E25: People Pleasing

Listen to the episode here: E25: People Pleasing - https://bit.ly/3VgzYuY

Hey there, it's Dr. Tiffany. I wanna welcome you to episode 25 of Integrative Mental Health Therapy with Dr. Tiffany. We are talking about people pleasing in this episode. And the focus is always brain, body, mind. And sometimes depending on what's going on or where we are, it just varies. I will focus on a different aspect of my three-leg stool, my model of healing.

And one of the things I've been super fascinated with is the impact of the inner critic, the impact of people pleasing, the impact of the mind on the physiology. And the fact that if we can engage in certain behaviors in our relationships, that they can have an impact on our health, right? We know that stress impacts cortisol levels, which can change the brain.

And if we are constantly criticizing ourselves and activating all of that cortisol in our mind and body, of course, health issues will follow. And if we are just not honoring our own needs and not acknowledging our own boundaries and violating our own well-being in our relationships, health issues will absolutely follow. And I've been quite, just kind of captivated with this idea of as I'm helping people heal and I'm looking at functional medicine and I'm looking at functional neurology and I'm doing all of this IFS work, I think before my break here, I had done a podcast on how an hour isn't enough. I have really thought a lot about, you know, digging deep.

Dropping in aggressively into doing work around this critic and this people pleaser and working on the future self and working with people, you know, very intrigued by adult children of emotionally immature parents and how that plays out in the presentation as an adult and what it means with your boundaries and with people pleasing. And so as I continue to learn more it influences how I want to work with people. And so one of the things that I have now as an offer is a people pleasing intensive. And so it's really, it's really had me just looking at this just really deeply. And part of it, I'm gonna be completely candid and so here in this podcast, part of what I did as I reflect, cause I reflect at the end of the year, that's my thing.

Part of what I did in 2024 to save my health, and my health had been improving in 2024 here, but to save my health was embark on a journey with a company called Cureable. And I mentioned them sometimes on some of my posts. And I spent weeks upon weeks upon weeks really dropping into healing with the Cureable method and doing group therapy and doing all of the work that Cureable has asked us to do to really kill chronic pain, chronic fatigue, autoimmune issues, and part of it with the personality type. And the personality types that find themselves dealing with these types of struggles, the research is super clear.

People with patterns of people-pleasing, people with patterns of inner critic dialogue that drives them to strive and to over-commit and to do the most and to not take the kind of breaks they need and that wants them to mold them and all the things, there's personality types that tend to have the problems that show up in my practice and have shown up in my own health.

And doing the group therapy and doing that work and going through all of the months and months and months and months of shifting and changing and then working with my own personal therapist around these same things, I said, you know what, this is something that needs to be done and it needs to be done quickly. And I just, I want to, I want to speak to this concept of the good girl health tax, the good girl health tax.

Of people-pleasing. And I want you to just kind of consider that idea. There was a great article in Women's Health Magazine about people-pleasing and just how it affects your health. And Gabor Mate, one of the biggest therapists and I don't even know the way to describe him in the field of trauma, but the biggest champion for healing around trauma, one of the things he talks about is how you have to deal with this need to people please to actually heal. How you have to deal with this need to people please to overcome autoimmune disorders and chronic health issues and chronic fatigue. Dr. Mate is a huge player. He's a doctor, he's a spearhead and champion in the trauma field. And he has talked so much about the research around repression and suppression of the difficult emotions and how that shows up in our health.

So what do I want to say about the people pleaser? The people pleaser, the common traits of the people pleaser, difficulty saying no, difficulty recognizing your own needs, overextending yourself, self-worth that is tied to approval, and a fear of conflict. A fear of conflict is one of the biggest things I hear from people who report people pleasing.

Difficulty prioritizing and recognizing what they need is another big player. And I want you to think about how this shows up with health. If a people pleasing personality has a hard time recognizing their own needs. And when the body needs rest or the body needs a boundary, a body needs like more quiet time, it just doesn't need the friend to come visit or doesn't want to go do this thing or doesn't want to say yes, then that puts that body, that mind at risk.

Self-worth tied to the approval of others. What lengths might a person go to to receive that approval from others? This is how people pleasing shows up in female health especially.

I ask people to look at speaking up, boundaries, self-care as life-saving. And I have said to many a woman to please avoid the temptation to make choices that are familiar but are no longer serving you.

Prioritizing your self-care means that you will have to show up differently and the people in your life will most likely be individuals who really liked it when you were pleasing them and not yourself. So you will have to prepare for the fact that there will be losses, there will be changes, people may go away.

That your new life is probably going to cost you your old life. And that is why I've been offering this process as an intensive, because this is a lot for people and can feel quite overwhelming. Boundary setting is something you can Google. You don't need me to tell you about it now. Setting boundaries, speaking up for yourself, how to articulate those words, how to speak up to your parents. Those aren't things that you need me or your partner rather to tell you to do. A lot of times what people need is the neuroplasticity, the flexibility in the parts in the system, the permission, the psychoeducation to do that work. So look at this as your green light to do what you need to do to take care of yourself. As I said, I'm dropping a bunch of little short episodes here. The week of Thanksgiving.

I hope this one lands with you. And if you have any thoughts or feelings about people pleasing, drop me a line. And until next time, be well.