A People Pleaser Goes to Therapy

One of the best things about being a millennial is that we were strongly encouraged to go to therapy. I spent one hour nearly every week between 2003 and the start of the pandemic airing my grievances and collecting coping mechanisms to deal with depression, anxiety, questionably diagnosed ADD, my father's Alzheimer's diagnosis, my father's death, and, of course, the general existential dread that comes standard with being alive in this country and on this planet. Of all the therapists I've had, I remember six by name, and there are a handful of others I remember only by their office location or the fabric of their couch. I'll guess I've seen ten in total. Ten therapists over approximately sixteen years. I'm not sure if that's a lot or a little, but I am sure that my reason for leaving each one is a symptom of the one mental condition I struggle most with: people pleasing.

I've been lucky to have mostly good experiences with therapists who did their best to guide me through my darkest times. Out of the whole group, there have only been a couple of duds. But regardless of how much I like a therapist or how effective they are at helping me cope with the chaos of chemicals inside my brain, I can never stay with them very long. It has nothing to do with them—even my worst therapists were nice people with good intentions. No, it's aways my fault. I have to leave and find a new therapist, on average about every year and a half, because I am a liar.

Lying is a complicated concept. I'm an only child, but when I was young, my cousins who were eight and ten years older than me spent a lot of time at our house. My uncle, my mother's brother, was divorced and sliding into the clutches of a cult, and my cousins got some stability by spending time living with us. I told my neighbor they were my brothers. I can't remember if I actually believed that living with us meant they were my brothers or if it was only wishful thinking. Later, when the neighbor approached my mom and inquired if she'd been married before, she was very confused. Was I a liar for telling our neighbor my cousins were my brothers? The neighbors certainly seemed to think so.

Am I a liar for telling a bunch of girls on my bus to elementary school that my parents owned the Maine Mall? If you've never been there, it's important to know that the Maine Mall is small and shabby enough that it is totally plausible that some guy would just own it. They seemed to believe for a good part of the ride that my parents were the ones that rented spaces to Limited Too and Gloria Jean's. I think I lost them when I said there was an apartment building underneath it. At the time, I didn't understand where the houses were in South Portland, because they are in a different area than the commercial zone. Eventually, they caught on and we all laughed and moved on. And now that I live in South Portland and know the mall is basically crumbling into the ground, I fully support turning that space into affordable housing, though I would suggest it be built above ground.

But no, I don't think either of those were lies. Real lies are attempts to cover up something you did, to blur reality, obfuscate the truth. There have been times, I'm ashamed to say, that I have told real lies, and I lived through the uncomfortable and volatile fallout. But the "lies" I told as a child were something different. I think I am, and have always been, a storyteller. I make things up. Sometimes because the truth is not exciting enough, like when I'm telling a story to a group of friends at a party. If I can tell I'm losing them, I'll spice my tale up a little, and when I get the laugh, I one hundred percent believe that it was worth fudging the truth. And sometimes, because I am a people pleaser, I find myself fudging the truth to make someone else's life better. This is where I run into issues with my poor, sweet therapists.

When I initially begin therapy with a new doctor or social worker, I am usually a little timid. I don't come in on day one with emotional guns blazing and shower the office with a torrent of tears. I usually do cry, just not in that snot-pouring-from-my-nose way that I will in later sessions. In the early days, I talk more broadly about my life and who I am, and what has brought me to that specific couch cushion balling up torn pieces of that specific tissue. And for several weeks, a year, occasionally even more, things go as well as they can. I share the things that are troubling me, and I feel the very specific kind of relief that comes from talking to someone whose job it is to listen to my problems.

I'm not the kind of person who collects friends. At each stage in my life, I've had a small circle of people who I love and support, and in turn they make me feel loved and supported. When I transition to the next stage, they don't always come with me. In fact, they usually don't, and I'm cool with that. Of course, I have a couple of ride-or-dies that I've known for decades. But friendships are largely based on shared interests and experiences, and we don't all grow and change at the same time. I think back fondly on everyone was once close to, but I'm okay with friendships coming and going. I don't need (or want) to go out with twenty-seven girlfriends on a Friday night. I like small groups of two to six that allow you to enjoy the company of everyone present.

But because I have a small number of trusted friends, I am limited on where I can dump my emotional crap. I don't like to waste a night of drinking wine on a patio by complaining about my season depression, or monopolize a nice dinner by dissecting something someone said to me offhand three weeks ago that they probably don't remember but has kept me up several nights since. I'm the kind person who, when asked how I am by anyone, from my mother to the barista, I say I'm fine. Which, I will point out, is not a lie. I am fine. I have a job, a house, two perfect pups, a relatively healthy body, and enough money that I can buy the type of apple that I actually want from the grocery store. I'm fine.

But also, I am not fine. My body is not great at making serotonin. I'm too often in gastro-intestinal distress. I don't get enough vitamin D during the short New England winter days. I worry that I will meet the same fate as my father. That my dogs will get sick. That my husband will get sick. That our country is regressing. That the earth will catch fire. The list could go on and on, and, when I wake in the middle of the night, it does. Having a therapist who is compensated for their time allows me to say even the ugliest things out loud without feeling like I am wasting someone's time or inconveniencing them in any way, both cardinal sins for people pleasers. I can examine all my worries and fears, even the least rational, with excruciating granularity because I am paying for that luxury.

And so, therapy goes well for me in chunks of time that last for several months to about a year. I am open to the secret tricks they suggest to soothe my anxious brain and keep my baseline-low mood from slipping deeper down into the depression zone. But then we get to know each other, my therapist becomes more than just some licensed social worker I see every seven days. As they get a deeper look into my psyche, I get a fuller picture of their life. I learn if they're married or not, I hear tidbits about their children, I catch glimpses into their own hopes and dreams, the things that make them a fully formed human person. This is where the trouble begins.

In 2010, when my then fifty-five-year-old father was diagnosed with the early-onset Alzheimer's (that we'd suspected he was suffering from for several years), I fell apart. If someone as kind and smart and funny as my father could have his life de-railed by an unforgiving illness, what was to say anyone was safe from a similar fate? Especially me, a gal carrying fifty percent of the DNA of a man with a genetic form of a neurodegenerative disease. I was spiraling. Nothing felt important anymore. Eating, working, exercising—what was the point? Why do anything if one random day I could be handed a death sentence?

The therapist I started seeing at the time was wonderful. Her name wasn't Suzanne, but let's pretend it was. Suzanne and I would meet in a tiny third-floor room of an old building downtown, walking distance from my office. She shared the space with a few other therapists, and they had coffee and tea in the waiting room. I would read old home and garden magazines while waiting for my appointment to begin. Her office had one window, which I faced from my seat on the couch. Suzanne sat in a chair beside her large wooden bookcase. And she did her job. She helped me come to terms with the fact that, yes, life is a gamble every day, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't make the most of each moment. In fact, it's maybe an argument for treating each of those moments as infinitely important.

And while it's true I did start feeling a little better, I was by no means fixed. I still cried almost every day, sometimes more than once depending on if I happened to hear "Cats in the Cradle" on the radio or see a commercial that featured a young woman and her father. But over the many months we'd been together, I'd started to really like Suzanne. When I talked, I could tell that she was really listening. Her suggestions were practical and employing them in my daily life made me feel less existential dread. I looked forward to our appointments. So, I did the only thing I could think of to show Suzanne my appreciation: I lied. I wanted her to see that she was doing a good job, so I pretended that she had fixed me. I would go into our sessions and say that I felt great, totally not sad, excited about life, not anxious at all. Eventually, she assessed that I could start seeing her less often, that I could call and book my next session when I felt like I needed it. I had graduated from therapy.

Except, of course, I was not well. I was desperately sad, dreaded every day, and riddled with anxiety. But I wanted Suzanne to be happy, and my people-pleaser brain decided that the best way to do that was to convince her she was such a good therapist that she had transformed me into someone who didn't need therapy anymore. I imagined her sitting in her chair, staring out the window saying things to herself like, "Wow, I've done it. I've changed her life! I am a success!" Of course, I never called Suzanne for another session. There was no way I could have kept up the facade.

I went several weeks without seeing someone until my best friend and roommate at the time told me that I needed to stop crying so much or else I would shrivel up like a raisin. I opened my laptop and went to my insurance's website to sort through the various therapists in our area that were taking new patients. This happened several times. I never intended for it to happen; it just did. I would start to see my therapist as a fully formed individual, and then I would become desperate to convince them that they were good at their job. But after the first couple, I started to recognize what I was doing. After a few more, I knew that I needed to nip the problem in the bud.

When I started seeing Hope (a therapist not actually named Hope) around 2018, I started our first session with something new. I told her straight up that I would probably start lying to her. I told her about my history, how once I started to care about her as more than someone I pay to listen to me complain, I would start trying to please her. I would think, "This person who is helping me so much—do they know that they're good at their job? What can I do to prove that to them?"

"Most people worry about if their therapist likes them," Hope told me. "You're worried about if your therapists like themselves."

She was right.

"It's not your job to buoy your therapist," she told me.

I knew she was right. As a people pleaser, I navigate through the world each day by locating others' perceived problems and calculating what I can do to fix them. Rarely does anyone ask me to intervene in their (non-)problems. It's an instinct as ingrained in me as the urge to hold your breath when you plunge into the ocean. Often, I'm not even helpful. My husband will tell you how annoying I can be when I'm paralyzed by the prospect of making a simple decision. Of course, he doesn't see the elaborate Good Will Hunting mathematics going on in my head as I try to calculate the answer that will make everyone else happy.

Hope was the first therapist to actively help me to dismantle some of the scaffolding that propped up my people pleasing. She encouraged me to give myself permission to access the part of me that has an opinion, often a strong one, but refused to ever say it out loud in case it disappointed someone. When I couldn't tell the difference between having an opinion and being an asshole, she was there to assure me that it was the former. At first, I relied on her heavily, but as time went on, I needed her less. I was by no means cured. I am still very much a people pleaser. But I have the ability to turn it off when I absolutely must or when I think it's going to cause my husband to leap from our car while speeding down the highway.

Still, my relationship with Hope ended the same way. Eventually, I presented as healthy enough that she suggested we meet every other week. Not long after that I changed jobs and my insurance wasn't as good, and I just stopped going. She had helped me. I did change under her care to become a less brittle person who sees herself more clearly, both the good qualities and the bad. Nowadays, when I'm feeling down, I sometimes google her, and if my sleuthing is correct, she no longer works in therapy, at least not in Maine. I miss her. And I think the fact that I would go back to her if I could means that I managed that relationship just differently enough to count as progress.

My dad died just before the pandemic started. It was the worst thing that ever happened to me, worse even than I imagined. But it was also the right thing. He was in a home at that point, and my mom visited him every day. I'm not sure my dad knew exactly who any of us were anymore, but I could tell that he enjoyed when we visited. If COVID closed the doors of the home and my mother was barred from visiting, I think it would have drastically changed the quality of all our lives. So, while I still hate everyone whose father is still alive and around to go to dinner or concerts or just talk on the phone with them, I also am glad that mine died before his life, all our lives, would have gotten more painful.

I could be rational about the timing of my father's death, but I was also, understandably, a fucking mess. I was falling apart in the kind of way that absolutely cannot be handled by just one person. I started seeing Georgia (you guess it—not named Georgia), a therapist who specialized in grief and how it effects the mind and the body. She mixed talk therapy with body manipulation to allow for better flow of your blood and your emotions through your body. I think it even helped with my gastro-intestinal distress. But then the Corona virus entered stage left. There was opportunity to meet over Zoom which I never took, foolishly I didn't expect the closures to last as long as they did. Eventually, Georgia quit therapy entirely and moved to another state long before I had time to care about her enough to lie. I can never know if I would have.

I'm not currently seeing a therapist, but every once in a while I find myself back on my insurance's website perusing the little red dots near my house and my office. Last year, my primary care doctor retired, and a couple weeks ago I saw my new doctor. She's young and smart and empathetic, and I cried twice during the appointment because it felt so good to say the things I had been keeping to myself for so long out loud and to have a knowledgeable woman offer concrete solutions. I apologized for crying—that wasn't the first impression I wanted to make. But of course, she waived it off.

"No apologizing!" she said. "If you need to cry, you cry."

I thanked her and we discussed some options for figuring out whatever is going on inside my body (something that my old doctor said wasn't a problem because I wasn't in pain). I have never felt so seen in a doctor’s office. But then she said something I didn't expect.

"Do you think you need me to prescribe you an anti-depressant?"

I said no. The next day, I deeply considered calling back to say yes. But now, with some time and space between me and that appointment, I think I made the right call. I may still need an anti-depressant, but if I'm going to get back on meds, I probably shouldn’t do it alone with just my half-filled toolbox. A plumber wouldn't fix a leaky faucet with only a screwdriver, right? But what I notice, looking back at that appointment, is that I never once thought about how my doctor felt. I didn't worry that I was taking up too much of her time, that my crying would make her uncomfortable, that I was being difficult. Yes, I apologized, but that was about me, about how I was feeling. And also yes, I know I just met her, maybe the urge to people please will come later. But I told her the truth. And when you're trying to break bad habits, it's one day at a time, one cry at a time, one lie not told at time, right? That's progress.

Halli Marshall lives in Portland, Maine with her husband and dogs, Maggie and Chip. She is a recent graduate of the Stonecoast MFA program at the University of Southern Maine. She officially focuses on writing short fiction and screenplays and unofficially writes limericks in the margins of her notes. When not reading and writing, Halli can usually be found treating herself to a nice little snack.