisible, forgotten, or directly shunned, is the core driver of perfectionistic tendencies. In black and white terms, you believe you’re liked for what you can do rather than who you are. And being liked is sustained through constant self-monitoring.

Therefore, an individual struggling with avoidant tendencies may enter treatment for depression through self-isolation and shame. And one of its main goals becomes helping her tolerate the risk involved in cultivating respect. For people-pleasers, respect takes a back seat to being liked. Fearing rejection, clients with avoidant tendencies often fail to set boundaries and express their desires. If you were to ask them, they’re mere window shoppers peeking into the great, big mall of respect. A mall designed for nearly everyone else.

Many of my avoidant clients have somewhat of an understanding of the construct, but, considering it to be beyond them, don’t care too much to know what it means. As children, respect would never be given, and few were even granted blueprints for earning it. Worse, some were tested with impossible standards. So, while many scratch and claw for respect, these individuals tend to scratch and claw for scraps of affection. In treatment, they learn the difference between being liked and respected, wherein being liked means that another benefits from your presence and being respected means that he cares about you benefiting from his, without always expecting something in return. With respect to the former, one is perceived as inferior and not taken as seriously; as for the latter, one is held by the other in high regard. Therefore, knowing you’re respected, you can tolerate moments in which you’re disliked.

Since much of the work in therapy lies in processing the relationship between the therapist and her patient, the exploration focuses on the patient’s beliefs and expectations for it. What happens when she makes a mistake? Is coming to treatment unprepared, with nothing to say, really permissible? Will they be held to impossible standards? I’m grateful for many of my patients just for being my patients. I love working with them and appreciate how much they teach me by affording me alternative interpretations (like the one about being forgotten, mentioned above) to the ones I create. So, I care about whether or not they benefit from my work, making it easier for them to risk rejection.

In other aspects of their lives, however, they worry about requesting too much, resulting in many unfulfilling relationships. But, to be respected, we need to risk being disliked. The paradox being: only when you allow yourself to be unlikable will you open the door to respect. When we set boundaries, and people stop benefiting from us (at least momentarily) they may start to hate us. In that moment, they punish us with rejection. For those who personalize, they find the response almost completely intolerable. “Why didn’t I just leave it alone?” “I could have just done it myself.” “It wasn’t worth the fight.” And this is how tyranny rules! At bottom, respect is withheld because it sustains the power dynamic.

And, the most important aspect of a dictatorship is the internalization of disrespect. In her book, Truth and Repair, Dr. Judith Herman writes, “…for many tyrants, having a submissive victim is not sufficient; they demand a willing victim. For this, it is necessary to break the victim’s spirit… The malignant shame of people subjected to methods of coercive control is of a different order of magnitude… Victims feel permanently dirty, disgusting, and defiled.” So, once a patient’s safety needs are met, two questions arise: 1. Is being liked worth it? 2. Could respect be possible?

Considered in another way, a loss may not be significant if respect weren’t an option. The risk remains a risk so long as one’s shame remains internal. Most of the time, even if someone is upset with you (for sharing your opinion or some long withheld wish), or even hates you momentarily, when they’re convinced of how much they need and love you, respect will ensue. However, if they wish to maintain control, they’ll reiterate, passively or actively, that you’re the one who ought to be grateful.

Judith notes, “The righteous anger of women and other subordinated groups, which violates dominant norms of compliant and willing submission, is always particularly threatening.” To viscerally feel her own dignity, she has to first understand why respect was withheld and then experience, not so much it being granted, but its rigidity. In treatment, my patients don’t learn that I respect them; they learn that I have no good reason not to. And most importantly, they learn that people love them for what they can do and for who they are, meaning their occasional silence, and invisibility, will, at some point, be transformed into connection and comfort by the love and respect they worked so hard to create.

Check out our episode with Judith below: