So, I had an incredibly fucked-up childhood in a toxic abusive environment and never really learned how to people.
When I was younger I was... abrasive, let's say. Or possibly just an insufferable prick. I would argue with people on the internet a lot and generate a lot of conflict - not from a desire to troll (as many assumed), I was just raised in a test-to-destruction environment where loud table-slapping debate was just how you learned things - kind of cage-match debugging sessions kind of thing.
This didn't make me many friends, understandably.
Anyway, decades passed and I learned to mellow out a bit, to go along to get along, and to develop some soft skills like y'know, tact, and... compassion for people's emotional investment in their intellectual position, if that has a name.
Well and good, the people I talk to don't generally want to strangle me, chalk it up as a win.
But increasingly of late I've been hearing disparaging talk of 'people pleasers', which as best I can tell seems to refer to people who do all the things I was yelled for not doing half my life: going along to get along, valuing other people's needs and emotional sore spots, taking a cooperative, defensive-driving kind of approach to social ineraction - and I am confuse.
I lack a proper framework to parse this all intuitively; I had to build my social skillset manually by trial and error, and things obvious to others remain somewhat mysterious to me.
I'm not actually ASD (just ADHD), but my lack-of-intuitive-grasp on certain things presents a similar profile. Can someone give me a longhand explanation of the border between not-an-asshole and people-pleasing?
Lunch comes up as it often does. Your friend Salby suggests pizza, which takes too long for lunch to start with, but whatever. You're gluten free so you pipe up and say sure, as long as it's a place with gf crust, and they have a separate baking spot, and they use clean pizza cutters so there's no cross contamination. Spoilers, such places are rare.
First scenario everyone is cool with going across town to the place you know is safe. It's a normal conversation. Lunch takes 90m but that's fine because no one has any conflicts.
Scenario 2, big meeting at 1 -- fucking gross who does that -- so it's Pizza Basement which is a local minimum wage chain with teens who hate everything running the place.
People pleasing would be going along with #2 and just eating some wilted half cup side salad for lunch.
Scenario 2 you should've gone somewhere else or just passed on lunch. If Salby clocks that you stood up for yourself and they decide they don't like that, you might have to regulate.