Healing the Habit of People Pleasing

People pleasing. It’s like the little sister/brother of co-dependency. Not a full-blown clinical diagnosis but it still can be disruptive in our lives. Its impact can range from annoyance and irritation to depletion and exhaustion. 

People pleasing is a habit. A learned pattern. At some point, (usually) in our young lives, we decided it was unsafe or unproductive to give voice to our needs, to actively follow through with compromise or full commitment in meeting our needs, to clarify our expectations to others and to continue the practice asserting our personal power with the art of saying “no”.