Do you sacrifice your internal harmony to please others? A story about building healthy boundaries
In January 2022 I found myself in Kathmandu searching for a decently-priced golden Buddha statue before heading back home to Europe. During my trip I had already identified a specific type of statue that I wanted, and now the mission for my last day was to find the specific statue that pleased me in both quality and price.
I left early in the morning to walk around Thamel — an area with lots of Nepali handicrafts, relics, and antiques. During the first hour, I found an interesting shop with statues of the type I was searching for. I stepped in and greeted the shop owner who seemed very welcoming. I skimmed through the shelves and took the best-looking statue in my hand and assessed it. The statue was almost — but not completely — of the quality that I was searching for.
As I was looking at the statue, the shop owner asked me whether I wanted to buy it. I doubted as this was my first shop, and I had hundreds of possible shops that could sell me a better statue. I answered her ambiguously and continued to look at the statue. During the next few minutes, her engagement started to turn into tension.
I wondered what caused her to tense up. Then I suddenly remembered a thing that my Nepali friend had told me a few weeks earlier. He said that the Nepalese people have a superstition that the first customer of the day is the most important one and will define the sales luck of the day. If the first customer buys from you, then this will cause good luck for the rest of the day— and if not, then it is bad luck.
Now all the tension in the air made sense. She was probably willing to go to great lengths to get me to buy the statue I had in my hand.
I felt a conflict inside. One part of me knew that if I left the shop without buying, she will feel awful and her superstition will probably become reality. The other part of me wanted to stay loyal to myself: I had still many shops to explore and a better statue may be just around the corner.
Side note: If you as a reader are not a pleaser, then this conflict may seem absurd. If Iwasn’t happy with the statue why wouldn’t I not just walk out of the shop? Well, for a pleaser the situation is not as easy as it seems: as a pleaser, I knew that my decision was going to either make or break her day — and therefore I felt some kind of responsibility for her feelings.
After about 5 minutes of feeling stuck with a tense shop owner next to me and a whole load of conflicted feelings, I decided to listen to what felt right for me. The statue did not completely match my preferences, and I did not want to bend to some other person’s superstitions. Still making the final decision was extremely hard. As I started to behave like I was leaving the shop the shop owner’s expression became desperate — and I felt I was the cause of her pain. Regardless of the tension, finally, I decided to thank her for her time and leave the shop without the statue.
When walking away she ran a whole block after me and came down in price to absurdly low levels. Still, I kept my decision and did not bend. I walked back to my hotel and sat down in the garden to recover and reflect.
As I was sipping my coffee I felt an inner peace. I had been loyal to myself — and it felt important that I did not bend to the superstitions of some other person but instead listened to myself. After all, the superstitions of people could be anything — it would be impossible to take all people’s thoughts, feelings, and beliefs into account. I would run around and try to protect people from their internal beliefs and all kinds of imagined consequences. It would be absurd.
But this was actually what I had been doing for most of my life. Now in retrospect, it felt completely obvious that my job is not to react to other peoples’ feelings but only to listen to myself.
A phrase came into my mind that summarized what I had learned:
“The pleaser sacrifices their inner harmony for what they believe will bring external harmony”
For some reason pleasers have learned that social harmony is more important than their own inner experience: they overrun their own needs and feelings to remove social tension. For example, if I would have disregarded my feelings and bought the statue I would definitely have caused disharmony inside myself. There I would stand in the middle of noisy Kathmandu with a statue in my hand that I didn’t even want — just to protect someone from an imagined feeling that I thought was my responsibility.
But what I believe will bring external harmony is just a subjective belief. What if buying the statue just upholds the other person’s false beliefs about how the world works? What If leaving the shop got the shop owner to understand that her superstition is false? Or what if I had interpreted her tension wrong and it was caused by something completely different than a superstition?
Pleasing causes damage to both oneself and one’s social relationships. In the short term, it may create some kind of social harmony — but in the long run, the pleaser’s internal disharmony will backlash on other people. In the long run, the pleaser will become resentful and this will be felt by people around them.
In my case it could have been me thanking the shop owner in a passive-aggressive way — or later during the day, I could have snapped at the coffee-serving barista at the hotel. Usually, pent-up anger finds a way to get out—and the problem is usually that its target is someone that does not deserve it at all.
The fundamental function of anger is to protect the self: like for example saying no to someone who wants something from you. If this anger is suppressed then one’s boundaries are overrun, and this anger turns either inward or towards an innocent bystander.
The key is to learn to listen to one’s feelings and develop the courage to say no to external pressures. Saying no almost always causes social tension and may also cause some negative feelings in other people, which is totally okay. The feelings of others are not your responsibility and social tension is completely fine.
Also, saying no may cause some negative feelings in the short run, but it will usually lead to trust in the long run; the other person will know what you want and do not want. They will know that you really mean it when you say yes. They will feel your true commitment to whatever you agree to.
Saying no can be practiced in small and trivial situations such as the one I described above — or harder situations such as an argument with a loved one. Family and friends may need to get used to your newly set boundaries, as they are used to you saying yes to their different requests. In some situations, you may notice that you overdo it and say no a bit too strongly. This is okay, and you may apologize and tell them what you are practicing. Overdoing boundaries happens usually because there is some pent-up anger that comes out when you first begin practicing boundary-setting.
In the beginning, it may be beneficial to take time-outs during tense situations: to hear one’s inner voice(s) and to strengthen the intention to stay on one’s side. If you are on the phone with someone you may say to the other person that you will call them back in a moment. Face-to-face, you can pick your phone up and say that you need to make a phone call to someone — but in reality, you make a phone call to yourself and reflect out loud. Developing inner dialogue between different parts of yourself is key to learning to handle tense situations. And this dialogue requires time for reflection.
The mindset should be to always stay on your own side, no matter what. Which part of oneself should one then stay on side with? It is your true self — what you innermost want or do not want. In some therapeutical approaches, it is called the inner child. In the beginning, it may be hard to hear its voice as it has been disregarded for so long.
During childhood, pleasers have learned that other people’s wants and feelings are more important than their own. They learned to disregard their own feelings and let their boundaries be overrun. Now in adulthood, the recovering pleaser will need to re-establish these boundaries and start listening to oneself once more. This happens in small and large situations and it is a learning journey of many years. One will fall many times, as there is a strong habit to prioritize others over oneself.
When failing, instead of being angry at oneself, one should try to be compassionate and reflective. “What made me promise so much, although I had planned to be by myself this evening?”. It’s about learning which situations are hard, and which are easy — and one situation at a time to do what is required to keep one’s internal harmony intact.
