6 Reasons Why We People Please and Don’t Set Boundaries
“Daring to set boundaries is about having the courage to love ourselves, even when we risk disappointing others.” — Brene Brown
Written by Jason Wrobel
As a child, I vividly remember the sense of dread when I started to hear my parents fighting. Upstairs in my bedroom, I could hear them screaming at each other and wondered what, if anything, I could do to stop it. I dreamed of ways I could put an end to the violence in my household. I fantasized about feeling safe enough to protect my mother from my father’s rageful outbursts.
My parents eventually separated, yet, I felt somehow that I still needed to protect my Mother. That it was my job to be the “man of the house” and provide some emotional support for her, in lieu of my Father’s absence. I didn’t realize it until I started doing therapy years later, but I started to adopt a people-pleaser mentality to keep the peace in my house. And, on a deeper subconscious level, to prevent me from abandonment.
My Father’s absence left a deep fear of abandonment. I learned that if I made my Mother and my Grandparents happy, I’d be safe. The seeds of people-pleasing and a lack of personal boundaries were already sprouting.
As I got older, I experienced depression, anxiety, and suicidal ideation. I realized through psychotherapy and trauma release that these compensation mechanisms kept me safe during my childhood. But they’re poor ways of relating to others in adult relationships. These mechanisms created feelings of exhaustion and burnout, plus structures of co-dependency in my relationships. I thought I NEEDED the approval and validation of others to feel safe.
Running around trying to please everyone, telling them what I thought they wanted to hear, and always putting other people’s perceived needs and desires ahead of my own… That all became the key ingredients in a recipe for mental and emotional disaster. Years of therapy and somatic experiencing helped me trace the roots of these behaviors to my childhood. It was a huge “aha!” moment for me. I started to understand how people-pleasing and lack of boundaries can creep into our lives, affecting not only our personal lives and romantic relationships but also our careers.
“You are not required to set yourself on fire to keep others warm.” — Jason Wrobel
From a perspective of basic human psychology, people are generally motivated to have their emotional needs met that they didn’t receive as children. People-pleasing behaviors often arise from unresolved trauma or the belief that we need to have our desires for attention, significance, importance, safety, and protection filled by others. Some part of our psyche is stuck in our childhood, yet we are in adult bodies.
In many cases, people-pleasing and lacking boundaries are protective mechanisms against abandonment, being ignored, or worse: the threat of death. Our primitive reptilian brains associate being shunned or ignored with impending death. As humans, we’re not that far removed from our small, tribal origins, where the possibility of being shunned or cast out into the wilderness by our tribe meant starvation, injury, or death. There’s a part of our brains that is still wired for this “fight or flight” response, in which the limbic system activates our sympathetic nervous system whenever we detect a threat (or, rather, even the THOUGHT of a possible threat.)
As our sympathetic nervous system gets activated under duress, fear, or the anticipation of pain or death, we do what we know best to preserve ourselves. People-pleasing is a primal preservation method, in which the fear of saying and enforcing an authentic “no” and setting healthy boundaries allays the risk of losing the favor and good graces of the tribe. Sure, we physically survive the perceived threat, but we often sacrifice our authenticity, our personal truth, and our long-term health as a result.
“Walls keep everybody out. Boundaries teach people where the door is.” — Unknown
These compensation mechanisms to keep ourselves safe are only exacerbated by the ever-present pressures of social media. These platforms encourage validation-seeking and reward the most popular users with the most sought-after currency in the world right now: attention. It’s a system that encourages people to often sacrifice their own core needs for a dopamine hit in the form of likes, comments, and shares. If you’re a person with a lack of personal boundaries or a tendency to people please, I feel that social media only magnifies those behaviors. Social media isn’t to blame, per se, but it has an accelerating and enhancing effect on these psychological compensation mechanisms.
So let’s dig into the primary psychological reasons why we begin and continue these behaviors…
Reasons why we people please and don’t set boundaries:
1. We have a strong desire to avoid conflict or fear of confrontation
2. We learned it was our role in childhood to be the “peacekeeper”
3. Our sense of self-worth is tied to supporting others (before ourselves)
4. We receive praise, attention, validation, and significance
5. We want to help others but don’t want to receive help for ourselves
6. We have not figured out our own boundaries
You may read that list and think, “oh wow, I totally resonate with those!” which is a great thing to acknowledge. However, it’s not enough to simply become aware of these ways of being. Awareness doesn’t automatically initiate substantive behavioral change. Too many people go to therapy and have the kind of “aha!” moment I described earlier in this post and then think they’re done.
I believe the only way to change a behavior is to use self-awareness and presence as foundations or jump-off points to create new practices that may lead to eventual behavioral changes. One way to do this is to become more sensitive to how our bodies are feeling and to notice when we are slipping into patterns of people-pleasing and lack of boundaries.
For example, let’s say you have a friend who needs to vent about some shit that went down with their significant other. You’ve had a really long day and you’re physically and emotionally drained. They call you on the phone at 11:00 pm, which is usually your bedtime. Now, this is a moment for awareness and practicing new ways of being. You stop, tune into your body and feel if you have the energy, desire, or ability to handle this phone call. If you feel the exhaustion and your body tells you it’s time to rest, you could text that person back or leave them a voice memo telling them you’re not able to take their call right now because you’re exhausted and don’t have the bandwidth or energy to chat. If you’re a people pleaser with a lack of boundaries, there’s going to be a part of your mind that will tell you, “You’re an awful friend, how could you not take their call when they need you?” But it’s precisely this kind of moment where you get to tune into your needs and be present with your body. It’s a moment like this where you get to practice making a different choice and create a pattern interrupt, deviating from your past, conditioned behavior.
Ultimately, we could discuss an innumerable number of examples of how to practice setting boundaries by listening to your body. At the core, I believe that boundary setting, telling people “no” or “not right now” is a fundamental practice in loving yourself, honoring your body, and allowing yourself to break free from a pattern of dependency on receiving praise, validation, or acknowledgment from others to feel safe and worthy. This is not easy work and it often takes a ton of practice, but it’s worth doing to create more peace, freedom, and joy in our lives.
“Love yourself enough to set boundaries. Your time and energy are precious. You get to choose how you use it. You teach people how to treat you by deciding what you will and won’t accept. — Anna Taylor
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