1. People Pleasing: Why You Stay In Bad Relationships and How to Finally Break the Cycle

The inertia trap: When you know it's wrong but stay anyway.

That feeling when something's off, but you can't explain why. You tell yourself to be grateful, to stop complaining, to just keep going.

If you've ever stayed too long—in a job, a friendship, a relationship—even when every fiber of your being is screaming at you to leave, this episode is for you, especially if you're a people pleaser, have overfunctioning tendencies, or feel like there should be something more to life.

I get really honest about staying in a relationship I knew was wrong from month one. The turning point in a hospital room that finally broke through years of ignoring my gut. 

And the one question that I wish I had known would change everything.

This is about what happens when you spend your whole life listening to everyone but yourself—and what it takes to finally stop.

In this episode:

• How childhood shapes our responses
• Why "normal" isn't the same as "right"
• The real reason we stay when we know we should go
• One daily practice to rebuild self-trust

This episode is dedicated to my brother Jon, who passed away in July 2025: You only have one life to live as your true self. Make the most of it.

Transcript

You’re listening to This Is How You Think with Jule Kim, episode #1. Maiden voyage! I’m a little nervous, but I’m taking the plunge, so wish me luck, and let’s dive in.

Have you ever had that feeling that something isn’t right — Maybe you’re not happy at work, or in your personal life  —  but you can’t explain why? 

So you tell yourself to suck it up, to be grateful, to keep going. 

This was me too, which is why I’m talking about this today - especially if you’ve ever stayed too long in a job, friendship, or relationship that you didn’t feel good about — then this is an episode you’ll want to listen to, because I’m going to share one of the pivotal lessons that I wish I had learned 35 years ago. This is now one of the core principles I teach to all of my clients so they can finally start taking ownership of their lives.

I’m a certified coach, and I’ve been doing this for the last 5 years. People will often describe me as calm and grounded. But that definitely wasn’t always me, especially not as a child. I had a temper, and an ongoing streak of woe is me. And I carried that into adulthood, where I was toxic af - pretty much all the way up till I was around 33. I’m embarrassed to put this out there, but I oozed negativity from every pore, which showed up in how I spoke to other people or to myself. You could also literally see it written all over my face and my body language. I didn't know how to be around other people. I remember feeling so incredibly uncomfortable with myself.

Now, like so many of you out there, I grew up in a dysfunctional family, where everyone was angry and I felt like I was walking on eggshells all the time. My parents were extremely critical of everyone, especially us kids, and that kind of energy rolls downhill, where unfortunately I was the youngest so I had the least power. That’s why I felt like I was about to get yelled at or punished at any moment if I stepped one toe out of line. So this made my childhood feel really chaotic and unsafe. I wasn’t allowed to speak up because I was punished for being disrespectful or disobedient.

If you asked me for 3 words that describe my childhood, I would say uncomfortable, afraid, and angry. I was feeling a lot of big emotions all the time, but I hadn’t been given the tools to handle any of that, which honestly is most people, especially Asians.

So no wonder I had such a hard time speaking up for myself as an adult. I was a compulsive and unwilling people pleaser. I was constantly saying yes to other people because not only did I not know how to say no, I was terrified of it. When people were rude to me or didn’t treat me very well, I put up with that because I felt compelled to be nice and I didn’t want to be mean. I didn’t want to be anything like my parents because I thought they were mean.

And that’s how I ended up with friends and relationships that didn’t serve me, the longest relationship being 7 years. And even though within the first month of that relationship I knew it probably wasn’t going to work, I stayed. We fought all the time, there were so many instances of disrespect and signs of incompatibility, but I stayed. Because I didn’t know any better. 

By the time I was 29 I hated my life. I felt trapped at work, I felt trapped at home. And so many times I remember thinking, I remember asking, Is this really all there is? But whenever I actually said that to the people around me, they all said, yes. They said I was asking for too much, that I was being extra, and my own brother told me that life and relationships are supposed to be hard now, given that he's divorced today, I realized I could have taken that with a grain of salt, but obviously I didn't know that. So the overall message I was getting from everyone was, shut up, stop complaining and make more money.

When that’s all you hear, you might end up where I was thinking there was something wrong with me. I thought I wasn’t working hard enough. I wasn’t smart enough. So I kept trying harder and harder for the next 3 years.

Now this was also around the time when I met my husband. We were pretty good friends, but I had my boyfriend, who I’d been dating for 5 years so everyone was expecting me and my boyfriend to get married. But here was this friend Jason (now my husband). He was incredibly kind, smart, and positive. His energy was so even and grounded, so healthy.

I immediately wanted to flee. No joke. I was so not used to being around someone like him, that it felt like something was seriously wrong.

So I made up excuses why we could never be together. I told myself that I owned a house with my ex, it would be such a pain to separate our stuff and our finances. And at one point, I even told myself, oh gosh, Jason’s going to lose his hair and I could never be with a bald man. I already know - that was ridiculous - you don’t have to tell me.

But there was other stuff I wasn’t saying - way deep deep down, I was terrified. I felt that if I went down this road with Jason, he would one day see the real me and it would be game over. It was relationship imposter syndrome. It felt like Jason was so much better than me, that there was no way this was ever going to work out.

So I stayed with my ex.

And I kept staying. For well over a year. It’s something I’m definitely not proud of, but given the place I was at in my life, I’m not surprised. I call this relationship inertia where even though you know it’s not working out, you keep going because you don’t know what else to do, and it just feels so monumentally hard to make a change, to separate from this other person you have shared so much of your life with.

And that was me. My family told me to put my head down and keep going, so that’s what I did.

But then the day came when I ended up in the hospital and everything changed. I wasn’t feeling well one day, and it started at lunch time at work. Eight hours later, the pain was so bad I thought I was going to pass out. I asked my ex to take ne to the ER, and I was lucky because they weren’t busy so I didn’t have to wait. They admitted me right away, and even as I was on the way to my room I threw up from the pain. 

My ex was with me, but the way my ex handled the whole situation - it wasn’t great. He brought his work laptop with him, and spent the whole time working away like a busy bee. I didn’t know what to think about this, but it felt like I was a huge inconvenience to him. I also remember hearing the nurses talking about him out in the hallway, so I remember feeling ashamed. And I share this not to rake him over the coals, because it was such a weird situation and I didn’t know what I was allowed to expect, but I definitely didn’t feel good. But I had bigger problems in the moment because it turned out I had a ruptured ovarian cyst, which let me tell you- is one of the most painful experiences I’ve ever gone through. So I didn’t say anything. I was just trying to get through the night. 

And with my ex, this wasn’t even the first incident where I saw that he didn’t have the capacity to support me, but I had ignored the signs all the other times. 

Until now. This time the truth was slapping me in the face: my ex was never going to be there for me the way I needed. I couldn’t ignore this anymore.

I didn’t know whether I would find the right person, all I knew was I couldn’t keep living like this. I was better off alone because at least that way I could focus on me and my goals. And that’s when I finally ended the relationship.

Looking back, the lesson I wish I had learned that no one ever taught me was that you deserve to be around people who treat you well. If someone belittles you, is dismissive, makes you do things you don’t want to do, basically if they do anything that makes you feel not good about yourself, makes you feel unsafe, then that person has no place in your life.

But this lesson is a lot harder to learn when you grew up like I did. If you’re raised anything like how I was raised and how so many others are as well, when you grow up in a family that didn’t give you space, that had you always accommodating other people because that’s what you had to do to survive, this lesson might take longer, because we grew up feeling unsafe and not good so much of the time that that is what was normal. But what is normal isn’t always what’s right. There’s a difference. 

This is why so many of us, especially women, are people pleasers. We outsource our power and our safety to others because that’s what we were taught. We center ourselves around the needs of others, instead of centering and grounding ourselves in our own happiness and our own desires. 

So many of the women I work with, don’t even know what they like or what they want, because they spend so much of their energy giving and giving to other people so they have nothing left for themselves.

Which brings us to the question I give to all of my clients, and if you feel like it in this moment ask yourself this - “what do I want?”

What comes up for you? There’s no right or wrong answer. Your only job is to open yourself to this question, and notice.

This is the first step to tuning into your own voice, your intuition so that you understand yourself better. This is the beginning of how you listen to yourself.

This will help you build self trust, so that you start feeling like you’re in the driver’s seat. 

The reason why I’ve constructed this exercise is because I’ve gone through burnout way too many times, because I didn’t know how to check in with myself. I’ve spent most of my life performing for other people and their expectations, and it never ended well for me which is why I feel compelled to talk about this now because I see so many other women in this position.

This show will focus on not just my own stories, but the stories of other women out there because we’re all more alike than we think.

We’ll get into topics like imposter syndrome, people pleasing, boundaries, and overall psychology and mental wellness.

All of these topics contribute to that feeling I mentioned in the very beginning — the feeling that tells you something’s off, even when you can’t put your finger on it.

That feeling isn’t your enemy. That is a message from your soul to you.

And if there’s anything I’ve learned in life so far, is that the moment you start listening to this message, you stop abandoning yourself — and that’s where everything starts to change.

Now this is how you get there. Your assignment should you choose to accept it:

Ask yourself “What do I want?” three times today, and you’re going to do this every day for the next week. You might be surprised by what you hear. If you need help remembering to do this, what I’ve done is set a phone reminder that tells me when it’s time to check in with myself.

The key is to take the time and answer yourself - don’t filter, just be honest. You can act on it or not - you don’t have to do anything with that answer unless you want to.

And if you feel some resistance to doing this, that’s ok - this is actually a lot of people. It just means that it’s even more important that you actually do this, instead of putting it off. 

If this episode hit home, share it with one person who needs that reminder too.

This episode — and this show — is dedicated to my brother Jon, who passed away in July 2025. His life reminds me every day why these conversations matter — because we don’t get unlimited chances to live as ourselves.

Thank you so much for listening. And remember: I believe in you. See you next time.