You probably know at least one woman who is really, really nice. She’s someone always tries to make everyone happy. Her way of dealing with misunderstandings is to make every effort to placate the other person.
You’ve probably also seen people taking advantage of this woman’s eagerness to please. Because she ‘s unwilling to engage in confrontation, she often ends up being treated with disrespect. The more she tries to please, the more contempt she seems to elicit.
A woman like this tends to need a lot of reassurance that she’s likable. She’s careful to not offend anyone and won’t express any “negative” emotions. She’s buying into society’s messages that anger or assertion is not ladylike and aggressive women are “shrews” and “harpies” who will never find love.
This type of woman has learned that it’s not acceptable for her to be powerful. She believes that being overly smart, ambitious or successful might spoil her chances of finding a relationship. She’s convinced that these qualities will also alienate her from other women, as they will likely perceive her as bitchy.
Women take in messages about how they are supposed to be from their families and from the media. If they are taught that having a strong opinion isn’t pleasing to others, they learn to say “kind of,” and “sort of,” when in truth, they know exactly how they feel and what they want, deep down inside.
If a woman’s family makes her feel that her strong emotions or strong opinions aren’t acceptable, she’ll learn to keep them to herself. The media reinforce these messages by indicating that the only way a woman will find love and approval is by being “nice.”
The problem with stuffing down your anger or your assertiveness is that these parts of you don’t want to stay down. Feelings and needs are meant to be expressed and if we try to repress them, they’ll find another outlet.
Being nice has unforeseen consequences: constantly holding back needs, feelings, opinion or ambition eventually creates frustration. This frustration grows into unconscious resentment. Since anger is unacceptable it morphs into anxiety, which is manifested by worrying, sleeplessness, compulsive behaviors or irritability.
This creates a dilemma: continue to hold everything in so as not to offend anyone or relieve the mounting anxiety by letting out the repressed material. Compounding the problem is the fact that often, the choice is made unconsciously, by default.
The pressure builds up to such an intensity that repressed content can end up leaking out in snarky remarks, whining, nagging or even outbursts of rage. When the people around react in shock and horror (because they aren’t used to seeing such a display) this reinforces the need to slam a lid down on all of it, once again.
A vicious circle is thus created, where the nice woman represses, becomes anxious, leaks a bit and then represses again. The negative reactions she experiences from the people in her life make her feel very bad about these leaks, so she turns to something which will help contain the leakage. In many cases, the answer is food.
Food helps to stuff down and keep down unacceptable needs and feelings. It also acts as an emotional numbing agent. Somehow, the act of eating and the sensation of being full are soothing and fulfilling enough to help hold things in. The one problem with eating is that it’s only a temporary solution.
Once the sensation of fullness is gone, the repressed needs and feelings start pushing their way up to the surface. A woman will have to eat fairly continuously in order to keep this content locked away in her psyche, but all the eating will have an unwanted result: It makes the woman feel bad about herself.
She’ll feel ashamed for being out of control and for gaining weight. Still, the need to keep stuffing her feelings down will prevent her from stopping the behavior. Once a woman starts using food to keep down unwanted emotions, she enters an unending cycle of eating that she can’t break free of.
As long as she needs to repress her needs, feelings and opinions she’ll have to keep eating. As long as she keeps on eating, she’ll be filled with remorse and a growing sense of self-loathing. This is a very high price to pay for trying to be nice.
This woman will eventually begin to see that no matter how much energy she spends being nice, people still get angry at her and in fact, a lot of them take advantage of her. They take her for granted and expect her to always be there for them, regardless of how she’s treated.
For every pleaser in the world, there’s a user. There will always be unscrupulous people out there who exploit the nice ones. The pleaser gives and the user takes. The nice woman realizes on some level that she’s being mistreated, and she grows tired of this dynamic.
Sadly, though, this insight rarely leads to change. People remain convinced of their core beliefs until they are educated otherwise. The nice woman won’t stop pleasing people because she believes that ultimately, it’ll work; she just has to figure out how to “do it right.” In the meantime she’ll keep eating, in order to soothe her growing frustration.
The compulsively nice woman craves sweets, because she needs to sweeten her life. She wants “comfort foods” to soothe her, and things to chew on to alleviate her frustration. She eats as a way of dealing with the unhappiness caused by her lack of success as a pleaser.
When a woman is being nice, it’s because she she thinks that making others happy will get them to love her, and that this is the key to her happiness. She doesn’t realize that the opposite is true, and that she’s dooming herself to endless frustration.
First of all, you can’t make people love you by being a pleaser and a placator. They’ll love you only if they’re able to, and not because of the way you are with them. Being nice doesn’t attract other nice people; in fact, it attracts the users who prey on the pleasers of the world. The only people who want a woman to suppress her feelings or her power are those who seek to dominate and control her.
Secondly, getting other people to love you is not the route to happiness. It’s great to be loved, but it’s not the answer to low self-esteem or a lack of confidence. The way to be happy is to sort out your emotional baggage and to go after the things in life which would bring you satisfaction and fulfillment.
If a woman is focused on being a pleaser, she’ll become alienated from her true needs and feelings and this will prevent her from achieving happiness. Looking outside herself for fulfillment will never work, even if she manages to find someone who’ll appreciate her and not exploit her. Her happiness depends on discovering what will give her life meaning and purpose.
Without personal fulfillment, a woman is left hungry for meaning in life. This hunger to transforms into a hunger for food. As long as she continues to repress her self-expression and neglect her own dreams, this woman will have to use food to replace what’s missing in her life.
This is how being nice could make you fat. If you are this woman, you might want to look at what fears or beliefs are driving you to be a pleaser and to bury your power, your needs and your dreams under all that food.
If you do so, you’ll have the opportunity to let go of the need to eat and to finally discover who you really are. You’ll be free to express your needs and feelings and to boldly assert your opinion to anyone who’ll listen. Sure, some people might not be pleased, but that’s a small price to pay for real happiness.
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