Healing People Pleasing Tendencies

By Casey Cheah, 27 September 2024

Healing People Pleasing Tendencies

Healing People Pleasing Tendencies

People pleasing is a very common behavioural trait that so many people, especially empaths and highly sensitive people, have. In order to heal our people pleasing tendencies, we first must understand how we got these tendencies in the first place.

Fawning is a behavioural adaptation

People pleasing, otherwise known as ‘fawning’, is a behavioural adaptation to a stressful or threatening situation. Fawning is one of the four automatic nervous system responses, along with fight, flight and freeze. Something important to remember is that when we feel threatened or stressed, this is an automatic response that happens in our physiological body. Our mind and emotions also respond to the threat by engaging our learned coping mechanisms, or behavioural adaptations. 

Learned responses

These behavioural adaptations were mostly learned as children. From the age of 0-7 years old, we are entirely dependent on our parents. As kids, we are driven by our ego-mind, which is designed to protect us. Our ego also wants to be in control, and it wants to be right. This is how our ego protects us from potential threats. It seeks out that which is familiar, and draws us to environments, people and situations that it recognises. This is so it can relax knowing we already know how to cope with this situation or person, as we have done it before (learned responses). 

How does people pleasing develop?

However we learn to deal with threats as children, is likely how we deal with threats in our adult life too. People pleasing usually develops as a result of controlling parents or a controlled environment. It can also come from specific cultural upbringing, and societal or familial expectations and judgements. Fawning tendencies can also develop as a result of trauma, of growing up in a large family with a number of siblings, and of being the ‘responsible’ older child. Having family pressure placed on a child’s shoulders before they have grown up can also create anxiety and people pleasing tendencies. 

Codependency and enmeshment

In addition, if one or both parents have codependent patterns, they will unconsciously project this onto their kids. These children then grow up learning that in order to get safety, love, validation and approval from their parents, they have to abandon their own needs and instead focus on meeting the needs of their parents (codependency and enmeshment then ensues between parent and child). 

People pleasing leads to abandoning ourselves

In adulthood, people pleasing tendencies then result in us abandoning ourselves in order to please the people around us. This could be friends, family, work colleagues, romantic partners, even our pets too. We think (subconsciously) that if people like us, approve of us, and we fit in, then we will be safe. It’s safer to mould ourselves into what we think other people want us to be, rather than be our authentic self. 

Who are we?

If we do this enough times over years and years, we end up losing sight of ourselves. We don’t even know what our needs and wants are anymore, let alone who our authentic self is. We might even subconsciously think we are not allowed to have needs (because this is what was drilled into us as kids). If we express our needs, then we are essentially ‘needy’, and seen as ‘bad’, ‘wrong’, or ‘negative’ in some way.

Healing People Pleasing Tendencies Process

To heal people pleasing is a long process, and definitely won’t happen overnight! There are a few steps to healing people pleasing tendencies:

Step 1:

Know that it’s perfectly normal and healthy to have needs! Give yourself permission to explore what your needs, wants, preferences and desires are. Ask yourself what your needs are on a daily basis and journal what they are. Get to know what your needs are without judging yourself for having them.

Step 2: 

Explore your emotions. Anytime you feel happy and positive, it generally means your needs have been met. Anytime you feel angry, frustrated, disappointed, sad, resentful or any other negative emotion, this is an expression of an unmet need. Journal how you feel. What are the emotions that arose today? Were they positive or negative? If negative, what is the need that you have that is not being met?

Step 3:

Ask yourself, can I meet this need myself, or do I require someone else to meet this need? 95% of the time, it is a need you can meet yourself. However, most of the time, we have never learnt how to meet our own needs (since we are too busy meeting the needs of everyone else). When we don’t know how to meet our own needs, we end up unconsciously projecting them onto other people and situations outside of our control. We get frustrated and angry at other people for not meeting our needs. However, we are actually acting from our wounded inner child and from our ego. 

 

As children, if we didn’t get our needs met by our primary caregivers, this made us feel bad, sad, angry, or negative in some way. As an adult, if our needs are not met, it will generally trigger the same emotions that we felt as a child. Only now, instead of depending on our parents to meet our needs (and them not getting met), we often unfairly transfer and project our needs onto our friends, partner, colleagues and kids. 

Step 4:

Learn to meet your own needs. Once you have worked out what your needs are, then you will need to learn strategies to meet them yourself. Interestingly, even single human has the same needs, they will just present in different ways. Common needs include a need for safety, to be loved, valued, respected, appreciated, heard and seen. We all have a need to be validated, and have needs for connection. 

Meeting our own needs

If don’t work out how to meet these needs ourself, we will end up projecting them onto others. The moment we place expectations on others to meet our needs, is the moment we slide into victim mode. We have now placed our internal emotional state and mindset into the hands of someone outside of our control. This is disempowering to yourself, and unfair to the other party. 

Taking responsibility

The moment you take responsibility for meeting your own needs, is the moment you take back your power. When you realise that you have been projecting your needs onto others, it can be a bit eye opening and shocking! If you are someone who is sensitive and always feeling drained because you’re constantly helping others, there can be a tendency to blame other people. However, if we can take responsibility for our own energy and needs, then we start to realise that it’s up to us to not only meet our own needs, but express and communicate our boundaries to others. That responsibility lies solely in our own hands.

Raise your vibration

When you can meet your own needs, this fills up your cup, raises your vibration, and moves you out of victim mode into self powered. When you are self empowered, it doesn’t mean that you no longer need anyone else, and you are now Miss or Mr Independent! But it does mean that you’re no longer vomiting your needs onto others. You no longer come from a scarcity mindset, hoping and wanting and expecting others to be, do or say something in order for you to feel better. 

Scarcity vs Abundant

Instead, you realise that your emotions are your own responsibility. Once you meet your own needs, you no longer feel so betrayed, angry, annoyed, resentful or jealous of others. Negative emotions are an expression of unmet needs. Positive emotions are an expression your needs have been met. Once you can fill up your own cup, you will feel more positive, and as a result, attract people into your life from an abundant high vibrational state. This is a very different energy and mindset from scarcity and neediness.

Book in for a Reiki + Coaching session

Does this is resonate? To learn more, book in for a Reiki + Coaching session, or a Reiki healing here! If you’d like to learn how Reiki can help with healing your people pleasing tendencies, read about our Reiki Courses here.  Hint: Reiki raises your vibration, clears your mind, and helps you make decisions from a higher perspective. This all helping to heal people pleasing tendencies!. If you have questions, you can contact me here.

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