Beyond Boundaries: The Missing Piece in Healing People Pleasing.
11/08/2026
The body keeps the score sure, but you keep saying “yes” when it wants to say “no”.
The tally is rarely in your favour, but you have no way of doing things differently.
Maybe you’ve been told you “lack boundaries”?
That you need to “be more selfish”?
But the micro moments to make different choices happen too quickly to catch, and all the mainstream pop-culture ideas of ‘people pleasing’ are missing the central core piece.
Let me go back and to the very beginning.
“People Pleasing” is the name we’ve all adopted for what is fundamentally a stress response – known as “Fawning”. It lives side by side the other more commonly known stress responses - fight, flight and freeze.
When circumstances prevail and these three aren’t available – maybe it isn’t possible to run, or safe to fight or to get ‘stuck’ - in order to maintain the relational status quo you have to pretend everything is fine and dandy and do everything in your power not to rock the boat.
This generally stems from feeling unsafe at some point in childhood, and learning how to keep parents or peers happy, for fear of volatility, or repercussions, and it’s worth noting it doesn’t mean there was an ACTUAL threat. If you look back and think “but my parents didn’t do xyz” then sure, that’s all well and good – but all it takes is a perceived threat for children to start managing themselves and their behaviours in order to keep the peace.
The fundamental function of fawning is to sacrifice your own needs for the sake of the other. And we do this over time by gradually silencing our interoceptive awareness – making it harder to recognise our own discomfort and needs until the fear of upsetting the ‘other’ feels so disproportionately uncomfortable that it takes over. Our initial ‘needs’ get bulldozed and pushed to the back, while keeping others happy becomes priority number 1, and all the masking behaviours, placating and tolerating ensue. Their needs become your needs. So it often doesn’t feel like we’re being super sacrificial because we feel quite content with how things are.
This is why telling ‘people pleasers’ that they simply need to set more boundaries and ask for their needs to be met, is futile. Because years of suppression means they often have absolutely no idea what they’re boundaries or needs actually are - beyond ‘be a good girl or a good boy.”
However altruistic this behaviour might appear, the bitter-pill no one wants to swallow is that people pleasing is an inherently self-serving survival mechanism, not intrinsic selflessness.
It doesn’t mean people pleasers are all secretly shit blokes, au contraire! Just that the term has become so over saturated and normalised in modern culture, waved away as a harmless quirk, or a cute self-deprecating joke, when what people really mean when they confess “Oh I’m such a people pleaser!” is actually “my nervous system finds it much safer to put other peoples needs before my own and it makes me feel better to keep acting this way then risk disappointing others.”
The case for disappointing others.
Comes from a favourite saying of mine “if you can’t feel someone’s no, you can’t trust their yes.” When people are willing to bare their whole, honest selves to us, by saying something as controversial as “no” – it means when we do receive their yes, we can trust it wholeheartedly. We’ve all had those friends who say ‘you chose where we go I don’t mind’ over and over again and the unconscious impact of never hearing an honest preference is that you’re left wondering whether they are happy with your choice.
People pleasing ends up being a form of dishonesty, and it absolutely erodes away at relationships over time, creating resentment, mistrust, frustration and disconnection.
Honesty, in higher stakes situations even when hard to hear, builds trust and fosters intimacy.
Boundaries do not keep people out – they provide a framework for safely letting people in, where connection can grow beneficially for both parties.
Showing up congruently with yourself allows others to get to know you for who you truly are, not the version of you that you think is most acceptable to them.
So - how do you rediscover boundaries, needs and wants amongst the thick conditioning of fawning? You return to the body and start listening.
People pleasers often find themselves in two camps: the first are the ones who have completely disconnected from their bodies and their instincts and have very little insight into what they feel and where they feel it and what it all means. These are the ones where suppression has won and the signals have stopped signalling. It shows up as disconnection, numbness, low motivation, low mood and high levels of cognitive rumination and overthinking. Sometimes the communication channel between our bodies and our minds is like an old radio that’s lost it’s frequency long ago, so it can just sound static for a long while. If the messages and symptoms that the body has been sending have been ignored and pushed away for years and years then it can take a while to reacquaint them.
The second camp are the ones who’s bodies are still sending signals, but they’re being misinterpreted as ‘anxiety’, a subtle sense of dissatisfaction, irritability, chronic pain, sleep issues etc. Sometimes these signals are so loud and have been screaming for attention for so long, that reacquainting yourself somatically actually happens quite quickly, but building trust can still take some time.
The important thing is that we use bottom-up somatic techniques to allow the truth of the body to slowly speak. Or else everything remains stuck in the cognitive mind, and in the embedded stories that seek to keep us safe and often revert us back to fawning behaviour.
Trauma is what happens when the bodies stress response is so large it shut downs and can’t complete the cycle. Somatic therapies have long held the highest esteem for working with trauma due to the physiological nature of the way trauma affects the body.
So when we start calling people pleasing what it actually is – the Fawn stress response, it geos without saying that somatic therapy is an incredibly potent way to work with it.
When we stay stuck in the mind and try to intellectualise people pleasing and boundary setting, we miss a very crucial aspect to boundaries. Underneath the art of setting successful boundaries, is the nervous systems capacity to sit with the discomfort of following through with consequences – something ‘people pleasers’ often struggle with.
Underneath the capacity to follow through with consequences is the willingness to face losing connection, or if we want to get simplistic about it – losing love. When someone crosses a boundary and the consequence is that they lose access to you (be it the dynamic, the conversation, or the entire relationship that has to end) you have to be willing to feel the loss, and with that loss, the disappointment, the sadness, the anger.
When our nervous systems are wired for connection, no matter the cost - then setting boundaries and consequences can often feel like a threat to our survival. What we need to do then, is teach ourselves how to sit with the uncomfortable truth that the cost of a relationship should never be self-abandonment. If we can learn to hold ourselves in pain, and somatically build capacity for our nervous systems and our emotional bodies to feel uncomfortable feelings, while still stay true to ourselves and our own self-respect, then we can tolerate the pain of losing connection knowing that it is not worth the sacrifice of dishonouring the self.
Ironically – when people can energetically feel your boundaries are a flimsy fence with the gate wide open, they tend to be more likely to waltz on through. Whereas when your boundaries are a tall, rock solid wall that requires permission to enter, greater respect for the boundary tends to be given.
So the (simplified) road map out of people-pleasing-ville:
Step one is to reacquaint with the body and learn to listen better.
Step two is prepare to face the discomfort that might come from chosing yourself.
Step three is to gradually start to discern what your needs and boundaries might actually be.
Step four is to practice micro-boundaries with baby steps (i.e if someone has made a request – simply asking for some time to decide can be an absolute game changer – “hey can I take the afternoon/night to sit with this and get back to you?”)
It goes without saying this is best navigated with a professional therapist, but I hope it’s given some food for thought and a bit of hope towards a life of more agency and autonomy, free from the constraints of the fawn response and instead finding liberation in the truth of your being.