Dawn Ascanio
Therapist + Therapeutic Coach
People-pleasing can drain the life out of you.
People-pleasing is not just about trying to please or appease others. It often means consistently sidelining your own true needs and wants in service of something outside yourself. Often that’s another person’s needs, comfort, or preferences, or even their approval or praise.
These patterns can run on autopilot, driven by fear of judgment or rejection, anxiety about seeming selfish, and the worry that you’ll disappoint others.
Over time, consistently putting your own needs aside for everyone and everything else can leave you drained, emotionally burned out, and disconnected from what you truly want, with little time, energy, or bandwidth left for yourself.
It can also chip away at your self-worth and self-respect and take a real toll on your wellbeing. For many women, these patterns show up everywhere: at work, in family and friend relationships, in partnerships, and in caregiving roles.
People-pleasing can look like:
-
Spending so much time, energy, and mental bandwidth on other people that you have very little left for yourself.
-
Feeling responsible for everyone and everything, including other people’s needs, expectations, and emotions.
-
Holding everything together for everyone else while feeling like the supporting character in their story instead of the lead in your own.
And it can feel like you’re doing all of this on autopilot, as though it’s your job to help and take care of others and you’re no longer making conscious choices about how you spend your time and energy.
You can balance caring for others and caring for yourself.
Therapy can help you go from drained and depleted to having more time, energy, and bandwidth for what matters most to you. As people-pleasing patterns loosen, your relationship with yourself and with others can change in powerful ways.
Benefits
Therapy can help you:
Develop a stronger relationship with yourself
-
You’re more tuned in to your own needs and wants, and you treat yourself as well as you treat others.
-
You honor your rights, protect your wellbeing, and make yourself an equal priority without feeling selfish or guilty.
-
Your sense of self-worth and self-respect comes increasingly from within rather than from proving yourself or earning approval.
Develop more balanced, sustainable relationships with others
-
You give, help, and care for others in ways that feel life-enhancing and sustainable, while staying connected to your own needs.
-
You set boundaries that protect your time and energy with warmth and respect.
-
You let go of carrying responsibility for everyone and everything while staying responsible for yourself.
-
You ask for help and allow other people to give to you, too.
You find a more sustainable balance between caring for others and caring for yourself.
How I Help
Using Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), mindfulness-based approaches, and other evidence-based therapies, I’ll help you:
Build self-awareness and understand what’s draining you.
We’ll identify how people-pleasing shows up in your life, what drives your particular patterns, and where they’re costing you the most time, energy, and emotional bandwidth.
Develop greater mental and emotional flexibility.
You’ll learn practical skills for working differently with the thoughts, internal rules, guilt, anxiety, and other difficult feelings that can keep people-pleasing patterns going.
Honor your own needs, wants, and values.
We’ll clarify what matters to you and help you distinguish between caring and giving that feels meaningful and over-giving that leaves you depleted, so you can make yourself an equal priority without feeling selfish or guilty.
Build self-worth from the inside out.
You’ll develop self-compassion and learn new ways of responding to self-judgment, while gradually untangling your worth from what you give, provide, or do for other people.
Strengthen self-advocacy and boundary-setting skills.
You’ll practice expressing your needs and opinions, making and declining requests, setting limits, and standing up for yourself with warmth, fairness, and respect.
What Sets Me Apart
and makes me uniquely qualified to help you with people-pleasing
Lived Experience
I understand people-pleasing from personal experience as well as professional experience. For years, helping, supporting, and doing for others became so automatic that I sometimes lost touch with my own needs and preferences. During periods of high stress, those patterns could intensify even further.
Over time, I learned how to care deeply for other people while also treating my own needs, limits, and wellbeing as equally important. I didn’t have to give up being kind, compassionate, caring, or generous. I learned how to live those values in ways that were more balanced and sustainable.
That experience is part of why I care so much about this work and why I understand how difficult it can be to change patterns that are deeply connected to who you believe you’re supposed to be.
Professional Experience
I bring nearly two decades of experience as a therapist to this work. My approach draws heavily from Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), compassion-focused approaches, and mindfulness-based practices, which offer practical ways to work with the thoughts, emotions, internal rules, and fears that keep people-pleasing going.
I’ve found this combination of approaches especially helpful for learning to treat your own needs, wants, and wellbeing as equally important to those of others, while continuing to be the caring and generous person you want to be.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is people-pleasing?
People-pleasing is a pattern of consistently prioritizing other people’s needs, comfort, expectations, or approval over your own needs and preferences. It can look like saying yes when you want to say no, taking responsibility for other people’s feelings, avoiding conflict, or doing more than your share because disappointing someone feels difficult. Over time, these patterns can become so automatic that you lose touch with what you actually want and need, while giving away more of your time and energy than feels sustainable.
What causes people-pleasing?
People-pleasing can develop from many different experiences. Childhood environments involving abuse, neglect, emotional unavailability, strict or authoritarian parenting, very high expectations, chronic conflict, or strong pressure to avoid conflict can all contribute. Similar patterns can develop later in life through difficult relationships. Racism, discrimination, exclusion, cultural or religious expectations, and messages that girls and women should take care of others, keep the peace, and put their own needs last can also shape people-pleasing. Sometimes these behaviors were modeled, praised, or expected so consistently that they simply became automatic. Trauma can be one pathway into people-pleasing, particularly when someone learned that staying agreeable, helpful, or highly attuned to others helped them feel safer. People-pleasing can also develop through less dramatic experiences repeated over time. Therapy can help you understand where your particular patterns came from and, more importantly, learn new ways of responding that give you greater choice.
How can I say no without feeling guilty?
If saying no or setting boundaries brings up guilt, anxiety, or fear of disappointing someone, there’s usually more going on than simply needing the “right words.” People-pleasing often involves deeply learned beliefs about responsibility, approval, conflict, and what it means to be a caring person. Therapy can help you understand what makes saying no so difficult, build tolerance for the uncomfortable feelings that can come with setting limits, and practice ways of responding that are clear, respectful, and consistent with your values. Over time, saying no can become less emotionally loaded and more like a normal part of taking care of yourself.
Can therapy help with people-pleasing?
Yes. Therapy can help you understand the underlying thoughts, feelings, beliefs, and nervous system reactions that drive people-pleasing patterns, and build practical skills for changing them. In our work, we can focus on self-awareness, self-compassion, emotional flexibility, boundary-setting, assertiveness, and learning to treat your own needs and wellbeing as equally important to those of others. Over time, the goal is to help you make more conscious choices about how you give your time and energy, so caring for others can feel more balanced and sustainable.