The Disease to Please: Curing the People-Pleasing Syndrome
by Harriet B. Braiker, Ph.D.

The New York Times bestseller is now available in a new paperback edition and on audio tapes and CDs.

Available at bookstores everywhere, or you can order here:

What's wrong with being a "people pleaser?" Plenty!

People pleasers are not just nice people who go overboard trying to make everyone happy. Those who suffer from the Disease to Please are people who say "Yes" when they really want to say "No" - but they can't. They feel the uncontrollable need for the elusive approval of others like an addictive pull. Their debilitating fears of anger and confrontation force them to use "niceness" and "people-pleasing" as self-defense camouflage.

They may appear to the outside world as perennial "nice" people, but they are only concealing their true anger and resentment behind public "happy faces." And they are hurting themselves and those they would otherwise seek to please.

Now, best-selling author and frequent Oprah guest Dr. Harriet B. Braiker offers help for people-pleasers. The Disease to Please presents clear, positive, practical and easily do-able steps toward recovery from a malady that sounds harmless, but can actually have serious and destructive consequences.

DO YOU HAVE THE DISEASE TO PLEASE?

Like million of others, you may suffer from this incapacitating but surprisingly common problem. For many, the difficulty may start innocently enough with genuine and generous attempts to make others happy. But this seemingly harmless passion to always be "nice," to put others first and to compulsively please them even at the expense of your own health and happiness rapidly spirals into a serious psychological syndrome with far-reaching physical and emotional consequences.

The Disease to Please explodes the dangerous myth that people-pleasing is just a simple problem of going overboard in seeking to please others. It reveals the underlying approval addition, toxic mindsets that rationalize and perpetuate the problem, and the fear and avoidance of anger, rejection and confrontation that fuel the emotional avoidance pattern.

Begin with a simple but revealing quiz to discover what type of people-pleaser you are and find out what drives your impulse to please others. Then learn how making even small changes to any single portion of the Disease to Please Triangle - involving your thoughts, feelings, and behavior - will cause a dramatic, positive and long-lasting change to the overall syndrome.

Next, you will be ready to embark on a 21-Day Action Plan for Curing the Disease to Please. This plan offers step-by-step, easy-to-follow solutions whose healing power you will experience for yourself one-day-at-a-time as it leads you through the small steps that will produce lasting rewards and recovery.

Inviting, warm, wise and inspiring, this truly therapeutic book will help you deal constructively with normal - though difficult - emotions and relationships, instead of trying to "please" your way out of them. As a recovered people-pleaser, you will finally see that a balanced way of living that takes others into consideration but puts the emphasis first on pleasing yourself and gaining your own approval is the clearest path to health and happiness. As Dr. Braiker points out, sometimes "it's okay not to be nice!"

Read the book and join the ranks of recovered people-pleasers, and you will finally understand that there is far more to you than how much you do!

A Review of The Disease to Please by Dr. Kay Redfield Jamison

"Dr. Harriet Braiker's impressive academic training and clinical expertise join up with her keen insights into human nature, and a clear and fast-paced writing style, to make The Disease to Please a fascinating book about an important topic to millions of women. It is a highly practical and thoughtful field book for women who struggle with where, whether, and how to draw the line between their own desires and the seemingly undeniable demands of others for limited resources of time and energy. If you need ways to figure out how to draw the line, buy this book!"

-- Dr. Kay Redfield Jamison, Professor of Psychiatry, Johns Hopkins University, and bestselling author of The Unquiet Mind and Night Falls Fast.