Book Review: Do It for You

Title: Do It for You 

Author: Vanessa Ooms

Date: 2022

Publisher: Vanooms Media

ISBN: 978-1-7387471-1-5

Length: 188 pages

Quote:  "I knew in my heart of hearts that this moment was the culmination of choices I’d made that were not in my best interest; in which I had ignored my intuition and red flags, and done what I thought others would view as “right.”

If you missed the insights North America received, almost en masse, from the bestsellers Co-Dependent No More and Your Erroneous Zones, this book is for you. "How to Stop Being a People-Pleaser" is still the advice some people need. 

If you remember what was helpful, and not helpful, in Melody Beattie's and Wayne Dyer's mega-sellers, and their many follow-up books and many imitators, this book may disappoint you. It's not that Ooms doesn't go beyond what Beattie and Dyer had to teach us. She does...but not necessarily in the direction you most wanted to see. She's updated the list of resources available to recovering people-pleasers but she's not come to any useful insights on when to stop fretting about being a people-pleaser and just be a helpful friend, or what to do if you've realized that your family actually have a pretty good sense of balances and boundaries, that it's government institutions (e.g. your school, your children's school, the Social Security Administration) that you're experiencing as oppressors and abusers. 

One thing Do It for You has that Co-Dependent No More and Your Erroneous Zones didn't have is workbook pages. People-pleasers sometimes feel overwhelmed by the idea of making decisions about what they want to do. They may have a general idea ("drop out of the accounting course, hitchhike to California, get discovered, and become a movie star") but they've never dared to think about exactly how they might make it work. Thinking about this sort of thing can help. Some people actually realize that there might be some benefit in completing the accounting course while Daddy's union fund is paying for it--they can always hitchhike to California as certified public accountants--and thus feel at peace with themselves about doing the sensible thing. 

One thing no guidebook for people-pleasers had, so far as I know, is any useful information about life beyond recovery from pathological people-pleasing. People who have already grown backbones quite often report that the things they want, for themselves, include happy families, satisfied customers, successful students, healthy patients, even a spiritual "discipleship group" where people encourage one another to build better habits of life. And relationships like that don't always make our lives perfect, either. Sometimes what we choose to do in relationships we've chosen to maintain is disgusting. Nobody likes disinfecting bedpans. On the other hand nobody likes being a person who abandons a sick relative. Choosing to disinfect bedpans is not being a people-pleaser. Quitting a dead-end corporate job in order to homeschool a deaf child is just about the opposite of being a people-pleaser. On a happier note, completely abandoning yourself to your spouse's pleasure in bed is the height of self-indulgence. The therapists who help people-pleasers probably would be prepared to discuss this in real life, but it would probably be too confusing to put into the books. At least Melody Beattie did spell out, in later editions of Co-Dependent No More, that most people can feel the difference between being helpful and generous or being exploited. 

All self-help books have some built-in limitations but they can help some people. If you are in a classic people-pleaser situation, like having spent your whole adult life pursuing success in a corporation that has gone bankrupt or a husband who has eloped with a younger man, this book may help you.