When the Desire to Be Liked CostsYou Everything

Written by Vania Phitidis
Counsellor & Therapist
Last updated on 22 May 2026

I want to tell you about a man I know of. He is in his seventies, retired, well-liked, and by most measures has had a good life. He is the kind of person people are fond of. Warm, easy to be around, someone who makes others feel comfortable. After a working life he was proud of, he stepped back and took a seat on the board of a business he cared about. He was there in an advisory capacity. His experience and judgment were, in theory, exactly what was needed.

The business is now in serious trouble. Collapsing, in fact. And with it, the retirement he had planned.

When I heard about this, what stayed with me was not the financial collapse. It was something much quieter. He had seen what was happening. He had been in those board meetings. He had the experience and the instincts to know that something was going wrong. He was not the only one in the room who might have said something. But he didn’t. And neither, it seems, did anyone else feel quite able to stop what was unfolding.

I keep thinking about why.

Two Patterns in a Room

The person leading the business, the one whose decisions were driving it toward the edge, was not someone plagued by self-doubt. Quite the opposite. There is a particular kind of confidence that does not really invite challenge. It fills the space. It moves quickly, speaks with certainty, and has a way of making hesitation feel like weakness. People who operate like this are not always wrong, but they are often very hard to question, especially in a room where other people are trying to keep the atmosphere collaborative and the relationships intact.

And here is where the two patterns meet.

Because the man I am thinking about is, by his own nature, a pleaser. Not in a small or superficial way. It is a deep, longstanding orientation toward the world: keep things smooth, avoid conflict, make sure people feel okay, don’t be the one who causes a problem. In many contexts over many years, this has made him someone people genuinely love and trust. It is not a pretence. It is simply how he has always moved through the world.

But in that boardroom, those two patterns, one expansive and unchecked, one accommodating and conflict-averse, created something between them. A dynamic where challenge became almost impossible. Where the person with the power to push forward did, and the person with the wisdom to push back didn’t. Not because he lacked the knowledge. But because something older and deeper than his knowledge was running the show.

Where Patterns Come From

In therapy, we talk about adaptive patterns: the ways we learned, usually early in life, to manage our relationships and keep ourselves safe. A child who grows up learning that harmony matters, that other people’s comfort takes priority, that being liked is connected in some way to being okay, that child often becomes very good at reading what a room needs. At adjusting. At holding back the thing that might cause friction.

This is not weakness. It is intelligence. It is a child working out how to belong.

The trouble is that patterns do not update themselves. They run quietly in the background, doing what they have always done, long after the original conditions that shaped them have changed. The man on that board was no longer a child navigating something difficult at home. He was an adult with real knowledge and real responsibility. But the older pattern was still there, still operating, still deciding what felt safe to say and what didn’t.

And it is worth saying: the person on the other side of that dynamic almost certainly had their own pattern running too. Grandiosity, that unshakeable sense of being right, of not needing to be questioned, rarely comes from nowhere either. It has its own history, its own logic, its own way of protecting something. These things tend to fit together. The unchecked leader and the conflict-averse advisor are, in a sense, a perfect and terrible match.

The Gap Between Knowing and Acting

What I find most painful in situations like this is that the awareness was there. He knew. The experience, the instincts, the understanding of what was happening, all of it was present. What was missing was not the information. It was the connection between what he knew and the permission to act on it.

That gap, between knowing and being able to move, is often exactly where our patterns live.

When we have never really examined how we operate, when we have never had cause to ask ourselves what we do when there is conflict, or when someone we care about is doing something we know is wrong, the pattern stays in charge. It does not announce itself. It simply produces a feeling. A tightening. A sense that speaking up would damage something, would make things uncomfortable, would mark us as difficult. And we follow that feeling, because we always have.

The pattern that helped us belong can, in certain high-stakes moments, cost us dearly. Not because it is bad. But because it was built for a different room, a different time, a different version of what safety meant.

What Knowing Yourself Can Do

I am not writing this to suggest that therapy is a guaranteed protection against difficult outcomes. Life is not that tidy. Boards have dynamics, businesses are complex, and even the most self-aware person can find themselves swept along by something larger than their own psychology.

But I do believe that there is something genuinely protective about knowing yourself. About having spent some time with the question: how do I actually operate? What do I tend to do when there is pressure, or conflict, or when someone I respect is moving in a direction I am not sure about? What does it feel like in my body when I am about to defer to someone when part of me knows I shouldn’t?

Not in order to become someone who challenges everything, or to strip out the warmth and the care that make you who you are. But to know that the pattern is there. To be able to notice it when it is running. To have some choice, even a small one, about whether this is a moment to follow it or to do something different.

The man I am thinking of is someone who has been genuinely loved and has given a great deal to the people around him. That is real and it matters. But I find myself wishing that somewhere along the way, someone had helped him see all of himself. Not just the part that was easy to be around. The part that went quiet when it needed to speak.

Because that part had something important to say. And the cost of not hearing it turned out to be very high indeed.

If any of this resonates with you, I work with people who are beginning to notice their own patterns and how those patterns might be shaping their choices. You don’t need to be in crisis to benefit from that kind of exploration. Sometimes the most valuable conversations happen before everything falls apart. Get in touch with me about counselling.