The People-Pleasing Chameleon

As soon as she sat on the couch, Samantha said, resolutely, “I want to figure out what I want from relationships.” I was glad to hear her say this with such determination. She and I had been meeting for a bit over a year. The initial relational crisis that brought her to therapy had subsided, as she worked through accepting and mourning a loss that, for a while, felt unbearable. We were able to see how that experience was connected to older relationship patterns, and how those patterns were rooted in even older longings and wishes for connection that she feared could not be fulfilled. As is usually the case, the root of whatever brings people to therapy, if we look deep enough, started many years before we realize.

In our work together, Samantha (not her real name) was becoming able to acknowledge and mourn past losses, connected with her feelings, develop a sense of vulnerability, and recognize complex patterns in her relationships. One of those patterns involved oscillating between needing to feel powerful and dominating, and being doubtful and insecure in romantic relationships. We came to understand this dance between idealization and devaluation as two sides of the same coin. We also wondered if both sides coexisted in order to protect her from feeling something she had already experienced in the past.

Part of this pattern involved feeling what she called being a “people pleaser.” For Samantha, this meant seeking validation from others, men in particular, in the form of expressions of interest, compliments, immediate responsiveness, among other things. The problem, as she understood it, was not the wish for mutuality and reciprocity in relationships, but how her attempts to get this validation came at the expense of forgetting her own self.

Samantha also blamed herself and felt wounded when her efforts didn’t seem to work. During our session, she talked about someone who didn’t call her back after a promising date. “My ego got bruised”, she said, “I couldn’t stop thinking about what I did wrong.” When I asked her about the difference between feeling disappointed and feeling “ego-bruised,” she seemed puzzled. “I honestly don’t know how they could be different.”

Disappointment, when it came to relationships, could not be separated from a disruption of and an injury to her sense of self. This is sometimes a central component of what’s popularly known as people-pleasing: it is usually less about pleasing others, and more about attempting to sustain a cohesive sense of self by doing so.

“I can’t keep being a people pleaser”, she said a few minutes later, “I’m like a chameleon when I don’t get the validation I’m looking for.” This was the second time Samantha used the chameleon metaphor in our session, so I took notice. The metaphors my patients use are very important to understand the complexity of their experience when descriptions are not enough. What was this chameleon trying to tell us?

I could understand how Samantha felt she “changed colors” like a chameleon, in order to get validation from others. She would try different ways of being, based on what she perceived the other person may want, need, or expect. She would change how she talked, how she dressed, her mood, or her demeanor. People pleasing involved shifting colors, becoming someone else, or at least appearing to become someone who would hopefully fit the other person’s needs, wishes, or desires.

It is in this way that the people-pleasing chameleon ends up becoming invisible. By shifting colors to match its environment, the chameleon disappears. By engaging in people-pleasing to match someone else’s needs and wishes, Samantha disappeared as well. This led her to an impossible situation: in order to get the validation she sought, she needed to not be herself.

“Why does a chameleon change colors?” I asked her.

“To survive, to stay alive from the threat of predators”, she said in response to my obvious question.

“So, what could it be that you are trying to survive? What threat is becoming a chameleon protecting you from?”

We started talking about her fears of disappointment, rejection, and hurt, about her ambivalence towards intimacy, and other relationship dynamics. I had a sense that there was something else, based on her comments about feeling “ego bruised” and the chameleon metaphor itself. For an actual chameleon, shifting colors can be a matter of life or death. Could it be that, for Samantha, people pleasing also functioned as a way to protect herself from an existential threat? That it defined the difference between feeling alive or feeling inexistent? I wondered if her sense of self depended on how well she camouflaged to please others, as a way to get a validation that would give shape to her own being.

“Maybe you feel that if you don’t shift colors, if you don’t do what it takes to get that validation, you will cease to exist”, I wondered out loud.

Samantha was in silence for a moment and then started to cry. We stayed in that space for a bit longer, until she said: “There is something in you putting it in that way, that felt like something opened up.” We let that moment be with us. Something had moved inside of her and we didn’t have to rush to explain it away. “Emotions are so complicated,” she added, “many times I can’t even put them in words.” No words were needed to realize that Samantha felt that her own existence was at stake in her relationships.

Perhaps this was one of the things that she had experienced in the past, all the way back in her childhood, and was anxious to repeat: the sense that, no matter how hard she tried, it felt as if she did not exist. We all depend on our first relationships in order to develop a cohesive and consistent sense of who we are. We learn to see ourselves through the ways other people see us, especially those we love and depend on. When we don’t have a consistent mirror upon which we can learn to see ourselves, or when that mirror is broken or warped, our sense of self, existence, and reality can feel disjointed and fragile.

The dilemma of the people-pleasing chameleon is a difficult one: in order to exist, it needs to disappear. In order to feel seen by others, it needs to become invisible. Feeling alive depends on its ability to be someone it’s not, a mere shadow of itself. The other person represents at the same time the opportunity to feel alive, through their validation, and the threat of non-existence if this validation is withheld. The people-pleasing chameleon might seem lively, social, and adaptive, but it carries inside the terror of non-existence. Existential anxieties are some of the deeper and more destabilizing aspects of our shared humanity.

When talking about some of these things with Samantha, I could see that it felt a bit daunting. “It’s so much bigger than I thought”, she said. And she was right. Working through this might involve rediscovering and redefining who we are, developing a sense of self from the ground up, and recognizing ourselves as if it was the first time. As I pointed out to her, though, we had already been doing some of that in our work. The question Samantha asked at the beginning of the session (“I want to figure out what I want from relationships”) was an indication of that process. I heard in her voice not only a desire to find new ways of relating to others, but a wish to include herself fully – her own needs, wants, hopes, longings, and vulnerabilities- in the way she lived her life. How we relate to others is, after all, always connected to how we relate to ourselves.

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Photo credit: Ante Hamersmit