The ROOT of People-Pleasing: Beware Wounding Your Kids Like This!

You would never intentionally hurt your kids, yet there’s a high chance you’re sending this subconscious message in your parenting—one that not only wounds their sense of self, but puts immense pressure on them to keep you happy in order to feel safe and loved.

In this admittedly confronting episode, I discuss a recent conversation with my son that exemplifies parents’ natural tendency to make a major mistake. I delve into the root cause of people-pleasing and how a particular parenting approach (no doubt popular when you were young and still extremely common today) can do lifelong damage to a kid’s sweet little developing brain. I then offer an alternative perspective to strive for in order to help kids become emotionally healthy and secure adults.

BY THE TIME YOU FINISH LISTENING, YOU'LL DISCOVER:

•  The unknown way you’re wounding your kids whenever you signal disappointment or disapproval
• Why making your kids responsible for YOUR feelings is so damaging to their nervous system
• A contrary belief to try on and implement if you want your kids to develop secure attachment, deep self-worth, and healthy boundaries as adults
• What your kids need to hear more than ANYTHING else
• Why hearing all this is inevitably triggering for YOU

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HOMEWORK:

Your homework for this episode is to book your FREE 60-minute consult here! Love or hate this episode? Share your thoughts with me via email or DM me on Instagram @solutionsforsimplicity. Would love to connect further! 

COMING UP NEXT:

Join me back next episode to continue unpacking the root causes of stress and overwhelm so you’re better equipped to deal with them in a healthy, productive way.

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Transcript

0:00

If your nervous system needs everyone and everything around you to be okay in order for you to feel okay, you never will. Welcome to More Time for Mom, where overwhelmed moms get science-backed strategies to overcome the hidden sources of stress stealing your time and joy. I'm your host, Dr. Amber Curtis. Ready to make more time for you? Let's dive in. What I'm about to say is probably going to be so confronting. I mean it in the best way, but we have to talk about this and I am really on a mission to make sure every mom knows this truth. because it is so profound and having such a big impact on your kids. Last week, I told my son he had basketball practice after school. He packed all of his stuff. But then after school, he called me and said his friends had told him they weren't going, so he didn't want to. I simply reiterated that the email I had received said there was practice and he should go if he wanted to play on the basketball team this year. He was hesitating and saying all the reasons he didn't want to go. I was trying to reiterate that the decision was ultimately up to him, but beware of the repercussions of his actions because if he chose not to go, he might not make the basketball team later this fall. What he said next was a gut punch to my heart. He said, I'm just afraid if I don't go, you'll be disappointed in me. I was already strapped for time and had to quickly get off the call with him to get to a work meeting. But I thought about that comment all afternoon and couldn't wait till the other kids had gone to bed that night so that I could pull him aside and sit down and have a heart to heart. I was so grateful for the opportunity to tell him that I don't ever want him to worry about disappointing me or to base his choices around what he thinks I will think of them. I reiterated that my love is never conditional on what he does or doesn't do. I will love him the same no matter what. I further underscored that he is never responsible for my feelings. Even if I am disappointed, that's on me. I'm allowed to feel how I feel, but it's my fault, not his. He can't change who he is or what he wants to make me happy. That would be denying himself and becoming someone he's not just to try to please others, which will never fulfill him or make him happy. How I just wish someone had told me this when I was little. Instead, it was the complete opposite. The message I, and probably you too, received was that we had to change who we were in order to make everyone around us happy in order to then be lovable. I was just talking with a prospective client about this same thing. Human nature is unfortunately so conditional. As a child, it feels unsafe to your little nervous system to think anything is wrong with your caregivers, the ones who are legitimately responsible for your physical safety and survival. So you naturally learn to do anything you can to help them feel better so that you can feel safe. But in doing that, you end up abandoning yourself and outsourcing your happiness to everyone else around you, which eventually comes back to bite you. At a minimum, it leads to a long life of people-pleasing and emotional hardship because there's always something hard going on. If your nervous system needs everyone and everything around you to be OK in order for you to feel OK, You never will. Our parents were undoubtedly doing the best they could under the circumstances, and the culture when we were little was much more of the traditional, children-should-be-seen-and-not-heard mentality, or even blatantly believing that kids' entire purpose is to serve and appease their elders. Children weren't seen and prized for their individuality, their innate God-given gifts and personalities, for their goodness just based on virtue of being born, but for how well they fit in with the tribe. Anyone who deviated from the group was ostracized, stigmatized, penalized, I want to offer that a good part of the reason you may feel triggered by your own kids, butt heads with them, struggle with feeling like they are disrespectful or disobedient, is because your nervous system learned you couldn't act in any way your parents would perceive as disrespectful or disobedient. You don't know how to handle your kids' big feelings and needs and personalities because your caregivers probably couldn't handle yours. For example, in a recent coaching call I had with a client, she was talking about how her kids pitched a big fit about doing chores after she had just taken them on a fun outing and bought them special treats. And she instantly found herself triggered and yelling and snapping and saying horrible things to them. Her words, not mine. As I coached her, she realized that she was absolutely not allowed to express herself in the way her kids were doing when she was little, at least not without being scolded verbally, sometimes physically, and told that she was ungrateful and disobedient and that that behavior would not be tolerated. She said her father's disappointment was so palpable, not just in his facial expression or his vocal tone, but in the way that he physically treated her, that she almost immediately always changed her behavior to adapt to his demands. Because of the years of research and neurosomatic certification training I've received, I was able to help her see that her nervous system is going into a mini existential threat every time her kids act out. Because the message she internalized as a little girl was that she had to comply or else. And the belief she took on was that she was a horrible daughter any time her dad was unhappy. So she strove that much harder to do great things and get good grades and win her sports games and all these kinds of things so that she could try and make her dad happy through her accomplishments. I don't know if my client's situation resonates with you or not, but it definitely matches a lot of my personal experience, and I see this kind of thing all the time. So I want to offer a complete reframe. What if it's not your kid's job to make you happy? What if it's their job to do the exact opposite? To push boundaries, to test out independence, to really aggravate you as a way of seeing how you are going to respond and ensure that they are safe even as their most true, vulnerable selves doing things that you don't agree with or you don't approve of. They want to know, will you still love them? Are they still lovable in those moments? And then similarly, you are the only one responsible for your own feelings. I will have to expand on this in subsequent episodes because I am running out of time to record for today, but this is so important. When kids are led to believe that they are responsible for your feelings, that they have to make you happy, it completely affects how they see themselves and how they show up later in life. It affects what they expect of others, how well or able they are to hold boundaries around people that they want to disagree with but might feel like they can't. There are so many layers and levels to unpack here. I really encourage you to model for your children what it is like to take complete ownership of your own happiness and even actively express to your children, tell them over and over that they are not responsible for your feelings. They don't have to make you happy. It's not their fault if you are unhappy. You're allowed to feel how you feel. You might be having a hard time. You can help them understand why, but we have to normalize this and you have to take control over what your feelings are causing you to do. How your feelings, particularly your negative feelings, are causing you to react in the moments you get triggered by your kids. It might seem so strange or even threatening, but I want you to try on the idea that it is not your kid's job to make you feel happy, proud, good. It's also not their responsibility if you feel sad, angry, disappointed, upset. I further know it might feel so triggering to hear this, but any insinuation to your kids that your feelings are their fault is going to do real harm to their sweet little developing nervous systems. Quick pause to say that if this is the first time you are ever hearing this or being presented this view, Please don't ever interpret it as shame or judgment or criticism. We are all imperfect parents, and I am in no way trying to make you feel bad for how you are parenting your kids or have up to this point. We are all doing the best we can with what we have been given. And as you can hopefully see from what happened with my son, I have definitely sent plenty of prior signals to my kids that their behavior made me unhappy or that I disapproved of their choices. It's only been in the last few years, really the last year, that my heart and mind have been opened to all this. It can be really painful to realize your parenting is a reflection of not just how you were parented, but of the wounds you didn't even know you received from your parents. At the same time, a whole new, beautiful world opens up for you and your kids when you start to examine and question all that, to consider whether your triggers are actually your trauma responses, which as I've said on other episodes, don't have to be big T trauma. They are actually much more likely to come from repeated relational patterns of what subconsciously made you feel safe or unsafe as a child, and how your nervous system learned to adapt, most likely by changing who you were and how you behaved in order to comply with the adults around you. So, be gentle with yourself. I am not saying any of this to make you feel bad or imply you are doing it wrong. Simply to bring you alongside on this incredible, eye-opening journey I've been on and what I'm so passionate about helping other women heal as well. Here's the hard truth. To have the capacity to hold space for your kids' big feelings, their choices, their You have to have complete control over your own nervous system. You have to know how to re-regulate yourself when you are inevitably triggered by your kids, knowing that your default response is not their fault. It is not because of whatever is happening in the present moment. Your default response, the fact that you are triggered. It's because of how your brain got wired as a young girl in response to how your caregivers treated you. The messages they instilled in you. Until you start to do the big, deep work of unpacking this, you won't have the capacity to remain calm in the presence of your kids' dysregulation, and you will just perpetuate the generational wounds of pressure, people-pleasing perfectionism, shame, worthlessness, and more. I don't want that for you, for your kids, for our world, and Crazy as it sounds, I am just on a mission to change this and make sure each and every one of us does this hard, deep, but beautiful work. It is so profound, it is so freeing, and it is exactly the kind of work I am trained to do. Your homework for today is to reach out and schedule a free 60-minute consultation with me. There is no pressure whatsoever, but I would love to connect more, have a real heart to heart, hear whatever is bothering you, the ways that you might be triggered in the present moment, all the things that feel wrong about your current life. Kid related or not, the link is in the show notes to sign up for a time that works for you. I just love helping you unpack all of this and really get to the root of the problem. I am so here to support you. You are never alone. Please reach out. Join me back next Tuesday for another episode where we continue to unpack the root causes of stress that are keeping you stuck and overwhelmed so you can overcome them and be better equipped to deal with them in a more healthy, productive way the next time they arise. Until then, remember nothing you do changes how wonderful and worthy you are. Have a great day.