The Disease to Please

Curing the People-Pleasing Syndrome

By: Harriet Braiker

Narrated by: Bernadette Dunne

Length: 4 hrs and 20 mins

Publisher's summary

Who are people pleasers? They are the people who say yes, when they want to say no - the perennial nice person whose resentment is concealed behind their public “happy face”. Now best-selling author and frequent Oprah guest Dr. Harriet Braiker offers help for anyone who has ever felt the resentment of giving 100 percent of themselves to others and getting nothing in return.

The Disease to Please explodes the dangerous myth that “people-pleasing” is a benign problem. It is the first book to treat people pleasing as a serious psychological syndrome, and it breaks new ground in its approach to offer a cure. 

Dr. Braiker offers a 21-day action plan for curing The Disease to Please. A daily psychological workout and skills-training program, it will help listeners replace the compulsion to comply with a more conscious and reasoned choice to care. The Disease to Please includes: 

• Extensive case studies
• Diary and journal formats to help recovery 
• An effective three-stage short-term therapy approach

©2001 Harriet B. Braiker, PhD (P)2005 McGraw Hill-Ascent Audio

Very helpful advice

I liked how the author used real life examples to back up each positive and negative trait expressed

Very Insightful

This is the book for all my people-pleasers! This book would be very beneficial for those who are going into the mental health field too. It was kinda boring to read but it was very informative and explained quite a bit to me even about myself that I never fully realized. Everything just kinda made sense and the pieces just fell into place.

Informative

The writing was paced very well. The stories were very relatable. This is my first audible book and it was a great first pick.

Excellent. Helped me more than I expected

Very nice narrating voice to listen to. The quality is professional, the story engaging, and the writing comprehensive. I was surprised to find so many familiar thought patterns, habits, and emotional tendencies I have explained so clearly in this book. Going into this book, I didn’t think I was very deep into this disease or that it could potentially be harmful. Thankfully my eyes have been opened. I am hopeful. Bless everyone that had a hand in making this accessible to me.

Hard to balance usefulness

The book is structured in a way that makes people pleasing behaviors out to be almost a pathology or a syndrome. That’s not always the case. While it’s helpful to understand some of the behaviors and backgrounds, I personally felt the ability to manage my relationships were not well served with this book. It’s more interpersonal relationships for couples versus the overall concept that many of us focus on others instead of our selves.

Good but doesn’t feel finished.

I like to book but I was hoping for more tips on how to heal. It felt like the whole book was about the issues from every angle and nothing on how to solve.

Never before.

I have never before been so pulled awake.
I am listening to it again.
The reader,
the statements,
the directness,
even the repetition;
everything is true and what I needed and not a single sentence wasn’t.
It was hard to hear without wondering what life could have been like, had I only known it 4 years ago.

Best book for People Pleasers

As a licensed counselor, I’ve been on the hunt for a deep, helpful book I can recommend to my clients…. I finally found it! This is it!!! I highly recommend this book for anyone who thinks they may have a people pleasing mindset.

very informative and targeted

a out of the info here was not new to me but framed specifically around people pleasing it brought a me awareness and helped me really target the areas I need to work on.

Excellent Narrator and Message

My only gripe is she read the book a little quickly so I had to bump the speed down a hair to really try and absorb and think about what was being read. Loved the narrator’s confident tone though and overall great performance.

The messaging in the book I found very helpful with no wasted stuff. There was a lot of examples where the male party was the aggressor against a female party. I know thats the Norm, some of us guys have people pleasing issues issues as well.