So, I had an incredibly fucked-up childhood in a toxic abusive environment and never really learned how to people.

When I was younger I was… abrasive, let’s say. Or possibly just an insufferable prick. I would argue with people on the internet a lot and generate a lot of conflict - not from a desire to troll (as many assumed), I was just raised in a test-to-destruction environment where loud table-slapping debate was just how you learned things - kind of cage-match debugging sessions kind of thing.

This didn’t make me many friends, understandably.

Anyway, decades passed and I learned to mellow out a bit, to go along to get along, and to develop some soft skills like y’know, tact, and… compassion for people’s emotional investment in their intellectual position, if that has a name.

Well and good, the people I talk to don’t generally want to strangle me, chalk it up as a win.

But increasingly of late I’ve been hearing disparaging talk of ‘people pleasers’, which as best I can tell seems to refer to people who do all the things I was yelled for not doing half my life: going along to get along, valuing other people’s needs and emotional sore spots, taking a cooperative, defensive-driving kind of approach to social ineraction - and I am confuse.

I lack a proper framework to parse this all intuitively; I had to build my social skillset manually by trial and error, and things obvious to others remain somewhat mysterious to me.

I’m not actually ASD (just ADHD), but my lack-of-intuitive-grasp on certain things presents a similar profile. Can someone give me a longhand explanation of the border between not-an-asshole and people-pleasing?