Are You Being a Good Person or Trying to Make Sure Everyone Thinks You Are?
This is a question that came up in a therapy session recently that I think every recovering perfectionist and people pleaser needs to sit with:
Am I trying to be a good person, or am I trying to make sure everyone experiences me as a good person?
At first, those seem basically identical. Of COURSE you want people to experience you as kind if you are kind. Of COURSE you care how your behavior affects other people. That’s part of having relationships and generally not being an asshole.
But there’s a point where caring about your impact turns into trying to control everyone’s perception of you, and that is a completely different job.
Being good is about your behavior. Being seen as good is about their reaction.
When your goal is to be a good person, you can ask yourself questions like:
Was I acting in alignment with my values?
Was I respectful?
Was I honest?
Did I take responsibility for something that was actually mine?
Did I behave in a way I can be proud of?
Those are questions you can answer with a yes or a no. Seems simple enough, right?
But when your goal becomes making sure someone else experiences you as good, the questions change:
Do they think I’m selfish?
Are they mad at me?
Did that text sound rude?
Should I explain myself again?
What if they misunderstood why I did that?
Do they know I didn’t mean it like that?
Should I be doing more?
Now your sense of whether you did the “right” thing depends on what happens inside somebody else’s brain. When you focus on this, you suddenly sign up for managing everyone else's expectations, interpretations, feelings, opinions, perspectives...you get the point. (I'm exhausted just thinking about it lol!)
This is where people pleasing gets sneaky.
People pleasing isn’t always doing big favors for everyone while completely neglecting yourself. Sometimes it looks extremely reasonable...and sometimes it doesn't.
You give a little more context than necessary because you don’t want someone to think you’re rude, or you agree to something because saying 'no' would make you feel selfish.
Someone seems disappointed by your perfectly appropriate boundary, so you immediately start to backtrack by offering alternatives.
You rewrite a text four times because one version sounds “too direct," or you apologize when you didn’t actually do anything wrong because restoring the other person’s positive perception of you feels more important than being accurate about what happened.
At that point, you aren’t just trying to be kind to others. You're trying to prove yourself until they approve of you 'til they're blue in the face.
You're crossing your fingers and hoping, hoping, hoping.
"Please find me kind. Please find me reasonable. Please understand my intentions. Please do not make me the bad guy in your version of this story."
That what us therapists call ~perception management~ and it is exhausting.
Perfectionists, I'm talking to you, too. You are especially good at this.
Perfectionism isn’t always just wanting your work to be perfect and for your house to be spotless.
For a lot of people, it shows up as wanting to perform your personhood correctly. You want to be the good employee, the understanding friend, the high-effort mom, the easygoing partner, the reliable daughter, the sister who never disappoints anyone, and the person who handles conflict perfectly and somehow communicates so flawlessly that nobody could possibly interpret you incorrectly.
Except there is no version of you that gets universally positive reviews.
You can communicate thoughtfully and someone can still misunderstand you.
You can set a reasonable boundary and someone can dislike it.
You can make a decision that is right for you and someone can think it’s selfish.
You can apologize sincerely and someone can remain angry.
You can be kind and someone can still not like you.
The goal isn’t to stop caring what people think.
I don’t find “just stop caring what people think” particularly useful. I actually think it's near-impossible to truly not GAF.
We are social creatures and relationships matter. Our impact on other people matters. Humans inherently CARE about social dynamics, and if you're a people-pleaser by nature it's going to feel almost PAINFUL to "not care" what people think of you.
The goal is not to become completely unconcerned with how your behavior affects anyone else. The goal is to know where your responsibility begins and ends.
Here's what you're responsible for:
Your behavior
Considering your impact
Repairing when you actually cause harm
Listening when someone gives you feedback
Deciding whether there is something there that you need to own
Your responsibility is not engineering every interaction so nobody can ever feel disappointed, annoyed, confused, hurt, or critical of you.
There’s a difference between “Did I treat this person well?” and “Did I successfully make this person believe I’m good?” Only one of those is fully yours to manage.
Try switching the question.
The next time you notice yourself overexplaining, fixing, apologizing, spiraling, or trying to make absolutely sure someone understands your intentions, ask:
If I knew I couldn't control what this person thought of me, how would I want to behave anyway?
That gets you back to your own values. Yeah, you might still apologize. Maybe you'll surprise yourself and say something once instead of over-explaining.
A lot of times, I think you'll actually realize that you were respectful, you were clear, and you made the choice you needed to make. Other people are allowed to have feelings about that, but it's not up to you to do the damage control.
You don't have to stop caring about being a good person.
You might just need to stop requiring everyone else to confirm that you are one.
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Greta Strickland, MS
Licensed Professional Counselor
Greta has managed her own private practice in Blue Springs, MO since 2015 providing therapy to high-achieving women who struggle with anxiety and perfectionism. When she's not working, you can find Greta watching Big Brother with her husband, singing made up songs to her daughters, and sneaking "people food" to their golden retriever.
