Dependent Personality Disorder Origins

How Does a Person Become A People-Pleaser?

Those who exhibit the Pleaser pattern are likely to enjoy an idyllic first year or so of life. By receiving consistently warm care, they form an expectation that they will be nurtured and develop an implicit trust in those they live with to meet all of their needs.

But when the toddler begins to show a desire for autonomy, the parent does not allow it. Instead, the parent continues nurturing the toddler in babying ways. The parent discourages exploration, overly protects, and immediately relieves any frustration the toddler experiences. This continues during preschool and school age years. An example is a mother who insisted on remaining with her son every day of his first week of kindergarten. 

The smothering parenting style is one of pervasive control. It does not occur to the parent that there will be any other response but compliance. The consequence of relentless nurturance is dedicated submission. These children experience difficulty in developing a sense of competence and dignity when parents discourage their autonomy and peers tease them about their immaturity and undue sensitivity.

Pleaser dependency can also develop in the context of aggressive parenting that exaggerates anger to intimidate the child. In this case, Pleasers fear for their self-preservation and evolve a dependent-compliant response to avoid parental anger or displeasure. In other words, because the parent is stuck with aggression on the Assertion compass point on their Self Compass, the child learns not only to decommission this compass point in their own development, but undergoes generational reversal by adopting a Love-oriented Self Compass fixated on being a good boy or good girl. 

Consequently, they neglect inner interests, talents, and feelings in favor of attending to what their parent expects and demands. They are given the impression that inner direction is selfish and inconsiderate. This impoverished self-determination accounts for the feelings of depression and emptiness that Pleasers secretly harbor, despite their efforts to appear happy.

Another origin of the Pleaser pattern stems from early deprivation due to the loss of a warm and supportive mother by death or illness, or its equivalent: the emotional absence of a nurturing parent. A parent who is physically absent, suffers from depression, or is emotionally shutdown can leave the child with nagging insecurities. 

  

Clinical Literature

The dependent pattern is widely recognized in clinical literature. Both Freud’s and Abraham’s concept of an “oral character” views the pattern as exhibiting many traits of infancy: total dependency, lack of assertion, a tendency to cling to others, separation anxiety, and insatiable needs for constant care, affection, and support. Fenichel aptly describes the oral dependent as a “love addict.”

Horney describes the “compliant type” as a person who chronically “moves toward people” with pleasing and placating behaviors. Fromm sees the dependent pattern as creating a “receptive orientation” characterized by interpersonal naiveté and Pollyannaish gullibility. Tyrer agrees that there is a Pollyanna-like view of the world that makes them regard duplicitous motives of manipulative individuals with imperceptive childlike trust. 

How does a therapist help the dependent pleaser grow out of this pattern? Have a look at:

 COMPASS THERAPY: CHRISTIAN PSYCHOLOGY ON ACTION

Dependent Personality Disorder: Therapeutic Impasse

Compass Therapy asserts that a person's personality pattern is largely responsible for the problems in living that they face. In the case of a dependent person, this pattern makes them a personal slave to those around them, and this results in hidden anxiety, guilt, and depression that drives them into therapy.

The therapeutic impasse of every personality pattern centers on the point of greatest resistance to a more rhythmic and actualizing life. For Dependent Pleasers to move beyond this impasse requires giving up the need for others' support and approval in order to develop self-support and self-approval. The success of the therapeutic alliance and treatment outcome depends upon making this transition.

The therapist does well to recognize how spouses, children, or friends take the Dependent counselee for granted and order them around. One young woman’s parents lived sixty miles away, yet left a message on her answer-machine saying, “We’ll be out of town for a week. Be sure and feed the dog in the morning and evening.” 

This demeaning treatment bewilders the love-stuck person and heaps up piles of hurt and resentment in the basement of the unconsciousness. Even so, the dependent keeps trying to put on a happy face. As one husband put it, “I just keep smiling and being a doormat.”

On the other hand, the very reason for coming into therapy often involves a rupture in their co-dependent way of life, some fresh and painful experience of rejection or abandonment in which they feel their very existence is threatened.

It is a fact of life that Dependent counselees—in order to make progress in developing serenity and personal power—will receive disapproval, the withdrawal of support, and loss of protection from unhealthy persons who have thrived on their lack of identity, especially those who are themselves stuck in narcissistic or aggressive patterns. 

Compass Therapy suggests helping counselees develop insights not only about their own pattern, but also about the manipulations of anyone who takes unfair advantage, imposes guilt trips, or causes undue duress.

Once dependent counselees begin to open up, they will pour out long-buried feelings of insecurity, anxiety, disappointment, and dejection. This is an excellent development because even though they feel like they are coming apart at the seams, in actuality they are becoming less of a stereotype and more of an individual self. 

Therapeutic Questions for Dependent Pleasers

The therapist can frame the characteristics that comprise the thinking, feeling, and behavior of Pleaser-patterned counselees as questions, reflections, or interpretations designed to help them gradually understand and differentiate their core selves from the constraints of the pattern:

• Are you aware of an inner need to take care of others and make them feel loved?
• Whenever there is an argument do you automatically take a peacekeeping role?
• When you were growing up, did you feel responsible for making your parents happy?
• Were you discouraged from assertive behavior in the name of being a “good boy” or “good girl?”
• When faced with a decision do you usually worry about what other people will think?
• Do you feel guilty about spending time and money on yourself?
• Do you feel happy if people are approving of you—and sad, guilty, and anxious if they don’t?
• Do you have difficulty in understanding people’s motives, especially if they take advantage of you? 
• If someone compliments you, do you play it down and quickly forget it?

When the therapist stands in strong support of former people-pleaser counselees, they can draw courage to stand up for themselves, discover their authentic wants and needs, and negotiate more successfully with reality.

An effective book for Dependent Pleasers to read while in therapy:

THE SELF COMPASS

The Dependent Pleaser Pattern's Interior

Therapists encounter the dependent pattern frequently because people suffering from it are accustomed to seeking support and advice from others. The upper quadrants of the Self Compass are deactivated to such a degree that counselees possess little self-esteem (Strength Compass) or courage (Assertion compass point). An overly exaggerated Love compass point leads them to submissively seek approval by pleasing and placating, while an inflated Weakness compass point creates an undercurrent of anxiety.

The Pattern’s Interior

As in all personality patterns, the actualizing quality of a compass point is lost when taken to an extreme and left unbalanced by the opposite compass point. Therefore, even though dependent counselees want to give and receive love more than anything else in the world, genuine love—which requires the integration of Strength and Assertion with Love and Weakness—eludes them. The overblown Love compass point skews behavior toward self-sacrifice without self-preservation, submissiveness without assertion, and giving without receiving. Beneath their warmth and niceness lies a desperate search for acceptance and approval.

Rejection is feared more than aloneness, so the dependent person takes no risks toward individuality or independent thought or action that might lead to alienation from sources of nurturance.

Unconscious forces are set in motion by these dynamics. A dependent-patterned person can be seen as cooperative and gracious by others, yet has actually undergone identity foreclosure, meaning that self-development is arrested with a childlike focus on safety and gratification, much like a fetus needs the mother to feed it and provide oxygen through the umbilical cord. Not knowing they can cut the psychological umbilical cord by developing the healthy expressions of Strength and Assertion, they fear independence instead of acquiring it. Nor do they comprehend that healthy people would find them more lovable for replacing clinging vine dependency with authentic selfhood.

The over-exaggeration of the Love compass point alone strands a counselee in a sea of masochism. It’s not that dependent Pleasers like pain, because they don’t. It’s just that they don’t realize how this subservient pattern creates the fundamental reason for this distress: the pain of feeling constantly on edge about keeping people happy and the pain of needing other’s approval for whatever they do.

The dependent pattern exists as a pure prototype of fixation on the Love compass point, but can occur in combination with the adjacent compass points of either Strength or Weakness. When combined with the Strength compass point, counselees develop compulsive controlling features; combined with the Weakness compass point, the dependent develops avoidant depressive features. In all cases, however, the Assertion compass point is decommissioned.

For more on the Dependent Pleaser pattern see:

Compass Therapy In Action: Christian Psychology In Action

Compass Therapy Tips for Counseling a Dependent Client

Dependent clients transfer their indiscriminate hunger for people’s approval straight into the counseling setting. In terms of the Self Compass, they are stuck on the Love compass point in the Dependent trend, and their chief difficulty is a fear of using the Assertion compass point.

1. Resist being trapped by the niceness, politeness, and attempts at being ideal counselees. It is important to help dependent clients stay in touch with the need for healthy assertion, because they fear anger and confrontation. Watch out for the temptation of feeling flattered when they tell you how wise and wonderful you are. If you get hooked by this unconscious ploy, they will remain as dependent as ever.

 

2. How do you teach dependents about their self-defeating personality pattern without devastating them? You break the news gently by exploring how they first acquired the Dependent trend in childhood and adolescence. You ask them to recall who taught them to care so much about people’s approval. You predict that unless they outgrow the Dependent trend, they will keep feeling guilty about trivial matters, fearful of displeasing others, and depressed when others inevitably take them for granted.

3. Skillfully frustrate their tendency to lean on you. Ask them how they feel about different issues, and wait for them to spell it out. This helps them take responsibility for thoughts and feelings. Ask what they want and how they might accomplish it. This helps them think for themselves. Compliment every movement toward self-direction and emotional self-sufficiency.

4. Become the accepting parent your dependent client never had. Compliment them when they finally admit their anger towards others, disclose secret depression, or show disgust with their overdone niceness. Your acceptance of their negative feelings helps them accept more realistically their Strengths and Weaknesses—without fear. This is how they become more authentic human persons.

Dr. Jim Beck at Denver Seminary says about  

Christian Counseling That Really Works: 

"The 25 techniques alone are worth the price of the book."