Book Review: The Joy of Saying No by Natalie Lue
A light-hearted guide with strong insight into how to stop people-pleasing behaviour
“If you don’t say yes authentically, you say it resentfully, fearfully, or avoidantly, and that leads to far more problems, than if you’d just said no in the first place.”
If you've found yourself concealing or stifling your true emotions, harbouring secret resentment, frequently prioritising others' wants and needs over your own, fretting about being disliked, or avoiding asking for help because you don’t want to be a burden, then, according to the author of this book, you are a people-pleaser.
Natalie Lue is a writer who ran a successful blog and podcast called The Baggage Reclaim Sessions to help people overcome their past patterns, including people-pleasing, having poor boundaries and engaging in high self-criticism. Lue herself suffered from a chronic illness in her late 20s and was looking at a life of pain-management on steroids when she surprised herself by saying no to medical treatment that wasn’t making her better. To treat her sarcoidosis, she instead chose kinesiology and acupuncture. By charting her own path, she sent her disease into remission and changed the way she advocated for herself.
In The Joy of Saying No: A Simple Plan to Stop People Pleasing, Reclaim Boundaries and Say Yes to the Life You Want, Lue outlines a variety of people-pleasing behaviours and offers actionable steps to break these patterns. According to Lue, people-pleasing involves behaviours that arise from anxiety and a degree of low self-worth, and this can prevent us from being authentic and investing in genuine and balanced relationships. Her style of writing is conversational, direct and imminently readable. She offers a tad too much hand-holding but her guidance is undeniably effective and provides invaluable support.
Lue states that the adults reading this book have most likely been raised in, what she calls, the Age of Obedience. Most millennials and boomers will identify with an upbringing that prioritised being good and obedient, listening to authority figures and not making too much of a fuss. Adulthood for Lue is about unlearning behaviours that no longer serve us and finding new ways to build a healthy life for ourselves.
She touches upon the idea of how going against our authentic selves makes us live in chronic stress until our bodies revolt. She writes, “living our lives with split selves, where we present one aspect to the world and then suppress and repress the other, blocks us from telling our minds and bodies the truth. And so we experience disconnection that manifests as emotional, mental, physical and spiritual illness.” She equates people-pleasing with hyper-vigilance and writes, “when you’re effectively on high alert and constantly scanning the perimeter for disapproval or danger, it inhibits your ability to be conscious, aware, and present.” By connecting our behaviour to our overall health, she makes a convincing argument that working towards honest self-expression benefits all aspects of our lives.
In order to identify our patterns of behaviour and begin to change them, Lue names five types of people-pleasing behaviours - gooding, efforting, avoiding, saving and suffering.
Gooders want to be perceived positively at all costs. They derive their self-worth from being compliant and expect to be rewarded for it. When things don’t work out as they hope, they wonder why, when all they did was try to be good. Efforting consists of, Lue writes, “people pleasing that uses effort, achieving and perfectionism to create self-worth and earn acceptance and safety.” Here, Lue touches upon a broader social context as she notes that efforting can be “a response to the immigrant, marginalised, and deprived existence. Work ethic and effort were means of gaining status but also insulating against or limiting discrimination and scrutiny.” Situating her theories in more sociological contexts would have provided a stronger foundation and applicability to a broader setting. Unfortunately, she does not dig deeper into this idea and leaves such analysis beyond the scope of the book.
Lue defines the third type of people-pleasing - Avoiding - as “the style of people pleasing that uses evading, hiding, merging, and blending as a means of pleasing others and meeting wants and needs.” Avoiders, she claims, are often children of divorce or those who lost a parent when they were young but whose experiences were left unaddressed by the adults around them.
Saving is a form of people pleasing where, Lue states, “the person tries to be the solution to other people’ problems by taking on their responsibilities and ‘giving’ through fixing, helping and rescuing in order to feel needed, purposeful and valuable.” She points out, “the sentiment ‘after everything I’ve done for you’ applies to Savers the most.” The Saver is frustrated when others don’t change in a way that would benefit them but would also actually make the Saver feel better.
The last type are Sufferers. Suffering, according to Lue, “is using self-dislike and consciously and unconsciously putting one’s self in a position of hardship, distress and frustration to be ‘good,’ to influence and control other people’s feelings and behaviour, and to call attention to a need.” Sufferers don’t say no because they don’t believe that they have a choice. They may be secretly afraid of taking responsibility for themselves.
For each category, Lue defines behaviour traits, strengths and challenges, and patterns to watch out for. She includes methods to adjust one’s behaviour and shows us how to listen to ourselves in order unpack where our need to please comes from. One may identify with more than one style of people-pleasing but one or two types will be dominant. Lue advises, “The key is to acknowledge what motivates and drives you the most because this will tell you about what you value as well as what you fear - and these will show themselves in the themes and patterns of your life.”
She emphasises the value of altering our behaviours, not only for personal growth but also for fostering healthier relationships with those around us, particularly if we find ourselves entrenched in unsatisfactory dynamics. Her use of listicles and bullet points provides a steady guide as we confront these uncomfortable truths about ourselves. A look at the book’s sparse references reveal that her theories arise from her own observations of human behaviour rather than psychological or scientific research. Still, her writing is more powerful than I expected them to be.
While initiating change in one’s behaviours, one can get bogged down by blame and regret for past actions or lost time but Lue helps navigate these emotions to arrive at a place of acceptance. I felt empowered to change my own behaviour by addressing the root beliefs that they stemmed from.
Through her own experiences and observations, Lue offers a roadmap to self-discovery and personal growth. Whether this book is used as a standalone resource or in conjunction with therapy, her concepts are guaranteed to click with the reader.
The Joy of Saying No: A Simple Plan to Stop People Pleasing, Reclaim Boundaries and Say Yes to the Life You Want
By Natalie Lue
220 pages, Harper Horizon, 2022
Rs. 499/ USD19.99