When you’ve spent a lifetime keeping everyone else happy, having needs of your own can feel dangerous.

Many of my clients — and I — share this experience. We entered adulthood with a deeply ingrained habit of putting everyone else’s needs before our own. 

For some of us, people-pleasing a phrase that’s loaded with shame, self-criticism, resentment or confusion. 

For others, thinking about people-pleasing evokes thoughts like:

“Why am I like this?”

“Why does setting boundaries feel so impossible for me?”

or maybe even

“I like pleasing others, I have no problem with it.”