People-pleasing or genuine compassion?
Understanding the difference through IFS lens
There’s so much emphasis these days on recognising our people-pleasing parts, setting boundaries and prioritising ourselves that sometimes we end up holding back even when we experience genuine love, kindness and compassion for others. We can become so confused and concerned about people-pleasing that we start questioning or even suppressing some of our most authentic feelings of care and connection.
There’s also a lot of emphasis on self-compassion, which can sometimes become confusing, as though compassion for ourselves and compassion for others are separate or competing with each other. Deep genuine self-compassion naturally extends to others. Once we learn to understand and hold our own experiences with compassion, we naturally become more able to recognise and connect with the humanity in others.
It’s useful to distinguish between people-pleasing that comes from fear and the genuine desire to offer love and care. People-pleasing often comes from parts of us that fear rejection, conflict, disappointing others or losing connection. Genuine compassion, on the other hand, comes from a place of care, where we offer kindness not because we have to, but because we genuinely want to.
Of course, it’s not always one or the other. From an Internal Family Systems (IFS) perspective, our people-pleasing parts can also carry genuine love and compassion. Just because a part of us is trying to protect us from rejection or disconnection doesn’t mean the kindness we feel or offer isn’t real. We can genuinely care for someone while also having parts that fear losing their connection.
Instead of judging or trying to get rid of these parts, we can become curious about them and learn about motivates them.
We might gently ask inside:
Am I offering this because I genuinely want to, or because I feel I have to?
Am I afraid of what might happen if I say no?
Can I care for someone while remaining connected to my own needs and boundaries?
Can I express my gratitude and kind comments freely?
Can I recognise the genuine love and care that might exist alongside my fears?
How does it feel when I act with kindness and compassion?
It’s also important not to overanalyse every expression of kindness. Sometimes we simply experience love, tenderness, warmth or compassion towards another person, and it’s important to allow ourselves to feel and choose whether to express that or not. Not every act of kindness needs to be viewed through the lens of people-pleasing or unhealthy attachment.
In other words, it is possible to have boundaries and still be deeply loving. We can care about someone without taking responsibility for their feelings. We can offer kindness without expecting anything in return. And we can experience compassion for ourselves without becoming less compassionate towards others.
Deep compassion can also extend beyond ourselves and those closest to us, to people we don’t know, people we find difficult, and those whose experiences are very different from ours. This doesn’t mean agreeing with everyone or allowing others to hurt us. It means recognising our shared humanity and being open to it.
In trying so hard to protect ourselves from people-pleasing, we sometimes risk closing ourselves off from the experiences of love, compassion and connection that make life more meaningful for us and others.
Perhaps it’s less about learning to care less and more about learning to care with more freedom, awareness and curiosity. Curiosity allows us to explore our fears and protective parts with less judgement, while remaining open to the genuine love and compassion that can arise within us. Instead of automatically questioning or suppressing these feelings, we can learn to recognise them, be more curious towards them, trust them a bit more and choose to allow ourselves to express them, both towards ourselves and others.
