There is a particular kind of people pleasing that doesn’t look like people pleasing at all.
It looks like being easy-going.
You don’t choose the restaurant because you genuinely don’t mind. You don’t mention the comment that hurt you because you don’t want to make a big deal out of it. You don’t ask your partner for more because they already have enough going on. You don’t tell your family that something is becoming too much because you know they’ll take it badly.
None of these things, on their own, are particularly alarming.
But when this becomes your default way of relating to people, something strange starts to happen.
You become increasingly absent from your own life.
There is a word for this: self-abnegation.
And while it sounds slightly Victorian, it describes something I see very often in people who struggle with people pleasing.
What does self-abnegation mean?
Self-abnegation means denying, suppressing or giving up your own needs, wishes or interests, particularly for the sake of somebody else.
It is sometimes confused with generosity, but I think there is an important difference.
Generosity means: I have something, and I am choosing to give some of it to you.
Self-abnegation sounds more like: I probably shouldn’t have needed it in the first place.
That distinction matters.
Giving up your preference occasionally because somebody else cares more about something is normal. Relationships require compromise. Sometimes we inconvenience ourselves because we love people. Sometimes we do things we would rather not do because another person needs us.
The problem begins when compromise becomes one-directional, automatic and almost invisible.
You don’t decide to put yourself second.
You simply stop considering yourself as one of the people whose needs should be included in the calculation.
People pleasing can become a form of self-abnegation
A lot of people pleasers are not consciously walking around thinking:
Everyone else matters more than me.
It is subtler than that.
Often, the underlying rule is:
My needs are more negotiable.
Your partner is tired, so you change your plans.
Your friend seems disappointed, so you immediately reconsider your boundary.
Someone disagrees with you, and suddenly you are less sure what you think.
You say no, notice the change in somebody’s face and immediately start explaining.
You are extremely good at knowing what everybody else wants, but strangely vague when someone asks what you want.
Sometimes people even wear this as part of their identity.
“I’m very low maintenance.”
“I’m just easy-going.”
“I don’t really need much.”
And sometimes that is genuinely true.
But sometimes “low maintenance” is what happens when a person has become exceptionally skilled at not requiring anything from anyone.
That is very different.
Self-abnegation and self-abandonment
I often talk about self-abandonment in my work with people pleasers.
The two ideas overlap, but I don’t think they are exactly the same.
Self-abnegation is the broader tendency to renounce or minimise your own interests, needs or wishes.
Self-abandonment is what that can look like in practice.
You have an opinion until someone dislikes it.
You have a boundary until someone becomes upset.
You know something hurt you until the other person explains why you shouldn’t be hurt.
You want something until wanting it creates tension.
Then suddenly, you disappear.
Not physically, obviously.
Psychologically.
Your attention moves almost entirely towards the other person: what they are thinking, what they are feeling, whether they are angry, whether they still like you, whether you need to repair something.
And your own experience becomes secondary.
Sometimes completely inaccessible.
Why do people do this?
People pleasing is often described online as if it were simply a bad habit caused by low self-esteem.
I think that explanation is far too shallow.
For many people, becoming highly sensitive to other people’s emotions was once quite intelligent.
If you grew up in an environment where another person’s mood strongly affected the emotional atmosphere around you, paying close attention to them may have been useful.
If disagreement resulted in withdrawal, criticism, anger or conflict, learning to keep everybody happy may have protected connection.
If being “good”, helpful or undemanding was rewarded, you may have learned that relationships work best when you take up slightly less space.
None of this requires some dramatic childhood story.
Human beings learn relational rules through repetition.
Don’t upset people.
Don’t be difficult.
Don’t ask for too much.
Keep the peace.
And eventually those rules stop feeling like rules.
They start feeling like your personality.
The difficulty is that something that helped maintain connection in one environment can become incredibly restrictive when you carry it into every relationship afterwards.
The resentment problem
This is where people pleasing becomes particularly confusing.
You give.
You accommodate.
You anticipate.
You make things easier.
And eventually you start feeling resentful that everybody expects so much from you.
Sometimes they do.
But sometimes something else is happening too.
People pleasing can make you feel as though other people are taking too much when you have been giving too much without ever telling them the cost.
That is uncomfortable to recognise because it means acknowledging that resentment is not always evidence that somebody else has behaved terribly.
Sometimes resentment is information.
It tells you that there is a discrepancy between what you are giving and what you actually want to give.
You said yes, but wanted to say no.
You agreed, but hoped they would somehow realise you didn’t really want to.
You kept offering, while quietly waiting for the other person to tell you to stop.
And eventually you blame them for accepting something you never told them was too expensive for you to give.
This is one of the reasons people pleasing and anger are often more closely connected than people realise.
The anger tends to arrive long after the boundary should have.
Why saying “just set boundaries” is not particularly helpful
People pleasers are constantly told to set boundaries.
Which is technically correct and sometimes about as useful as telling an anxious person to relax.
Most people I work with already know they are “supposed” to set boundaries.
The difficulty is what happens after the boundary.
The silence.
The disappointed expression.
The message that feels slightly colder than usual.
The possibility that somebody might think you are selfish.
That is the part that makes boundaries difficult.
People pleasing is often maintained not because you don’t know what to say, but because you have a very low tolerance for the emotional consequences of saying it.
So the work is not simply learning the sentence:
“No, I can’t do that.”
It is learning that somebody else can be disappointed by your answer and you do not have to immediately change it.
That someone can misunderstand you and you do not have to write a three-paragraph defence.
That somebody can think you are being unreasonable without that automatically meaning you are.
This is where CBT for people pleasing can be particularly useful.
A CBT approach to self-abnegation
If you notice yourself disappearing in relationships, I would start by paying attention to the rules underneath the behaviour.
They often sound very reasonable.
It’s easier if I just do it.
There’s no point saying anything.
I don’t want to make things awkward.
They’ve already got enough going on.
It isn’t a big deal.
Maybe.
But ask yourself another question:
If I repeatedly follow this rule, what happens to me?
Because a rule can be reasonable once and destructive as a lifestyle.
The next step is often surprisingly small.
You don’t need to begin by confronting your entire family and reinventing your personality overnight.
In fact, for people pleasers, gradual behavioural experiments are usually far more useful.
Choose the restaurant.
Say which film you actually want to watch.
Don’t immediately say “whatever works for you”.
Allow somebody to wait while you think before answering a request.
Say no to something relatively unimportant and resist the urge to provide a legal defence for it.
Then notice what your mind predicts.
They’ll think I’m difficult.
They’ll be annoyed.
They’ll pull away.
And notice what actually happens.
This is how internal authority starts to develop: not because you suddenly stop caring what anyone thinks, but because other people’s reactions stop being the only evidence you use to decide whether you were allowed to have a need.
You do not need to become less caring
This is important because people who struggle with self-abnegation sometimes hear all of this as:
Fine. I need to become more selfish.
Not at all.
Caring about other people is not the problem.
Empathy is not the problem.
Compromise is not the problem.
The problem is when caring for other people consistently requires removing yourself from the relationship.
Healthy relationships contain two subjectivities.
Two sets of preferences.
Two nervous systems.
Two people who can occasionally inconvenience, disappoint or misunderstand one another without the relationship collapsing.
The goal is not to stop considering other people.
It is to stop treating yourself as the one person who can always be edited out.
The opposite of self-abnegation is not selfishness.
It is participation.
It is allowing your own preferences, limitations, feelings and needs to enter the room alongside everybody else’s.
Including, perhaps most importantly, when somebody else doesn’t particularly like them.
About Ludovica
Ludovica Colella is a CBT therapist and coach specialising in people pleasing, self-abandonment and relationship patterns. She helps people build stronger internal authority, clearer boundaries and a way of relating to others that doesn’t require disappearing from themselves.
Suggested Reading
7 CBT Techniques for People Pleasers (That Actually Work)
How to Stop Being a People Pleaser: The Complete Guide
People Pleasing and Anger: The Emotions I Was Never Allowed to Feel
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