by David Bennis
The “disease to please”
People pleasers come in many varieties, from unhappy parents struggling to keep things in order in their homes so that they don’t upset their kids to even business leaders who can’t sleep because they are scared of confrontations. Different people have different reasons for trying to please others, for some, it could be a learned behavior from childhood, and to others, it’s just a desire to be in good terms with everyone.
If you didn’t know, but you have a tendency of saying yes to people especially to things that you do not want to do, and you avoid speaking up simply to avoid upsetting the other, then you have the disease to please people. One important thing you should know though is that people-pleasers are a manipulator's easy target.
Spotting a people pleaser is very easy, and the more a person keeps saying yes to requests, the more frequent these requests get. People-pleasers are easily swayed by phrases like “I wouldn’t ask anyone else, but you’re such a good friend.” Or “I hate to ask you this, but…”
Whether they feel guilted into doing something for someone or honored because the other person has entrusted them with favor, what is important to note is that when other people know that their main goal is to please people, then they can easily manipulate them.
Over-conscientiousness
Conscientiousness is a personality trait characterized by being careful or diligent. Conscientious people tend to have a desire to do a task well, efficiently and in an organized manner, and also take other people’s obligations seriously. They are also usually self-disciplined, act dutifully, and they always aim for achievement.
Conscientious people display planned instead of spontaneous behavior manifested in characteristic behaviors like being systematic, neat, or even elements like thoroughness, carefulness, and deliberation (propensity for thinking carefully before acting). All these make such kind of people very dependable. It also exposes them to manipulation.
Conscientious people usually care so much about right and wrong, and they always want to be on the right side. So all a manipulator has to do is point out to them legitimate weaknesses, inconsistencies, shortcomings, minor errors, or missteps. Before they get a grasp of what is happening, they start seeing and doing things the manipulator’s way.
Emotophobia
Emotophobia is an irrational and excessive fear of negative feelings, that is, avoiding anger and conflict. For a lot of people, emotophobia is actually avoiding these negative consequences instead of attaining positive rewards that keep people-pleasing behavior. If you are wondering what is wrong with avoiding negative feelings in the first place, look at it this way. First of all, suppressing anger is much more damaging than explosive rage health-wise. Also, avoiding confrontation and anger makes relationships less genuine. Furthermore, staying away from people to avoid negative feelings only makes you far away for people to embrace you; your safe zone becomes a lonely place.
But the worst thing about being emotophobic is that it makes you easily vulnerable to manipulators. Manipulators can make emotophobics choose to comply and do what they want through emotional manipulation, rather than experience negative feelings. Unfortunately, the only way to get over this fear is to embrace these feared emotions.
Low self-confidence
Having self-confidence is having self-assurance in one’s personal power, ability, and judgment. Now having low self-confidence is characterized by lacking the qualities of self-confidence and feeling bad about oneself. Low self-confidence makes one feel unlovable, incompetent, or awkward. Such people easily tend to go on the defensive. These make them vulnerable to other people, especially manipulators. They may openly ridicule them, criticize them, or point out their flaws.
People with low self-confidence also tend to look for confirmation of their self-limiting beliefs. This makes them constantly become targets to manipulators who want to take a physical and mostly mental punch at them. Instead of retaliating, they usually just go with it. This is because deep down, they believe that it is their fault anyway.
Approval addiction
This is basically the addiction to earn acceptance and approval by other people. This is somehow similar to the disease to please but with a little difference. Approval addiction is both the desire to please some else but with an added need to get approval from the other person in order to feel good about them. This is usually a sign of low self-esteem that manipulators prey upon. Many manipulators aim, if not all, is to create a relationship where they can exercise every power and control. And a person who constantly craves for approval perfectly fit into this much needed submissive role.
Also, there are times when the manipulator would withhold approval as a tactic to create more doubts in the victim’s mind about themselves. These doubts help a victim with low self-image and low self-worth to crumble further in their downward spiral. In the process, they would also be helping the manipulator to toy with them by replaying these doubts in their minds over and over. The psychological damage, in this case, is usually extensive. However, as usual, the manipulator cares less about the fate of the victim as long as they meet their needs and accomplish their goals.
The inability to say no
The inability to say no has been linked directly to a person’s need to seek approval from others. This behavior is characterized by the inability to say no even when you really want to, making elaborate or false excuses or ignore requests with the hope that the other person will get the message or just drop it. The good news is one's inability to say no is not a flaw in the person’s character but rather a learned behavior. The bad news is, this behavior makes one vulnerable to manipulative people.
Once a manipulator finds out this behavior in a person, they won’t hesitate using it to their advantage. Once the manipulator gets a hold of them, the victim will have hard and almost impossible work of standing up for themselves. They would always feel like guilty or always in the wrong because they don’t always want to abide by the manipulators.
Over-intellectualization
Psychology defines intellectualization as a defense mechanism where a person would ignore the emotional significance of a phenomenon or event and instead focus on a more intellectual or rational explanation. While being rational or logical is not a bad thing; what is bad is ignoring the emotional side of things. And this is what a manipulator preys on. A victim who has a tendency to over-intellectualize would try too hard to understand a manipulator’s behavior and believe that there is an understandable reason the manipulator are hurtful. This only allows them to be victimized even more.
A dependent person
A person with a dependent personality is usually characterized by a pattern of dependent and submissive behavior. Such a person usually finds it hard to make decisions on their own and resorts to seeking an excessive amount of advice as well as reassurance from other people. In extreme cases, this behavior could be a symptom of dependent personality disorder. Studies have found that the disorder is more common in women than in men. Such kinds of people are very easy to be influenced or manipulated. They would prefer to be belittled and berated by a manipulator as long as they are not alone, or they feel accepted. If you feel that you are in a situation like this, visiting a psychologist is one of your best ways out.
Emotional dependency
An emotionally dependent is one that doesn’t define their own inner worth; instead, they make other people’s attention and approval responsible for their sense their worth. When a person is not taking responsibility for their own feelings or for defining their worth, it means they depend on other people to do it. This makes them a victim of other people’s choices. This is what is called emotional dependency.
The more emotionally dependent a person is, the more vulnerable they make themselves to be exploited and manipulated. Manipulators will offer them the emotional support that may eventually lead to financial support as well. This will ensure that the victim will never leave the manipulator since they offer the
m both emotional support and a source of livelihood. In such a situation, the manipulator will strive to isolate their victim from the rest of the world since isolation feeds dependency.
External locus of control
Control is an interesting word. There are those people who believe that they have control over everything, there are those who believe that the world around them controls them, and then there are those found in the middle. Control is defined as the power to have an effect on outcomes by influencing actions, events, and people directly. Control becomes more interesting when the word locus is added before it. Locus is defined as a place, point or position, or a location to be more specific where something occurs. A person’s locus of control can either be internal or external.
A person with an internal locus of control credits their success to their own work, and they also believe that they control their own life. On the other hand, a person with an external locus of control attributes their successes and failures to outside influences. A person with an external locus of control often doesn’t believe that they have the power or ability to change their situations. They feel powerless and hopeless in the face of difficult situations. Manipulators take advantage of this and exploit such kinds of people by pretending to give them that strength they lack and in exchange exercise power and control over them by getting them to do what they want.
Immaturity
Generally, a mature person is someone who has achieved both natural growth and development. It is the state of attaining the desired or final state. A mature person is specifically an individual who lives their life by principles as well as wisdom gained through personal experiences and learning from others. An immature person, on the other hand, exhibits less than these expected degrees of maturity. Immature people are easy targets for manipulators. This is because the immature people are either trying to please someone or to get back at someone, usually a caregiver and therefore they would do anything. The manipulators find them as easy prey because they would never question what the manipulator is doing.
Too trusting
A person can be too trusting when it comes to other people. These kinds of people believe that anyone has everyone’s best interest at heart and that there isn’t any person who would willingly do wrong to others. For manipulators, there is nothing they do that is in the victim’s long-term best interests. Instead, when they prey on too trusting people, this trusting nature makes them vulnerable to blame games and lies of manipulators.
Lonely people
Loneliness is a very dangerous emotion. It makes people do anything to rid them off of it, and that may easily include allowing manipulators into their lives. A manipulator will prey on someone looking for companionship and even step in between the victim and their few friends with the promise of always being there for them. Loneliness is sometimes a lack of safety net for a person who can be a potential victim for a manipulator.
Impulsive
Impulsive people aren’t usually in control of their emotion, and it makes them very vulnerable to manipulation. Mostly, impulsive people are often turned to anger, and manipulators use this opportunity to build guilt with their victim arising from the anger and accompanying actions.
Another way that manipulators can use this impulsiveness to their advantage is by encouraging the victim to make quick decisions without thinking completely through. The aim here is for the manipulator to exercise control and power just like with any other tactic.
Masochistic
Masochism is someone’s belief that they deserve to be punished for something. Having such a personality trait makes things very easy for manipulators – they fall right into the manipulator’s tactics of punishment and guilt. The manipulator would continue to find faults in the victim no matter how much sad or hurt they are. The more the manipulator feeds the victim with feelings of being a bad person, the more they feel they deserve whatever punishment the manipulators give them.
Altruistic
Psychologists describe altruistic as the opposite of a psychopath. An altruistic person is one that is too honest, too empathetic and too fair. They always take other people’s feelings into consideration and can easily be fooled or manipulated by false emotions like hurt or anger displayed by someone else.
Keep in mind that expert manipulators are also good actors who can use drama whenever the opportunity or need arises. They aren’t bound by feelings of being honest or fair.
Chapter 7: Traits of a Narcissistic and Aggressive Person
Grandiose sense of self-importance
Grandiosity is one of the defining traits of a narcissistic person. Grandiosity is more than just vanity or arrogance; it is having an unrealistic sense of superiority. Narcissists believe they are “special and unique and that only other special people can understand them. They only want to be associated as well as associate themselves with other people, places, or things of high status.
Narcissists also believe that no one is better than them and that they should be recognized even when they have done absolutely nothing to earn recognition. They will often lie or exaggerate their talents or achievements. And when they talk about relationships or work, all you will hear is how great they are, how much they contribute, or how lucky people are to have them in their lives.
Sense of entitlement
Since they consider themselves unique and special, narcissistic people always expect to be given favorable treatment. They really believe that they should get whatever they want. They also expect that everyone should automatically comply with all their wishes and the ones who don’t in their eyes are useless. And also the ones who dare to ask something in return or entirely defy their will should prepare themselves for outrage, aggression or the cold shoulder.
Needs constant praise and admiration
The sense of superiority in a narcissist is like a balloon that needs a steady stream of recognition and applause to keep it inflated; without it, it gradually loses air. An occasional compliment is not enough. Narcissistic people need constant compliments to feed their ego, and therefore, they tend to surround themselves with people who would do just that. Such kinds of relationships are usually one-sided because it is always about what they get and not what they give. And if they feel like their admirer has reduced their attention and praise or entirely stopped offering it, they would treat that as a betrayal.
Exploits others without guilt or shame
Narcissistic people lack the ability to identify themselves with the feelings of other people, that is, to put themselves into “other people’s shoes.” This means they lack empathy. Usually, many of the people in their lives are viewed as objects that are there to serve their needs. And as a result of that, they would take advantage of other people without thinking twice as long as they get what they want. While these interpersonal exploitations are usually simply obvious, sometimes they can be outright malicious. Narcissists simply do not possess the ability to think about how people are getting affected by their behaviors. And sometimes, even when it gets pointed out, they would still not get it. Getting their own needs met is the only thing they understand.
Lives in a fantasy world that supports their delusions of grandeur
Reality will never support narcissists’ grandiose feelings of themselves; therefore, as a cover, they live in a fantasy world filled with magical thinking, self-deception, and distortion. They have fantasies of glorifying themselves of ideal love, attractiveness; brilliance, power, and unlimited success that make them feel in control and special. Having such fantasies protects them from having feelings of shame and inner emptiness; therefore, opinions and facts that contradict them are either rationalized away or ignored. Anything that poses a threat to their fantasy bubble is usually met with rage or extreme defensiveness.
Frequently belittles, bullies, intimidates or demeans others
Narcissistic and aggressive individuals always feel threatened when they come across a person who appears to have something that they don’t have –
especially those who have confidence and popularity. They also feel threatened by people who challenge them in any way and the one who aren’t submissive towards them. Most times, they would resort to putting these people down as a way to neutralize the threat – contempt is the defense mechanism. This can be done in a dismissive or patronizing way to show how little these people mean to them. And other times, they may choose to go on the attack with threats, bullying, name-calling, and insults to force that person to get back into line.
The types of abusive people
The narcissistic abuser
The narcissist is obsessed with self, they constantly think about self, they worship self, photographs self, promotes self, looks at self and more importantly, they want other people to do all these too. A narcissist is overly concerned with their image, talents, and looks and will do anything no matter the cost to uphold all these. They are also overly concerned with receiving adoration and praise. They love and thrive in the attention they get if any. They are also very charismatic but hate having a charismatic or outgoing partner. They think that this would take attention from them.
A narcissistic abuser is also very inconsiderate, self-absorbed, and very selfish. When socializing with other people, they usually only want to talk about themselves, their accomplishments, talents, pain, and injustices, and if the conversation shifts to another person, they are usually bored and disinterested and only thinks about how to switch the conversation back to themselves.