How We Lost Ourselves

In this episode we are diving deeper into people-pleasing. We talk about why people-pleasing isn’t a personality trait you’re stuck with, but a survival mechanism a nervous system can learn in childhood. If it felt safer to be agreeable, accommodating, and low maintenance, that pattern makes sense. And for queer folks, the wound can run even deeper when your most basic desire to love who you love was treated as wrong. That’s where the “yes” you didn’t mean, the opinion you swallowed, and the life you drifted into can start.

We share the ways it shows up day to day: editing yourself before speaking, struggling to ask for help, managing other people’s emotions, and honestly not knowing what you want because you always defer. We also get practical with tools as a way to retrain the belief that discomfort equals danger. If you’re ready to take up a little more space, start here.

If this hits home, subscribe, share the episode with someone who needs it, and leave a review so more recovering people-pleasers can find us.

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Transcript

Pride Month And Showing Up

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Hey Bestie, how are you? How's it going? It is so warm out today. It's a beautiful day. Summer is definitely upon us. And it's Pride Month, so happy Pride. I will say that pride feels extra important this year because corporations have basically abandoned celebrating. Like there is no merch out there. They've just like left us. There's all this legislation out there against trans people all over the country. Um, there was an article about the fact that marriage, like support for marriage equality, has gone down over the last 11 years since marriage equality became law. And it's mostly among conservatives, but let's be honest, conservatives are like running this country right now. So it's kind of bleak. And that's why it's really more important than ever to just keep showing up and the ways that we do to combat this and to live our lives out loud because pride is still really important. It's important so that people know, especially young people, that like it is possible to grow up and live a great life being queer. So happy pride. I hope that you have something planned for this month. And if not, make a plan, even if it's just to like hang out with your friends and like laugh and have a good time. All right. So today I want to talk a little bit more about people pleasing as we go on this journey as recovering people pleasers, and we're learning how to like tell ourselves the truth, and we're giving ourselves permission to be ourselves. And I think it's so important to start with the just knowing that like people pleasing is not a personality trait. It's not like something immutable that you can't change. Um, and it's important to distinguish the difference between a personality trait and a survival mechanism or

People Pleasing As Survival

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a trauma response. And so my therapist puts it in a way that I think is really accessible. He says that a personality trait is who you are when you feel safe, and a survival mechanism or a trauma response is who you think you need to be in order to feel safe. So there's the distinction there. If you're doing it because you feel like there's it's dangerous to not do it, then that might be more of a survival mechanism. So, people pleasing, therefore, is not something that you were born with. And it's not something to be ashamed of. It's not a flaw. It's something you developed over time to feel safe. At some point in your life, probably when you were like very, very young, you figured out that when you made other people happy, life went more smoothly. When you agreed, when you adapted, when you made yourself easy and accommodating and low maintenance, you felt safer. Maybe the atmosphere in your home was calmer when you didn't make waves. Maybe love felt more available when you were good and agreeable and didn't ask for too much. And maybe at some point you got a very clear message, whether like implied or actually said that your needs were inconvenient, that you were just too much, that what you naturally were needed to be toned down a little bit. I know for me, I was definitely too much for my parents. Um, my needs were always too big. I was too sensitive. I was too scared of the world. I just needed too much comforting to like be out there. And I learned that this was not the way to get the love that I needed as a child. So I learned how to be small and to need less. Well, I learned how to need nothing, but the problem is that I'm no longer a child and I no longer need to make myself small, but it's so much easier said than done. Underneath every people pleaser, there's some thought that either I am not enough or I'm too much. And whichever it is, it basically comes down to who I am is not acceptable. And this message is even louder for us queer people. We learned very early on that our most basic desire to love who we wanted to love was wrong. That is a wound that cuts really, really deep. And that is a wound that is behind behavior that has us saying yes when we mean no, or swallowing our opinion to just to keep the peace. It's staying in the career you fell into because it made sense to everyone else but yourself. And it's the relationship where you gave everything and got so little back. It was never really about being nice, it was about survival, it was about love, it was about belonging. But belonging isn't about being wanted by people who you have to pretend in front of. Belonging is about being vulnerable, being you and being wanted by people just the way you are. I hid who I was for for such a long time, like in my career, my relationship. I became so good at being what everyone needed that I genuinely didn't know what I wanted anymore. Because really, I'd stopped asking myself the question. Asking felt selfish, um, wanting felt dangerous. I didn't believe that anyone would like me if I wasn't exactly who they wanted me to be.

How It Shows Up Daily

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One of the ways that it showed up most is when people would ask me, like, what I do for a living, and I would tell them that I'm a dancer and a dance instructor, and they'd always be like, That's so amazing. You get to do what you love. Isn't that great? And I would just like smile and be like, Yeah, it is. It's so great. I feel so lucky. Meanwhile, that is kind of exactly the opposite of how I felt. I danced because I was good at it. Um, and I didn't think that there was anything else I could do. I didn't think I was good at anything else. So I never really chose it. It kind of chose me. And that isn't to say that there weren't things that I enjoyed about it, but it never really felt like the thing that I was meant to do. And so I spent so much time like searching for something else. But it it's been really hard to break away from because so many people saw me that way and wanted me to be happy and grateful for the ability to do it. And that's just one way I wasn't showing up authentically in the world around me. I was showing up trying to be what other people wanted instead of being honest about who I really am. Some other ways it's shown up are in me saying yes to things when I really wanted to say no and then resenting it. And then I'd like to try to find a way to get out of it. Or another way is editing myself before speaking, making sure that like what I'm about to say isn't going to upset anybody. So I learned to never really say what was on my mind. And I think that's also true as someone with ADHD who found out later in life. I never realized how much I was masking in conversation with others, but I definitely have been holding back for most of my life. I also find it impossible to ask for help. I would rather do everything myself than inconvenience someone else. But I have no problem offering help to others at my own expense. I learned to try to manage other people's emotions from a very early age. I made myself responsible for how they felt, even though it wasn't my responsibility. And probably the biggest one, which I've mentioned before, is never knowing what I want because I defer to everyone else around me and try to accommodate what they want instead of telling them what I want. So if you recognize yourself in any of these, I feel for you. It is not easy to come to terms with the idea that you haven't been living for yourself, but you've been living for everyone else. But here's the thing: you have not been doing life wrong. I want to make that clear. This is a survival tactic. You were just doing what you felt you needed to do to make it through life. I think what's even harder to kind of navigate is how much it might have actually been necessary. If we look at this through like an intersectional lens, then it's very possible that based on the identities that you hold, you may have had no choice but to learn to be small, to take up less space, to fly under the radar, because not doing so would be dangerous. Whether that is true for the situation you were dealing with at home, or just because the world is hostile to who you are, the most important thing to know is that it's not your fault. You didn't choose to become a people pleaser. You didn't wake up one day and think, you know what? I'm gonna spend the next however many years making myself smaller for everyone else's comfort. You were adapting, you survived, you did what you had to do. But now it's time to take small steps forward to reclaiming yourself. The work I've been doing with my therapist has been so helpful for me. We talk a lot about complex PTSD and the trauma that I've experienced that made me adopt this fawn response. And we talk a lot about how to counter it. And one of the things that's really helpful when trying to break out of these kinds of patterns is opposite action. So in his book, Complex PTSD, From Surviving to Thriving, Pete Walker talks about the implicit

Fawn Response And Opposite Action

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code of the fawn type. And that's really what people pleasing is. It's it's fawning, it's a nervous system reaction. So that code has like five specific things. And they are that it is safer to listen than talk, it is safer to agree than to dissent, it is safer to offer care than to ask for help. It is safer to elicit the other than to express yourself, and it is safer to leave choices to the other than to express preferences. I think a lot of us who are working through people pleasing can see ourselves in those statements where we elicit others instead of express ourselves, right? I talked about that in terms of like I'm working on that with dinner plans, right? Like, what do I want for dinner? And instead of like asking my husband first, like I'll express what I want, what I think we should have, right? And how difficult that's been. So a lot of my work has been focused on these behaviors and trying to take opposite action. We absolutely have to teach ourselves that discomfort doesn't mean danger. That while it might feel like the end of the world to speak up or to speak first, that when we are in relation with people who are safe, people that love us, we absolutely can do those things. Because there's no way for people to get to know the real us if we aren't willing to show up as the real us. And it's scary. And there may be times when there is conflict because we decide to be our true selves. But conflict is a part of healthy relationships and we can withstand that. So start small. Maybe start with taking opposite action in some some way this week, right? Maybe it is to speak first before listening. And that's gonna feel really difficult. It's gonna feel selfish, it's gonna feel like you're being a narcissist, right? Like for a people pleaser, one of our biggest fears is that we're going to like be too much for other people, that we're gonna take up too much space. But let's be honest, like if you have been making yourself so small and you haven't been taking up any space, right? It's not going to come off as narcissistic or arrogant or any of those things to simply speak your mind first. All right, friends, that's what I've got for you today. If you see yourself in this topic, reach out. I would love to hear from you. And if you're ready to do some work on showing up more authentically in your life, let's work together. I am so here for you. All right, bye for now.