People-Pleasing and Social Media

S. E. Wigget
7 min readMar 28, 2024

People-pleasing is a bad habit common to empaths, and one I’ve been guilty of countless times.

Vita working on a computer

For me, at least, I think it stems from a childhood with a narcissist mother and her narcissist and sociopath siblings and countless other relatives who are their flying monkeys. I was brainwashed by my mother and her side of the family. They taught me to throw myself under the bus for bullies. They taught me that their needs, emotions, opinions, perspectives and the like matter and that mine don’t.

They set me up. Even in my forties, I still didn’t know I was an empath and didn’t know about things like… boundaries. At the age of thirty-seven, I moved to a progressive West Coast city and expected people to be much nicer than in the middle of the U. S. That’s right — by the time I moved away from the Midwest, I was convinced that Perpetual Playground Bullies (PPB) being the norm is just a Midwestern thing. I didn’t know about personality disorders. In the past, bullies inspired me to be somewhat reclusive, so I didn’t know that as an empath who socially opened up, I was opening myself up to be an easy target for narcissists and sociopaths.

I people-pleased narcissists and sociopaths. I don’t recommend it.

But… this is supposed to be about people-pleasing specifically on social media.

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S. E. Wigget

Outside Medium, I mostly write fiction, especially paranormal and historical fantasy, under either S. E. Wigget or Susan E. Wigget.🌈 WhimsicalWords.Substack.co