Not every person who wants to please others is fawning.
Most of the time, people give because giving feels natural. They notice what others need. They accommodate. They share, help, soften situations, remember small details, and make space for other people. They are often wonderful to be around because relationships, for them, are not constant negotiations about who owes what to whom.
This does not necessarily begin as a stress response. It can begin with generosity, attachment, community, and the very human pleasure of making another person happy.
And when a generous person meets another generous person, something beautiful happens. Giving is returned. Care circulates. Nobody has to keep score. What we might call “people pleasing” can actually feel energizing rather than depleting.
There are several layers worth bringing forward. “People pleasing” is often treated as if it were an individual defect: poor boundaries, fear of rejection, lack of selfhood. But the same behaviour can mean very different things depending on context. Accommodation can be initial hospitality or generosity and can be transformed in fear based on a hostile environment.
We notice the person who adapts quickly, gives easily, anticipates what others need, avoids disappointing people, offers more than is required, and has difficulty saying no. Increasingly, we place these behaviours under the language of fawning: a stress response organized around keeping others happy in order to remain safe.
Sometimes that description is exactly right.
But I wonder whether we have started using it too easily and "correcting" it in therapy.
The problem may emerge less from giving itself than from asymmetry. Generosity becomes pathological-looking when it enters a relationship where reciprocity is minimal. A warm, responsive person paired with another warm, responsive person may never experience their giving as depletion. Put the same person beside someone withholding, highly defended, or relentlessly self-protective, and suddenly the giver appears “boundaryless.”
There is also a cultural tension here. Contemporary therapeutic language places enormous value on boundaries, autonomy, self-protection, detachment from others’ reactions, and the capacity to say no. These are important achievements, especially for people who have lived with coercion or fear. But taken too far, they reflect a very particular model of health: the autonomous individual who is difficult to intrude upon.
We speak less often about the opposite capacities: generosity, permeability, accommodation, loyalty, sacrifice, responsiveness, which are also necessary for intimacy and community.
So are we sometimes treating altruist qualities as symptoms because they make people very vulnerable in environments that do not reciprocate them?
And there is an even more uncomfortable possibility. When therapy helps the hearted person adapt to the less generous environment, the intervention may work individually while reinforcing the social conditions that created the suffering. The client becomes safer. But what did we just do to the community? We lost one more giver.
Communities have always depended on people who give more than they calculate, who make room for others, who bring food, stay late, smooth conflict, remember what someone needs, and experience genuine pleasure when another person is happy.
Put a generous person with another generous person and giving circulates. Nobody measures every exchange. Accommodation does not diminish either person; it creates warmth.
Put the same person beside someone who receives easily but rarely gives back, and the picture changes. The giver becomes exhausted. They begin wondering why they are always the one reaching out, understanding, forgiving, organizing, adjusting.
I am hoping we can balance different layers of giving and identifying carefully the goals for therapy for each individual and each relationship they may experience. I hope identifying also cultural aspects of "people pleasing" could help. Let's be careful when we work with a quality that kept our human species survive and thrive.
