How To Set Healthy Boundaries When You’re a People Pleaser
Therapy for People Pleasing & Relationship Issues in Colorado Springs
Many people who struggle with boundaries are not weak or incapable - they’ve learned through experience that saying no feels unsafe
Recently I talked with a very strong, capable, successful person who told me…
“I’ve never been good with boundaries. I don’t have any idea how to have them.”
This is incredibly common, and there’s often a pattern that looks like this…
Growing up in a home where you have to take too much responsibility too soon - like being overly parentified from an early age, harshly criticized for normal childhood behavior or feelings, or punished or shamed for having needs - can set in motion an almost superhuman ability to anticipate people’s reactions and try to manage them to preserve your own sense of safety.
This can look like being overly accommodating to avoid another’s disappointment, or appeasing people’s desires to stay out of conflict, or managing other people’s feelings so that you can maintain an internal sense of peace or safety. There’s a subconscious sense that “I have to manage your feelings, needs, and expectations to keep myself regulated.”
This is often referred to as “people pleasing” and can be a trauma response known as “fawning.”
We are all familiar with the survival response “fight or flight,” but really it’s “fight, flight, freeze, or fawn.”
Instead of fighting, freezing, or running away, fawning is a survival mechanism in which a person appeases, pleases, or accommodates others - often at their own expense - and suppresses their own needs to preserve a sense of safety. If you want to know more, an excellent book on this survival mechanism and the related patterns is “Fawning” by Dr. Ingrid Clayton.
Fawning, people pleasing, and trouble setting boundaries often go hand in hand
It’s important to know this is not because of weakness or lack of ability to have boundaries - this is a trauma response that is hardwired into a person at a nervous system level and can be very hard to overcome because of its perceived connection to survival and safety. People who have trouble setting boundaries are often very strong and capable - they’re just scared of what feels threatening because it has been in the past.
Back to my conversation about difficulty setting boundaries…
We talked about three main ways to go through a concrete process, even though there is no exact formula - boundaries are individual to each person and each situation, and they often need to be dynamic and flexible depending on how relationships evolve. The process we identified included when to determine a boundary is needed, where to set the boundary, and how to communicate a boundary.
Determining When a Boundary is Needed
It’s common to feel like “I don’t even know when I should have a boundary.” Fawning and people pleasing can separate you from your own intuition and ability to trust yourself for so long that it’s hard to reconnect to your innate instincts to know what’s best for you.
Curiosity and emotion tolerance are your superpowers when it comes to setting boundaries. Any emotion you feel is information, about a need you have or a place a boundary is being violated. It can be tempting to try to push these emotions out, but tuning in to what they’re telling you can be enormously helpful. Seeing strong emotions, especially anger or resentment, as communication from your inner wisdom can help to diffuse the feeling and make it useful for you.
Any strong feeling should become a signal that there may be a missing boundary, and it’s worth checking in with yourself about it. Curiosity - why am I feeling this way? what do I need? - can then help you further refine where boundaries are needed.
Where to Set Boundaries
Once you’ve employed curiosity, you can start to determine where there’s a missing boundary and what needs to change for your needs to be met. This doesn’t have to be overly complicated or serious. You can start to play with different ideas and wishes within your own mind that you don’t have to act on right away.
My favorite boundary setting exercise is what I call the “Want vs Should Game.” When you’re having a feeling about something, you use it as information, and your curiosity tells you it’s because a line is being crossed somewhere, ask yourself…
If I did want I want to do instead of what I think I should do, what would I choose?
This is often very illuminating. Sometimes there’s a clear answer - I would say no - and that becomes your boundary. Sometimes there’s an initial knee-jerk response, like I want to tell that person off - but then another values based desire, like I want to be a person who handles conflict well and stays calm, comes behind it with a choice that brings peace.
Often what you want to do and what you feel you should do end up being the same thing, but it feels different when you act on something because it’s a choice rather than an obligation.
How to Communicate Boundaries
There are two ways to hold boundaries - internal and external.
Not every boundary needs to be communicated to another person. Sometimes it’s enough to know you hold the boundary internally, for example, if you decide that when a difficult family member starts a negative communication on a phone call you’re going to say you need to hang up without engaging. These internal boundaries work best in relationships where positive communication is not constructive or productive.
When a boundary needs to be communicated, you can think in terms of 4 simple steps:
Observation: first, take a deep breath and share an objective observation of what’s going on - just the facts
Feeling: second, share how you feel about what’s happening and the impact on you or the relationship
Need: third, communicate the need you have for change in the situation
Request: and finally, make a request for how you’d like the other person to meet the need
Ultimately we can’t control other people. Communicating boundaries does not mean the other person will agree. And that’s okay - because the goal of boundaries is not to make other people do what we want, but to decide what we’re going to do to get what we need.
It can be hard to know how to set boundaries, especially if you have a long-standing history of people pleasing and fawning, or past relational trauma that is unresolved. Therapy can help you go through a process of identifying, setting, and communicating boundaries. EMDR can help resolve the underlying cause of difficult with boundaries.
