Notebook
The Inner Architecture of People-Pleasing
Part One: People-Pleasing from an Object Relations Perspective
October 10, 2025
Your friend asks if you can help them move next weekend. You say yes before you even check your schedule — or check in with yourself. You tell yourself it’s kindness; you want to be supportive. You smile, but your chest feels tight. A faint hum of ambivalence and resentment rises beneath the surface.
In depth psychology — including Object Relations theory, the lineage of thinkers like Melanie Klein, D. W. Winnicott, and Donald Fairbairn — behavior is rarely what it seems on the surface. What looks like generosity often protects against emotions we learned were unacceptable: anxiety, anger, envy. People-pleasing isn’t just a habit; it’s a structure the psyche builds to manage love and aggression. It comes at a cost: burnout, emotional exhaustion, and a creeping sense of alienation — from others and, most painfully, from oneself.
Early on, many of us learned that being good kept us safe and lovable. The parts that felt angry, needy, or judgmental were sent underground. When those feelings get disowned, they don’t vanish — they get projected onto the world around us.
Projection is a psychological process where repressed emotions and impulses are misattributed to others. In this way, the world becomes a mirror, reflecting back to us the traits we can’t face in ourselves.
Sometimes people really do have “hooks” for our projections — the critical boss, the emotionally unavailable lover — but the deeper work is discerning what’s ours and reclaiming it. That reclamation is the emotional and spiritual path through people-pleasing.
As a clinician, I love working with people who identify as “people-pleasers,” “empaths,” or “highly sensitive.” The particulars vary, but certain inner processes repeat. Two of the most common patterns I see among people-pleasers are the projection of anxiety and fragility, and the projection of judgment and aggression.
Projection of Anxiety and Fragility
Many pleasers anticipate others’ distress before it happens. You assume the other person will crumble, or you feel responsible for keeping everyone calm. Your body tenses before anyone else’s mood even shifts. Often, this pattern begins in childhood with a stressed, ill, or otherwise vulnerable caregiver. When a child must stay attuned to a parent’s emotional weather, a kind of false self begins to form — one organized around the other’s needs, not one’s own. A child who feels their parent’s instability learns to hold themselves together, to be the “little adult” or “parentified child.”
What can get missed with well-behaved kids is how the parent’s anxiety becomes the child’s own. Having an anxious parent makes a child anxious; having a “helpless” parent can make a child feel helpless. When that vulnerability is unbearable, the child suppresses it and becomes the helper instead. As adults, we may still rush in to rescue others, placing our own fragility outside ourselves. It can feel like holding our breath for someone else, or like “secondhand embarrassment” or “toxic empathy.”
Beneath the urge to help lies an unconscious hope to restore something in ourselves — an idealistic wish for a safer world that will mirror safety and goodness back to us. When that reflection doesn’t come, when above-and-beyond thoughtfulness goes unreciprocated, a quiet grief or bitterness can seep in — the ache of realizing the world may never give back what we’ve worked so hard to provide.
Projection of Judgment and Aggression
Not all people-pleasing grows from fearing another’s fragility; sometimes it comes from fearing their judgment — or our own. The pleaser’s internal world is often ruled by a subtle, relentless critic. You might spend hours rehearsing what to say in a meeting, replaying conversations, or worrying that saying no makes you selfish.
The phrase “inner critic” is ubiquitous in pop-psychology language. In IFS (Internal Family Systems) and psychodynamic frameworks, it can develop from trauma as an internalized abuser-protector — a voice meant to keep us safe by pre-empting others’ anger. While that makes perfect sense and is certainly part of the picture, Object Relations theory invites us to look somewhere more uncomfortable. Consciously, we may think, I’d never judge anyone else like that. Unconsciously, though, the aggression we can’t allow ourselves to feel gets turned inward or reversed outward as exaggerated niceness — a defense Freud called reaction formation.
Klein described how we split off hatred to preserve love; reaction formation is that split in motion. Perhaps we grew up in homes where anger wasn’t safe — an explosive parent whose rage made us fear annihilation, or a fragile one whose tears made us fear we’d annihilate them. So when a friend gets irritated with us, we over-apologize, over-give, over-correct. We think we’re meeting them halfway, but we’re doing ninety percent of the repair attempt while they’re doing ten. What we imagine others think of us often belongs to the parts of ourselves we’ve yet to meet.
Takeaways
Whether we’re protecting someone else’s perceived fragility, which echoes our own, or defending against our unacknowledged anger, the aim is the same: to keep love intact. The cost is aliveness. The task isn’t to stop caring; it’s to let care include deeper truth. When we can tolerate both tenderness and aggression, we relate at a deeper, more real level — one that’s far less exhausting.
Honesty takes courage; it asks us to befriend what we once had to exile. It can be frightening to look in the mirror and stay with the parts of ourselves we’ve learned to call ugly — envy, anger, fear, desire. Yet when we finally dare to see what we’ve turned to stone in ourselves, we come back to life.
This reflection is part of an ongoing series on the inner architecture of people-pleasing.