So, I had an incredibly fucked-up childhood in a toxic abusive environment and never really learned how to people.

When I was younger I was… abrasive, let’s say. Or possibly just an insufferable prick. I would argue with people on the internet a lot and generate a lot of conflict - not from a desire to troll (as many assumed), I was just raised in a test-to-destruction environment where loud table-slapping debate was just how you learned things - kind of cage-match debugging sessions kind of thing.

This didn’t make me many friends, understandably.

Anyway, decades passed and I learned to mellow out a bit, to go along to get along, and to develop some soft skills like y’know, tact, and… compassion for people’s emotional investment in their intellectual position, if that has a name.

Well and good, the people I talk to don’t generally want to strangle me, chalk it up as a win.

But increasingly of late I’ve been hearing disparaging talk of ‘people pleasers’, which as best I can tell seems to refer to people who do all the things I was yelled for not doing half my life: going along to get along, valuing other people’s needs and emotional sore spots, taking a cooperative, defensive-driving kind of approach to social ineraction - and I am confuse.

I lack a proper framework to parse this all intuitively; I had to build my social skillset manually by trial and error, and things obvious to others remain somewhat mysterious to me.

I’m not actually ASD (just ADHD), but my lack-of-intuitive-grasp on certain things presents a similar profile. Can someone give me a longhand explanation of the border between not-an-asshole and people-pleasing?

  • Dandroid@dandroid.app
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    10 months ago

    In my opinion, I always saw “people pleasing” as not having an opinion of your own and always just agreeing with whoever you are talking to.

    There are ways to disagree with someone and not be abrasive about it. As long as you respect people’s opinions and don’t act like you are better than them because of their opinions, I feel like the rest falls into place. You can be inquisitive about your disagreeal, asking why they believe what they believe, and possibly lead them to what you believe. You can simply withhold your opinion until someone asks for it (and maybe even withhold it then). You can even agree to disagree (my personal favorite). What’s key is having a civilized discussion about a topic. It doesn’t always have to be a heated argument or even a debate - just a conversation.

    You can also sometimes change your mind on something and realize you were wrong and they were right. If this your honest opinion, it isn’t “people pleasing” imo.