Most relationship advice treats the people pleaser as a problem to be solved. There are books, podcasts, Instagram carousels— heck, entire wellness industries— built around helping the pleaser say no. And don’t get me wrong, chronic people pleasers often are desperate for help, and there is help out there for them (I wrote a chapter about this in Rise Above). But here is what every one of those well-meaning resources misses: The people-pleaser is half of a dance. The other half — the pleader — almost never gets named. I think that’s a pretty important part of the equation.
I call this person the “pleader” to make clear that these folks aren’t necessarily “toxic”. These days, the partner a pleaser most often ends up with is likely to be described as the “toxic boyfriend” or the “narcissistic asshole partner.” But as I see it, the pleader is simply someone who asks again and again and again after you’ve already said “no thanks” (again, and again, and again). The pleader is the person who forgets to honor an obligation, then acts like it’s a personal hardship that you are now expected to accommodate. The pleader is someone who may acknowledge your boundary in one sentence, only to completely undo it in the next breath.
But I want to be clear: the pleader isn’t the villain in this story. Pleasers and pleaders usually grew up learning the same thing: asking for what you want directly isn't safe. This is a survival strategy for both of them. Pleasers dealt with that by giving and never asking for anything back, whereas pleaders found sneakier ways to get what they need. So same need, but they went about it in opposite ways.
I’ve spent the last decade studying the personality structure of what I’m calling the pleader side. With my colleagues Brandon Weiss, Joshua Miller, and Keith Campbell, I’ve published on the clinical correlates of vulnerable narcissism. Vulnerable narcissism is the introverted, hypersensitive version of the grandiose type. The defining features of vulnerable narcissism are shame, entitlement, distrust of others, and extreme sensitivity to perceived slights. It’s also one of several ways people use their own hurt to get what they want from someone else. You’ll see versions of it all over psychology: the “sufferer” type of emotional blackmail Susan Forward described, the fawn response in trauma research, and the DARVO pattern (Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim and Offender) that Jennifer Freyd named. I think they’re all describing the same basic pattern. But because each one is studied by a different group of researchers, nobody has really connected them, and I think that’s a big reason we don’t spot it when it’s happening to us. The “entitlement paradox” I write about in Rise Above is “I’m broken AND I am entitled to special treatment BECAUSE I’m broken.” To me, that basically sums up what the pleader does.
So how do pleaders get what they want? I think it’s mostly through their need. They show you how fragile they are (and they often are truly fragile), how hard things have been, and how much they’re hurting. They don’t ask directly because at some point growing up, whenever they asked something directly they got their request rejected. So they come at it covertly. They let their distress do the talking, and they make your “no” the reason they’re in pain. And quite frequently, they round up sympathetic people to back up their side of the story.
Pleasers give too much, and pleaders ask too much. However, pleaders can be very sneaky about how they ask. You may recognize these 8 pleader patterns:
1. Getting other people on their side. Pleaders will call your other friends to get them on their side before they even bring up the disagreement with you. Or they’ll text your sister to “vent” about something they haven’t even mentioned to you yet. By the time they finally talk to you, half the room is on their side and the deck is already heavily stacked against you. And once the fight starts, they bring in reinforcements: “Your sister agrees with me.” “Even my therapist thinks so.” “Everyone else sees it.” Half the time, those people never even said what the pleader claims they did!
2. Being dramatic. "I'm always the one who handles the planning." "I do everything around here." Pleaders say it with such certainty, like it's just a fact. End of discussion. Disagree, and suddenly you're the one calling them a liar. They're also constantly escalating their emotional language. Instead of simply "I'd be disappointed," it's "I'd be horrified." Or "This is hard" turns into "this is the hardest thing I've ever faced." Every call to you is "important," even if it's the tiniest thing, so if you don't call back right away, you're the asshole. The pleader is a master at picking words that make you feel guilty for not giving them the constant attention they crave.
3. Turning what they didn’t do into a favor. The pleader forgets to call when they said they would, then tells you, “Oh, I didn’t want to overwhelm you.” Or they skip your important event: “I figured you needed space.” You end up feeling like you should be grateful to them for treating you like shit!
4. Saying it’s “just an opinion,” then pushing you anyway. “At least have the respect to hear me out… You should break up with him.” “I’m not telling you what to do, but… you look terrible in that beard and should cut it off.” “It’s totally your call, but if it were me… I would stop choosing that kind of girl.” They say it all warmly, like they’re just offering an opinion. But in the same breath, they’re telling you to do the exact thing they just said you didn’t have to do.
5. Going after your sore spot. Pleasers are obsessed with the question “Am I a kind person?”, and pleaders sure do know it! So pleaders will say things like “I just wish you cared more” or “You’re so cold sometimes,” softly, often with a hurt look. And you know what? It works like a charm on pleasers.
6. Never letting anything be settled. “We’ll come back to this.” “I’m not done talking about it.” It sounds reasonable enough in the moment. Then the whole thing gets reopened an hour later (or sometimes minutes later!), and you realize the pleader gets to decide when the argument is over.
Pleaders don’t have to be doing any of this on purpose, and often they aren’t. In fact, the more practiced someone is at it, the less aware of it they tend to be. Pleaders aren’t, necessarily, psychopaths. Or narcissists. Or toxic. Or assholes. Or inconsiderate. Or whatever other labels make people pleasers feel good to call them so they have to take zero responsibility for their part of the dance. Pleaders are people whose survival strategy is doing what every survival strategy does: running in the background, beneath the level of conscious choice, in any situation that feels like the home they grew up in.
So how does the dance get going? Pleaders and pleasers often find each other without anyone introducing them. They can be like magnets for each other. Or to take another metaphor, they are like birds of a feather, except in this case it’s wounds of a feather. The pleader’s antennae are calibrated for someone who won’t say no cleanly. The pleaser’s antennae are calibrated for someone who needs them. Within five minutes, both nervous systems have decided this is going to work out — without realizing that working out and dysfunctional are two things that can co-exist! (Yes/And!)
I described this dynamic in Rise Above using a slightly different framing. There I wrote about codependency — the tendency of excessive helpers to keep themselves locked into relationships with people who exploit their helping. In that chapter, I wrote that “Grandiose narcissists eat codependents for breakfast.” (Yes, I am particularly proud of that line). I framed it as codependents and narcissists “essentially fulfill each other’s needs.” The codependent gets to feel needed, and the narcissist gets constant attention and accommodation. That’s why neither one leaves.
The pleaser/pleader idea I’m offering here takes that further, beyond the grandiose narcissist, to a much larger group of people. These are people who use their own needs to get what they want, without ever reaching a clinical level of anything. They won’t necessarily score high on narcissism as a personality trait. Pleaders aren’t always narcissists, and pleasers aren’t always codependent in the full sense. But I believe that the pattern between them works the same way.
In fact, pleasers and pleaders often come from the very same family. A controlling parent who needs everyone to stay tuned in to their feelings at all times can raise kids who end up as pleasers, pleaders, or a mix of both. A lot of pleasers grow up giving before anyone asks, desperately trying to figure out what everyone needs just to keep things calm.
Pleaders usually got punished for asking for things directly, so they learned to show how much they were hurting instead. Most of us have the need to be listened to, and to feel needed. It’s very human to want both things, and depending on who we’re with, and what our childhood was like, we may have an oversized need for one or the other.
So why does the culture reward it? To put it bluntly, we pay way more attention to people suffering in public than to people who are crushing it. You’ll get way more likes on posts about a rough week than about how you helped an old lady cross the street. And people who talk about how they’ve been wronged often end up with bigger followings than people who just quietly do good work. Why does pleading keep happening? It gets results.
Now, this doesn’t mean that every story of suffering is leveraged. Real suffering is real. Honest love, as I wrote in Rise Above, is the rejection of both tough love (which dismisses suffering in the name of stoicism) and coddling (which removes any responsibility needed for one’s part in anything). Honest love validates real felt pain and empowers the person to take actions that can make their life better. The problem is that our cultural radar is currently calibrated only for the first move — validation — and not for the second — empowerment. So people can’t tell suffering that’s being used to get something from suffering that’s real. Pleaders know that, and get away with it.
So what’s the way out, for both parties? In my honest love approach, I like to extend compassion to both sides. I know that’s very controversial these days where everyone is forced to take a side and god forbid you try to understand or take the perspective of “the other side”. But my aim is to show you how there is an emergence at play here that transcends the pleaser and pleader individually.
Most advice writes to the pleaser. Trust your radar. Say no. Stop being needed in order to be loved. All true. But the pleaser cannot do this work alone, because it takes two to tango. Here’s some advice for both parties.
For the pleaser: learn to trust your own radar without checking it with someone else first. Your read is usually accurate. The thing your gut said at the beginning of the interaction is usually the thing your gut should have said at the end. The pleaser’s wound is uncertainty about whether their perception is fair. The work is letting accuracy be enough.
The deeper work, the one I’ve spent a lot of time measuring, is healthy selfishness. My colleague Emanuel Jauk and I built a scale that captures it (take the test here). My healthy selfishness scale has items like “I have healthy boundaries,” “I balance my own needs with the needs of others,” and “I give myself permission to enjoy myself, even if it doesn’t necessarily help others.” On the other end we have pathological altruism, which is chronic over-giving that people often don’t even want. This shows up in items such as: “I am a total pushover when it comes to requests to help others” and “I am willing to place another’s needs above my own in a way that may cause self-harm.”
Across two studies, healthy selfishness was a strong positive predictor of well-being, life satisfaction, and self-esteem, whereas pathological altruism was the single strongest predictor of depression. And it also was related to actually causing more harm for others! And the childhood antecedent that most predicted high pathological altruism in our adult samples? You got it: “As a child, I was often encouraged by my family to substitute my own needs for their own.”
The work for the pleaser, then, isn’t to give less. It’s to give from a self that hasn’t been substituted out of the room. Even if they get there a little bit at a time.
For the pleader: learn to ask directly, without leverage. When someone tells you no, take it as their final answer. People get to make their own choices, even ones you think are wrong. Respect the autonomy of an independent human being. Your suffering can be completely real, and it still doesn’t mean anyone owes you something. Over time, the people you most want close to you will start to notice when you’re using your needs to get your way, and that’s often exactly what drives them away. Deep down, pleaders aren’t sure anyone will say yes when they ask directly. In a healthy relationship, they’ll find out that people do.
Now, some advice for both pleasers and pleaders: the healthiest relationship is one where both people have stopped playing their old roles. Healthy, life-affirming relationships are harder to build than codependent ones, and honestly it often doesn’t feel as exciting. There’s definitely less constant drama, that’s for sure. But in a healthy, growth-oriented relationship, people ask for what they want directly, get straight answers, and walk away still feeling like themselves.
I think that’s what we’re all really looking for, even when we’re doing the old dance.