What Kind of Parents Create People-Pleasers?

What kind of parents create people pleasers? If you’re wondering what a lot of people on the internet are wondering; how you even became a people pleaser, you’re in the right place. Understanding is definitely the first step to change. It’s important to note that there are surface level reasons, and non-surface level reasons. Here we are getting to the core. To the root, for the truth shall set you free. It definitely set me free. In this blog, I’ll be sharing some of my personal experiences as well as the experiences of my clients. And then I’ll tell you why people get stuck, people-pleasing their entire life, the risks, how to change it and what life looks like on the other side. So make yourself a cup of tea and get comfy. Let’s dive in!

Growing Up in Survival Mode (The Root)

I personally grew up in a hostile, lonely and unpredictable environment. My mom was a single mom and very stressed about making ends meet. I never knew when her switch was going to flip. What if I said or did something to make her upset? Would I be physically safe? Many times, the answer was no. Because it was such a hostile environment, this spilled into the relationship with my sister, who seemed to hate me from the time I was born. I never felt safe because they were very similar, even though they never got along. So, I became the easy one. The convenient one. The one who never argued. I learned to read rooms before I learned to read books. If I could predict and manage the moods of others, then maybe I would be safe.

How We Internalize Beliefs That Lead to People-Pleasing

Many Gen X children were raised to feel like a burden. They were raised to feel like their needs were too much. As children, below the age of 7, we’re sponges. I’m sure you’ve heard that before. But what does that actually mean? It basically means that we’re operating in a hypnotic state where the critical faculty is not yet developed. That’s why we accept everything we hear at a young age. We haven’t yet developed the logical skills to discern real from fake. That’s why children are so good at imagining.

So what does this have to do with people-pleasing? Well, let’s say your parents were too busy to pay attention to you. It doesn’t even have to be because they were bad parents. Maybe they had a lot of children, had health issues or were busy trying to make ends meet. They may tell you, “not now, go play”. When you constantly hear things like this, your little brain internalizes a belief that your needs are too much. This belief sits in the subconscious and stays with you in adulthood.

How People-Pleasing Shows Up in Adult Relationships

How does this show up in adulthood?

Well, the subconscious is always mirroring our beliefs back onto us in an effort to close the loop on that “trauma”. This means that we’ll keep attracting people that make us feel like we need to earn their love or that our needs are inconvenient. This used to be me, not to mention all of my clients.

Anytime people would include me or pour into me, I would tend to overgive and overfunction because at the core, I didn’t believe that I deserved it and that I need to earn it. Also, in relationships, I would attract people who treated me like an option and not a priority.

The constant need to prove my worth, silence myself and settle was no longer worth it when I finally realized that while I was working so hard to please people, they still weren’t pleased and the only person I was disappointing was myself.

I was asleep for decades. I was consumed with feelings of self-doubt, insecurity and resentment from putting the needs of others, before mine while being overlooked and undervalued. My relationships were a true reflection of the dynamics I had with my parents until I did the inner work and released the pattern at the subconscious and nervous system level.

Why Talk Therapy Falls Short (The Missing Piece)

We spend so much of our adult lives walking on eggshells in our own homes, jobs, and relationships, wondering why we are so completely burnt out by the time evening hits. Here’s the reality: when your nervous system is trained to scan everyone else’s mood before you even check in with yourself, you are burning through massive amounts of energy just to keep the peace. You find yourself rewriting a simple text message three times so you don’t sound ‘too difficult,’ replaying a conversation in your head for hours wondering if you upset someone, and apologizing just for existing. That constant hypervigilance isn’t just a quirky habit, it’s an internal survival loop running in the background of your life. And until you actually go down to the root where that wiring lives, you can read every self-help book on the shelf and spend five years in talk therapy, but that internal alarm bell is still going to ring. True freedom doesn’t come from managing everyone else’s reactions; it comes from teaching your body that it’s finally safe to drop the armor, stop over-functioning, and take up space without feeling like you’re doing something wrong.

A lot of my clients tell me they’ve spent years in therapy, stuck in loops of talking, understanding and intellectualizing what happened and why they are the way they are. With just one session with me, they were able to experience a shift because we don’t just focus on speaking, we focus on creating transformation by accessing the parts of us that store those patterns.

When I went through therapy, I realized that I was consumed with anxiety and self-doubt. My therapist was focussing on helping me understand at the conscious level that I was worthy of setting boundaries and going after what I desired. I felt empowered and seen during and after my session. But when I was placed in a situation where I could have executed the insight that I’m allowed to set boundaries, I didn’t actually do it. Why? Because our conversation involved the conscious mind. The interesting thing to note here is that it’s our subconscious mind that runs 95% of our day. This means that talking doesn’t lead to change. We must experience that shift by accessing the parts of us where these limiting beliefs live; the subconscious and the nervous system. This is how we get out of the survival loop.

“But it’s too late for me to change. It’s just my personality. I’ve already tried everything.”

If you’re sitting there and thinking this is just how your life and relationships are, your life is just going to remain the same as it’s always been. Change starts by getting curious. And sometimes, the pain of changing, outweighs the pain of staying the same, which is why people continue to overgive, overfunction and feel anxious in their relationships while they remain in victim mentality, while externalizing their peace and power.

For me, and for many of my clients, the pain of staying the same finally began to feel harder and worse than actually changing. Does this mean it was easy? No. It takes courage to change. And where we get it wrong is thinking that you either have courage or you don’t. The truth is, courage is cultivated through action. I cannot tell you how many times people have told me, “if only I had the courage you have.” What a cop out. It took inner work to get to where I am today.

And while I’m saying it’s not easy, I’m also going to tell you that it’s very simple. I’m all about working smarter, not harder and with my decades of experience, learning, growing and transforming, I’ve developed a system which I call the Bravezone Blueprint for my VIP clients in which I take them through it. Everything about them changes, from their outlook on life, their coping mechanisms, their identity and how they show up in relationships. It’s truly an overhaul and leads to a lot of external shifts in their lives.

The Awakening & A New Reality

The truth is, people-pleasing isn’t your personality. It’s a coping mechanism that you internalized long before you can remember. The insecurity, the self-doubt, the lack of confident decision making skills and the anxiety all went away when I began getting curious, taking accountability and being willing to rewire my nervous system while releasing the limiting beliefs that crippled me for decades.

It’s never too late. I’ve met women and men in their 70’s regretting not doing it sooner and then wanting to change at that stage. I truly believe if we don’t change now, our soul will call in the same experience in another life so that we can go through the same type of challenges and have yet another opportunity to evolve. When I learned that, I decided to take the bull by the horn and do the inner work instead of living a life passively. Every day, every hour, every moment is a new opportunity to start doing small things to create a different reality.

The thoughts that we think, the feelings that we have and the actions that we take lead to our reality. Every time we make a different choice, we move in a different direction.

My children were my biggest teachers. They were never the people pleaser that I was. They have standards on the way they expect others to treat them. They set boundaries and feel entitled to things that I never felt entitled to. What would your life look like if you were the most grounded, calm, confident version of you? How would you be living your life? How would you speak and what kind of people would you have in your life?

Steps to Change

• Ask yourself why you even want to change.
• Visualize what that would look like.
• Be willing to make the unconscious, conscious.

For more support, I invite you to book a session to feel the magic of gaining clarity and feeling a shift toward calm, grounded confidence.