October 15, 2025
The Inner Architecture of People-Pleasing
Part Two: People-Pleasing Through a Self Psychology Lens
Have you ever hung up the phone or pulled into your driveway after spending time with family or friends and thought, Why does giving sometimes feel draining instead of connecting? If you’ve ever found yourself saying “of course!” when you mean “I’d rather not,” you can probably relate.
Maybe it’s the difference between being nice and being kind. Niceness keeps the peace; kindness makes contact. Niceness maintains harmony by smoothing edges. Kindness reaches across difference — it can sting, disrupt, and heal.
The first essay in this series explored people-pleasing from an Object Relations perspective. Where Object Relations explores how early caretaking patterns shape our inner world of relationships, Self Psychology asks how our relationships shape the structure and vitality of the self. Both belong to the broader lineage of depth psychology, frameworks that look beneath behavior to the unconscious architecture of relationship and meaning.
Developed by Heinz Kohut in the 1970s — a few decades after Winnicott and Bowlby were describing attachment, and around the time Lacan was interpreting Freud through language and desire — Self Psychology centered empathy. Emerging in parallel to Object Relations, Self Psychology was part of a broader psychoanalytic shift toward relationship-based theories.
Kohut asked how the self holds together through relationship, how we maintain our sense of aliveness and worth when reflected in another’s eyes.
Mirroring: The Need to Be Seen
In attachment theory, mirroring means emotional attunement: “I see your sadness and comfort you.”
In Self Psychology, mirroring reaches deeper. It says: “I see your radiance. I delight in your being.”
We all need to feel admired, enjoyed, and special sometimes — not out of vanity, but because being vividly seen helps us feel real, alive, and related. Kohut called this “narcissistic nutrition.” When we’re mirrored accurately and consistently, we internalize a sense of worth that remains stable even when life wobbles.
For many people-pleasers, in childhood, mirroring was conditional. Some were celebrated only when they were “good” — calm, self-sufficient, or easy to love. Others absorbed mostly negative reflections: the scapegoated child who felt perpetually “too much,” or the bright one who learned to shrink around an insecure caregiver. When the reflection distorts, the self adapts by managing the mirror — by keeping everyone pleased, regulating others’ moods, or fading into the background at signs of tension.
These habits once preserved belonging. In adulthood, they often leave us tired, over-responsible, or disconnected from our own vitality.
Kohut proposed two other fundamental relational needs: idealization and twinship.
Idealization: The Need to Admire and Aspire
Idealization is the wish to look up to someone — to feel strengthened through connection with someone admirable. When this is healthy, we can admire others without losing our own center. When it’s rooted in shame or emptiness, we over-idealize and outsource our stability, creativity, or vitality: if they approve of me, I’m okay.
In childhood, idealization begins as the need to look up to a caregiver — to feel safe in their strength, to borrow their calm or courage until our own develops. When a parent feels consistently frightening, unavailable, or dismissive, the child loses that safe figure to look toward.
Later, the adult may swing between idolizing others and rejecting authority altogether — unable to trust strength without also fearing it. Healthy idealization lets us look up to others without losing ourselves. We can be inspired without needing to be completed.
Twinship: The Need to Belong
Twinship is the longing to feel alike, to belong, to recognize ourselves in others.
It’s the early sense of you and I are the same kind of person. Developmentally, this might look like a parent laughing with a child at the same silly thing or joining them in wonder — building a block tower together, humming the same tune, sharing a rhythm of play. It can also be a parent who sees a child’s shyness and says, “I used to feel that way too,” helping them feel less alone in their temperament.
When this need is unmet — when a parent feels alien or unreachable, when no one shares our sense of humor, curiosity, or inner world — the self can splinter. We might feel like visitors in our own family. Later, we may over-adapt to fit in or isolate to avoid rejection.
Adults who didn’t experience twinship often carry a subtle loneliness, a sense that belonging requires performing. When deprived of sameness, we can over-merge — I’m only safe if we’re the same — or detach — no one could ever understand me.
Niceness and Kindness: Maintenance and Contact
Related to this, lately I’ve been reflecting a lot on the distinction between being nice and being kind.
Niceness is a form of maintenance. It’s the effort to hold things together — to keep relationships smooth, identities intact, anxieties contained. Niceness can open the door to contact, or unconsciously become a substitute for it. In excess, it functions as a shield: protective, reflective, gentle, but distancing.
Niceness and maintenance aren’t bad; they’re necessary. They’re how the psyche moves safely through the world and society, especially if connection once felt precarious. The aim isn’t to abandon maintenance but to let it flex so contact can happen. When maintenance becomes rigid, when niceness replaces honesty, vitality flattens.
Kindness, by contrast, is enlivening. It’s like the sword that heals: direct, precise, and capable of cutting through illusion for the sake of truth. Kindness is what happens when we let reality touch us, when we risk truth, disappointment, or difference and stay connected anyway. When we dare make real contact — expressing what’s real instead of what’s safe — we discover that love and separateness can coexist.
The Spiral of Development
While Kohut didn’t use this image explicitly, it can be useful to think of psychological growth as a spiral path. Throughout our lives, we revisit our earliest relational needs — to be seen, to admire, to belong — each time with greater consciousness.
Therapy, friendship, and creative work all offer new turns on that spiral: we’re seen more fully, we bear not being seen, and we internalize stability. The external mirror becomes less necessary when we have an inner compass.
That’s transformation in Self Psychology terms: from external maintenance (holding relationships together to stay intact) to internal cohesion (holding ourselves together while staying open).
In everyday life, this might look like:
Letting yourself feel proud without fearing arrogance
Admiring others without dimming oneself
Asking for help without shame or apology
Feeling a pang of envy and turning it into curiosity (What do I admire there?) rather than distance
Each moment expands the self’s elasticity — the capacity to bend without breaking, to connect without dissolving.
A Theory of Healthy Relating
In Self Psychology, the aims are aliveness and flexibility.
A cohesive self can hold both pride and humility, similarity and difference, giving and receiving — without panic.
Healthy mirroring feels like being enjoyed for who you are, not who you perform to be.
Healthy idealization lets you look up to others while staying grounded.
Healthy twinship allows belonging without sameness.
Over time, the compulsion to please softens. You stop managing the mirror and start living in the world. You can tell the truth kindly, tolerate disapproval, and stay connected even when admiration isn’t guaranteed. Maintenance loosens; contact deepens. In that space, the self learns it can be both distinct and connected — whole, imperfect, and fully alive.
This essay is part of an ongoing series on the inner architecture of people-pleasing.
Part Three will explore intersubjectivity and the meeting of selves.