Episode 10: People Pleasing: The Survival Strategy That Stopped Serving You

In this episode we unpack what people pleasing actually means, where it comes from, and why it has nothing to do with other people and everything to do with your own fear of sitting with someone else's discomfort and you having the need to control the outcome. We explore the difference between genuine helping, and people pleasing. This episode is for anyone ready to slow down this survival pattern. 

Transcript

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Welcome back to Breaking the Cycle, the podcast about unpacking your roots and rewriting your story. I'm Vivian, your host, and I'm so glad you're here. You know, so much of the work we've been doing on this podcast is about understanding the patterns that we developed to survive and how those same patterns are quietly running our life long after we need them. Today we are looking at one of the most common ones, people pleasing. I'm sure you've heard the term, but what does it actually mean? At its core, people pleasing is the pattern of consistently prioritizing other people's feelings, needs, and comfort over your own. It's the chronic yes when everything in your body wants to say no, the smile when you're actually hurting, the endlessly adjusting, accommodating, and shrinking of yourself to make sure everyone around you is okay, even when you're not. It might look like kindness on the outside, but underneath it all is something entirely different. And that's what we're going to be talking about today. Here's something that took me a long time to really understand. And when I finally did, it changed everything. Now listen to this. People pleasing is not for other people, it's about you not being able to tolerate other people's discomfort. Because being disliked feels unbearable. Because if someone is upset with you, you lose control of how they see you. And losing that control means that connection might be at risk. And if that connection is at risk, something in your nervous system goes into full alarm. This is not about them, this is about you. So you manage it, you manage their feelings so you don't have to feel your own fear. That is not selfishness. That is a self-protection dressed up in a language of being a good person. And this is not about shame. This is about honesty. Because until you can see people pleasing for what it actually is, a fear-based strategy for managing other people's discomfort, you cannot begin to change it. People pleasing has some deep roots. As a lot of these traits that we've been talking about, it begins in childhood, in an environment where keeping others happy felt like a survival strategy, where the environmental temperature of the house depended on whether you were being good enough, quiet enough, or agreeable enough, where love or safety felt conditional on your behavior, on your compliance, and how well you could read the room and adjust yourself accordingly. And so you learned. And I believe them. I really do for the most part. But there's a difference between genuinely wanting to help someone and people pleasing. And the difference is not in what you do, it is where it comes from. Genuinely helping comes from a full place, from a real desire to contribute, to give, and to support someone you care about. While people pleasing comes from fear, it comes from the anxiety of what might happen if you don't do the thing. It comes from the need to manage someone else's perception of you. And here is how you tell the difference in real time. Ask yourself, if I said no right now to whatever it is, and they were disappointed, could you sit with that? Could you sit with their discomfort? Could I let them have their feeling without immediately trying to fix it, explain it away, or take it back? If the answer is no, if the thought of someone being disappointed in you feels genuinely unbearable, that is people pleasing. That is fear, and it deserves to be looked at with compassion, not judgment. People pleasing feels like the safe choice, but it comes with a price that accumulates quietly over time. It costs you your authenticity because the version of you that people pleasers put forward is always edited, always calibrated, always just a little bit less than the whole truth of who you are. It costs you your relationships because the connections that you build through people pleasing are built on performance, not on you, not on the real version of you. And somewhere underneath, you know that, and it creates a loneliness that is hard to explain, being surrounded by people who like you and still feel completely unseen. It costs you your energy, the constant monitoring, the endlessly adjusting of yourself, the vigilance of always making sure everyone is okay is exhausting in a way that no amount of sleep seems to fix. And it costs you your resentment. Because when you give from fear rather than from genuine desire, the resentment builds quietly underneath the smiles and the yeses and the I'm finds until one day it comes out sideways in an explosion that seems to come out of nowhere or in a slow withdrawal that nobody can quite explain. So, what does it actually look like to begin to change this? It starts with one thing, and it is deceptively simple and incredibly hard. Learning to tolerate someone else's disappointment without making it mean something about your worth or your value. That is it, that is the whole work in one sentence. Because a people pleaser's deepest fear is not really that the other person will be upset. It is what that upset means. It means I am not enough. It means they might leave. It means I am not lovable. It means I have failed at the one thing I have built my entire sense of safety around. Keeping everyone okay. And the healing is learning slowly with a great deal of practice and an immense deal of self-compassion, that someone can be disappointed in you and you will survive it, that their discomfort is not your responsibility to fix, that you are allowed to take up space, to have needs, to say no, and still be worthy of love. That is not something you learn overnight, but it starts with the next small movement you make, the next time you feel the pull to say yes when everything in your body says no, the next time you are about to twist yourself to shape into places where you are not meant to be in. Pause, feel the fear, and ask yourself: whose discomfort am I actually trying to avoid right now? The answer will tell you everything. People pleasing is not a character flaw. It is not proof that you are weak or needy or broken. It is a survival strategy that made complete sense once. An environment where keeping others happy felt like the price of staying connected and staying safe. But you get to make different choices now, not all at once, not perfectly, but one small honest moment at a time. Before I let you go, just one question to carry this week. Where in your life are you people pleasing the most? Is it at work? Is it in the relationship with your partner? Is it in the relationship with your family? Where is it? Do not judge yourself for doing that. When it comes to healing, when it comes to breaking this people-pleasing pattern, you have to remember this is a survival strategy. This is a part of you that needs compassion because essentially it has built a wall against you connecting to your authenticity. Because if I'm really seen for who I am, then I could really be rejected. So the people-pleasing part comes into place, adjust you, making yourself look presentable to that person. So you won't be not only with their discomfort or your own discomfort, but with their discomfort as well. If this episode resonated with you, I would love for you to leave me a five star review. It helps this podcast reach more people, and it helps inspire me create more episodes. Thank you so much for being here. I'll see you on the next episode.