You Won't Stop People Pleasing Until Your Body Knows It's Not Prey

Ever found yourself smiling and agreeing to something, only to walk away wishing you had said no? Do you wonder why you keep accidentally ending up resentful or burnt out? You wonder why boundaries and conflict feel like you could die? That’s not just “people-pleasing” it’s your nervous system working overtime to keep you safe through fawning. 

In this episode, we dig into what’s really happening beneath freeze and fawn responses. These patterns aren’t flaws to fix; they’re survival strategies that once protected you. But if they’ve become your default, they can quietly erode your boundaries, your voice, your capacity, and your sense of choice.

You’ll learn:

• Why people-pleasing isn’t the same as kindness or empathy
• How freeze shows up when you feel the activation but can’t mobilize it
• Why true nervous system health isn’t perpetual calm it’s healthy anger being utilized as energy for your good 
• The surprising role of physical practices (like kickboxing!) in waking your body up to new options
• How to set emotional boundaries with your kids (without shutting them out)
• The 1% shifts you can make today to reclaim agency in your responses
  
  

Your freedom and regulation isn’t about escaping conflict or erasing your human complexity. It’s about befriending all parts of yourself and gaining access to your power, softness, and everything in between.

Chapters

• 0:00 People Pleasing and Nervous System Connection
• 3:14 Understanding Fawning vs. Freezing Responses
• 7:17 Accessing a Dynamic Range of Responses
• 11:07 Building Healthy Boundaries with Kids
• 15:40 Finding Your Fight Energy
• 18:49 Beyond Calm: True Nervous System Health
• 21:29 Episode Closing and Call to Action

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:02

you won't stop people pleasing and freezing until your body no longer feels like it's prey. Welcome to today's episode of the Motherhood Mentor Podcast. Today is a hopefully probably quick episode, just about some insights to people pleasing, fawning and freezing that so much is missed in our pop psychology culture of nervous system work. And I'm going to say that sentence again you won't stop people pleasing and freezing until your body no longer feels like it's prey. I know so many women who are stuck in chronic freeze and fawn and shutdown and what your body needs is access to your fight and flight. But a lot of times your body quite literally either doesn't have access to it, or it doesn't believe it does, or you are afraid of accessing those parts of you. You are afraid of accessing the energy and the mobilization that come with those, and there's so many different reasons why this could be, but we're not going to get into that today. Today we're just going to talk about here's where you are and here's how we get to where you're going. So if you are in a body that is chronically people pleasing and by people pleasing I'm referring to fawning I am not talking about your niceness, I am not talking about your empathy for other people, your ability to pay attention to the subtleties of conflict and your ability to witness what other people want and need as an important measure of relationship and community. Those are not people pleasing.

Speaker 1: 1:54

People pleasing and fawning is when your body this is so, so important your body, your nervous system are unconsciously and impulsively saying yes when it means no. You are disconnected from your own consent. You are disconnected from your own desires, your own needs. So when someone asks you a question, you will reflexively and impulsively say yes. You might not even feel that no until later. Or maybe you feel the no. You feel it somewhere deep in your belly, in your chest. You feel a resistance. You don't want to, you don't like it, you don't want to. But you find yourself smiling and saying yes and you don't realize that you meant no until later, when all of a sudden you're out of their presence and you get done with the conversation, or you leave the room, or they walk away, or the conflict's over and all of a sudden there's something that comes alive and you go. I didn't even realize I was doing it.

Speaker 1: 2:57

You're at a party, you're at a work function and you find yourself talking or acting or behaving in a way that isn't quite you. It's a version of you, it's an aspect of you, but you feel like there's this deep disconnection from the essence of who you are. That is fawning and people-pleasing. Fawning and people-pleasing so often is that you aren't even aware that you wanted to say no. You just feel compulsively compelled not only to say yes but to overexert yourself into other people's lives, into other people's decision making, into other people's problems and preemptively solve it for them. Now, that's a pretty extreme version and this can happen on a spectrum. So there's people who are experiencing this in micro moments. They're experiencing it in specific environments or relationships, and then there's women where this feels like it is compelling their entire personality. They don't even know who they are anymore.

Speaker 1: 4:04

And part of both fawning and freezing, which are nervous system responses, is that there is an aspect of you that you lose contact with. Contact with is very different than you losing it. It's not that it's gone, it's that you've lost that connection and the contact with it and the ability for that part of you to mobilize. So when you are stuck in this people pleasing and this freezing and freezing, I think is a little bit different than the fawning, because freezing. There's an underlying activation that you feel connected to. There's a part of you that's alive, that feels the mobilization, and then you're stunting it, you're stopping it. So you want to say something, you feel it, you want it, but you can't seem to find the words. You go to set the boundary and you can't seem to do it. You keep overthinking it, fawning. A lot of times you don't even feel the activation because there's a disconnection. There's a disconnection from even feeling like you can mobilize. Mobilization means that there is an energy, there is an activation that is moving you to do something. This is where it is so important for you to be able to feel your fight and flight.

Speaker 1: 5:37

People who are stuck in that conic freeze and fawn and shutdown their bodies, their nervous systems, need to be able to find activation and mobilization within safety. So they need to find their access and their connection to that part of them that says and feels and knows when it's a no and when it's a yes. When it's a conditional yes, so it's a no, and when it's a yes. When it's a conditional yes, so it's a maybe. It's not like a always yes, it's a sometimes Like Okay, we're going to talk about marital sex, because I think that's a huge thing that so many women have never learned that there is a big difference between no and my body doesn't want to and I want to want to. I don't have a desire for say it's not necessarily a yes, but it's a conditional. Maybe a yes, but it's a conditional. Maybe it's yes, I want to, but here's what I need to get there. Whether that's from you or from me, there's a conditional yes, there's a conditional. Maybe If you've been here for a minute, you know that I have a bone to pick with that whole saying of if it's not a hell yes, it's a hell no, and it's like that is almost never my experience.

Speaker 1: 7:03

My experience in so many arenas of my life is I have so many like I think of my life right now I have much, much more ambition than I have capacity, and that's a frustrating space to be in. It is frustrating to have all of these things that I want to do, that I want to accomplish, that I want to build, that I want to write, that I want to do, but like I don't necessarily have the time or the emotional focus or availability to do all of that, at least not all at once or not right now. I think of last week with work. We made it two whole weeks of school before one of my kids got sick. So I had a sick kid home with me all week and that meant that I had a little bit less capacity for work. It didn't mean that I didn't have a hell yes for work, it just meant that my hell yes was split between the work that I wanted to do and also the nurturing that my kid required but also that I want to do.

Speaker 1: 8:05

Sometimes what we want is complicated and complex and there is tension in that, and so many of us we are avoiding tension in our lives because we fear it. We see tension as conflict and conflict as a dangerous thing, not only in ourselves, but dangerous within the things that we want. And one of the ways that we come back into agency agency being that you feel that you have a dynamic range of ways that you can move. There is nothing inherently innately wrong with your nervous system. Your nervous system is not broken and it certainly doesn't need a reset because you are not a computer. It doesn't work, that's not a thing. It doesn't work, that's not a thing. What is a thing is that your body. Can you feel where and when and who you are right now? Do you feel access to a dynamic range of responses? Let me give you an example of that.

Speaker 1: 9:15

I want you to think of one of the areas in your life where you are struggling. Maybe you're struggling with a specific kiddo. Maybe you have a spicy kiddo. Maybe you're in the toddler season and your toddler's big emotions, or their no or their wildness, is really triggering to you. Maybe you're in a season where your relationship is hard to this person. Maybe you're in a season where it's work.

Speaker 1: 9:44

I want you to think of a very specific struggle with a specific person or a specific thing. Maybe it's emotional eating for you, maybe it's the relationship to yourself, and I want you to think of the pattern that you are in relationship to that person or to that thing with. There's a pattern, there's a way that they act and there's a way that you respond that you witness isn't working. We'll use the example of you're struggling with this kid A. We're struggling with your kid named Aaron, right, and when Aaron does this, you tend to do X, y, z and some of this is unintentional and it doesn't match up with your values. Let's say you lecture or you yell or you freak out or you get overstimulated and overwhelmed, or you keep finding yourself opening your phone and scrolling on social media because you need to, like disassociate and distract yourself from how activated and irritated and frustrated you feel with said kid and you don't want to take it out on them, so you're just trying to, like, help yourself cope. What I want for you is to have a relationship to that part of you that you know how to mobilize into many different responses to their actions.

Speaker 1: 11:09

Sometimes you need a fight energy and fight does not always mean a fist. Sometimes it means a steady, sturdy, staying energy. Fight energy means I'm staying my ground, I'm holding my ground. It doesn't always mean an aggressiveness against someone. It can, and there's an appropriate time and place for that. There's an appropriate and timely and healthy place for a fist. There's also a healthy, appropriate time for a boundary. So maybe your kid Aaron. He needs more specific boundaries and you need more specific boundaries in order to have a healthy relationship to each other. You need more emotional space from him. You need to stop over over over associating with his emotions.

Speaker 1: 11:59

If you are an empathetic mother, if you are a fawning mother, if you are a people-pleasing mother, it is so, so important for you to learn how to have emotional boundaries with your kids' emotions, that you witness their emotions as their own and you start to change that relationship to them. Having emotions is not inherently dangerous. Them having emotions is not inherently dangerous, but your body is responding as if it does. And if you can find that boundary, if you can find that fist energy or that push energy and I don't mean physiologically, I can mean emotionally, spiritually, quite literally you can put distance between you two, but there's an energetic pull. Maybe you need that bubble between you and your kid. Maybe you need to both be sitting and holding a cold drink while you talk about this.

Speaker 1: 12:54

There's different ways to relate to your kid. There's different ways to assess and respond to perceived threat, and that's what we want in your nervous system. We don't want a nervous system that only has one way to deal with threat. We want a nervous system that can feel access to walking away, to saying no, to saying maybe, to having a conversation, to moving towards conflict or away from conflict, a nervous system that can create a gentle barrier or a roar or a push or a run or a fist. This is what it means to have a regulated nervous system. It is a nervous system that is not so stuck in one response. You likely have your one response that you are so good at. This is just it's nature, it's nurture, and maybe you got your response from your parent, Maybe you started emulating your parent and you learned when my kid does X, oh that's when parents yell.

Speaker 1: 14:04

Even if that doesn't align with your values, you like picked that behavior up. You picked up that pattern and sometimes what happens with kids is you counteract your parents' responses. So let's say you had a parent who was emotionally volatile, who was a yeller, or maybe they were a collapser, so they would just like collapse into tears and emotions and they were so driven by their emotions or they had anger that was always coming out at other people. You might respond emotionally by disassociating, because you had to counterbalance that their pattern. You had to create symbiosis and balance in the dynamics in the family by creating the counterweight, the counterbalance to what theirs was. And what this creates is, even as adults, those patterns are almost always still at play until we become conscious of them and until we bring back this big piece, this big hinge of agency and choice, because healing from trauma, healing from patterns, healing your boundaries, healing and restoring your nervous system is about helping you develop contact with and a relationship to these responses, and it's not that you have to come in and change them and make them go away.

Speaker 1: 15:33

It's that you learn the medicine of them. You learn the wisdom of fawning and where and when and how it works for you and where and how it's getting you stuck. Because my fawning abilities and capabilities that's also one of my greatest strengths in life. That's why I'm such a good coach, that's why I'm so good at helping and holding other people. And your greatest gifts also tend to be your greatest weaknesses. Your greatest weaknesses are often your gifts under or overutilized. Greatest weaknesses are often your gifts under or overutilized.

Speaker 1: 16:12

So let's say you feel right now in your life that you are an overly angry person, like you are. You are like I have too much fight in my system. Okay, you are over utilizing this strength and this boundary and this, this staying power. That's not a problematic thing, but you might be using it in a way that doesn't work for you anymore. You might have been using that anger as a counterbalance, as a way to metabolize or move through feeling like a victim or feeling taken advantage of. There is a reason that your nervous system is dysregulated.

Speaker 1: 16:46

And bringing your nervous system back into regulation is not about always being calm. It's about having the ability to metabolize and move these activations, these different ways that your body wants to dynamically move. And again, it's not just that you have strength and fight and the ability to get away, it's also that you have staying power and softness and flow. I think of physically in my life I'm trying to be really, really strong, but I don't want to be so strong that I become inflexible, because then I'm more prone to injury. I don't want to be so flexible and flowy but have no strength, because then I'm more prone to injury. I don't want to be so flexible and flowy but have no strength, because then I'm going to have no staying power. I want a body that can run and fight, but also a body that can rest and paint and hold and nurture. That is a dynamic, healthy nervous system, one that can access slow health, medium health and fast health. A nervous system that can move against and move away from and move towards and move with. That is dynamic health. So to put this into practice and to make this so, so practical. So, to put this into practice and to make this so, so practical.

Speaker 1: 18:08

If you are someone who feels like you are stuck in people pleasing and freezing, one thing you can do in your life is integrating movements that allow you to get more comfortable with metabolizing those higher energy reactions literally in your physiology. This is one of. This was, honestly, my first introduction to somatic healing is before I even had the language of it, I had started doing kickboxing workouts just in my house, just doing kickboxing videos, and every single time I got done I was crying and having this emotional release and I could literally feel my body shifting. I could literally feel my identity and my relationship to trauma changing, because kickboxing was one of the first times in my life where I accessed fight energy, where my body witnessed I am no longer frozen, I no longer have to play dead, I no longer have to play nice. I have fists and I know how to use them. I can kick, I can yell, I can move against, I have fight. I am not a victim anymore, I am not in this trauma anymore and it started to bring me out of that mode, out of that fawning, out of that people pleasing simply because my body started realizing I have barriers. I have fight in me. I am not just this person who has to play nice all of the time.

Speaker 1: 19:48

I hope this little drop-in podcast helps you, supports you. Take a moment and notice how it feels in your body to hear this. What comes alive for you, what you want to walk away with Because, at the end of the day, to walk away with, because, at the end of the day, head knowledge is just inspiration. What matters is what does it do to your bones, how does it make you want to move or think differently or change in your life? And how can you go do one small, doable piece of that work? How can you do 1% of that work today? Finding that, no, finding that, yes, finding that maybe maybe it's just even feeling it before expressing it.

Speaker 1: 20:40

And, of course, as always, if this is work that you want to dive deep into, that you want to integrate, not just know in your head, but truly feel the effects of it in your life, if you want that freedom not of the human experience, because I'm so sorry to tell you there is no freedom from the human experience, there is just learning how to live differently in your wild human self. And let me tell you it is so cool to see in my clients. I have some long-term clients who recently were finding some new language of the work that it is that I do, because sometimes it's hard for me to put into words, because is it nervous system regulation, yes, but not in the way that it's been sold to you, not in the way that it's been monetized and whitewashed into being calm. It's like no, I want to teach you how to utilize your anger. I want to teach you how to wield your boundaries not just as a knife, but sometimes as staying power, as sturdiness. I want to teach you how to throw your weight around.

Speaker 1: 21:52

I want to teach you how rage and anger and disappointment and dissatisfaction and grief and feeling guilty or shame actually enhance your life, actually make you feel better by not being afraid to feel worse for a little bit Like. I don't just want to teach you how to bring more lightness in your life. I also want to teach you how to be in the dark, how to be with those dark parts of yourself, because there is no escaping that part of life and the more that you can hold that within yourself, the more that that enables you to hold and witness and see in other people. So again, I hope today you can take one piece of this and take even more health into your life, that dynamic movement.

Speaker 1: 22:41

If this podcast resonated with you, if you appreciated it, would you take one moment please and leave a review? It only takes a few moments, but it really helps the podcast and I would appreciate it so much. And feel free. I love hearing from you. You can send me an email there's a button below that you can text or you can always DM me on social media. I would love to know if you loved this episode and what you want to see in the future. I hope you have an awesome day out there, utilizing all of the beautiful, wonderful, magical parts of you and your nervous system.