Is it possible to stop people pleasing when you have spent your entire life seeking approval from others? If you were raised in chaos and dysfunction, you probably spent your childhood years searching for connection and security in your life – and have now carried this pattern with you. Author Courtney Burg and I discuss helpful strategies for people pleasers, the impact of staying tethered to our family of origin, and how to build God-centered confidence. Let this episode be a reminder that our ultimate safety and foundation is based on who we are in Christ – not in our unhealthy attachments.
WHAT YOU’LL LEARN:
- [03:13] Where Does The Pattern of People Pleasing Come From?
- [08:44] Implementing Healthy Confrontation Instead of Gossip
- [11:48] Are You Wrapped Up in The Narrative of What it Means to be Caring, Hardworking, and Loyal?
- [15:40] We Aren’t Meant to Stay Unhealthily Tethered to Our Family of Origin
- [19:43] “There's A Lot of Freedom When We Unhook From Being Each Other's Messiah”
- [21:35] How Did Jesus Manage The Line of Pleasing God versus Not Pleasing Man?
- [26:42] Ways We Can Start to Work Through People Pleasing
- [32:02] Alicia’s Reflections: Can We Implement God-Centered Confidence and Move Forward With Change in Our People Pleasing Patterns?
[03:13] Where Does The Pattern of People Pleasing Come From?
Courtney shares that through her experience, she has learned that we all crave connection and security in our family of origin. People pleasing is an early pattern of behavior that we adopt as a young child which then carries with us into our adult relationships. We have to go back to see when these patterns started and then see how we can untangle ourselves from them.
People pleasing is an unhealthy attachment because it is manufactured. When we people please or function from a place of codependency, we are striving to keep ourselves comfortable. We want to control the relationship and the outcome of the narrative – which is very self-serving. When Courtney first started this work, she did not want to admit to herself how selfish it was.
As believers, we can trust God and ask Him for guidance on how to function in our relationships. Courtney realized that she was not inviting God into her relationships because she was in a place of fear and control. She wanted to keep people pleasing because she knew that this would make her feel needed and wanted. This is perpetuating the lie that we are only helpful when we are giving ourselves to others. If we are functioning from any type of fear, anxiety, or insecurity – the fruits of this will never be joy, peace, or love.
We often see this when we do something for someone and they do not appreciate it. We start to get irritable and this is where the selfishness comes in. We have to get really clear on these questions:
– Am I doing this for me or the other person?
– Am I feeding my pride and insecurities?
– Am I trying to control the way this relationship is?
– Am I just trying to keep this person close?
It is not always that we are trying to make the other person happy, we are also not listening to our needs. We are willing to just go with the flow so that there is peace. Alicia was recently in a situation where she felt like it would be much easier if she did not say anything – but she felt her inner child say “No, you need to stand up and say something.” It is much easier to deal with this internally but we do need to stand up for what God is asking us to do.
As believers, we have these values that we commit to. There are these nonnegotiables but there are also core values that we stand for and have to guard. If we feel like we cannot stand up for these values, we need to ask ourselves, “Wait why can’t I? What am I afraid of?” In Scripture, it says, “We're not to fear the thoughts and opinions of man”. So if we are functioning in our relationships from a place of fearing that person, this is where we see things like anxiety, discontentment, and depression come up.
[08:44] Implementing Healthy Confrontation Instead of Gossip
What often happens with people pleasing is that we will not say something to that person, but we will open up to someone else and say “Look what they did again today”. Courtney shares that the majority of women that she works with sidestep healthy confrontation. If we grew up in a home where there was conflict, whether that was loud and in our faces or looked something like our mom disappearing, we are often scared of conflict as adults. We have never learned how to respectfully disagree or have assertive dialogue with someone. We need to learn how to have hard conversations. This does take practice and is like learning a new language. If we are not strong in our identity of who we are in God, then it is much more tempting to want to not say anything to keep those relationships safe. If we have this stability in Him then we know that it does not matter what someone else says to us because we know who we are in Christ. The premise of Courtney’s book “Loyal to a Fault” is unraveling our patterns of behavior and making God’s voice the loudest one that we hear. If we can do that, we can reinforce new patterns and learn to function more authentically in relationships.
[11:48] Are You Wrapped Up in The Narrative of What it Means to be Caring, Hardworking, and Loyal?
There are many statements that women struggle with around people pleasing. Courtney shares that one she struggled with the most was the concept of being loyal. She thought that being loyal meant that she needed to lie about the addiction happening in her home, pay her brother's rent, or help her friends with whatever they needed. There was a lot of fear that if she did not act in the ways that were expected of her, then she would not be perceived as loyal, caring, loving, or hard-working.
Courtney reminds us that we cannot just stop thinking these thoughts. We need to hear them and listen to God on what he instructs us to do. In her book, she tells people to hold these thoughts captive, bring them to God, and then hold them up against scripture to see what is true and what is not. We can make up a lot of things and we will often complete a story for a sense of safety. We think something like “She’s not calling me back, she must be mad at me” which is ultimately us connecting the dots to another lie.
If we can start to implement this exercise into our daily lives, we will stop creating these false narratives. Courtney reminds us that we have authority over our thoughts and we can begin to replace them with more God-honoring thoughts. This takes an exercise of noticing, acknowledging and replacing these thoughts.
[15:40] We Aren’t Meant to Stay Unhealthily Tethered to Our Family of Origin
Courtney shares that within her family, she was honoring their wounds, sinning, and dysfunction. She thought that this meant loving them, but as she walked with God, they unpacked what it really meant to honor her parents. As adults, we are no longer meant to remain obedient to our parents. She often sees that adults stay unhealthily tethered to their family of origin because they believe that this is honoring. She now understands that honoring them means not going to places where drinking is involved and standing behind their bad behavior.
It is supportive for us to talk to the Holy Spirit and ask for discernment so we know what is the truth and what is the lie. As Christians, we get confused and think that we are meant to serve each other because that is what God needs. But the truth is that we are meant to serve God first in our relationships. If we love God with our whole self, we have to look at Him and ask “How do I serve you in this relationship?” instead of trying to serve each other in a way that we believe pleases God. Having this dialogue with Him and trusting that He will guide our steps gives us the truth in these moments.
We do not have to earn our security with God by serving someone else. If we do not feel safe to be ourselves in a relationship, we might end up falling into those people pleasing patterns for extra security. But if we know who we are in God, then we do not need that foundation because we are already secure. This allows us to have more freedom in who and how we serve.
[19:43] “There's A Lot of Freedom When We Unhook From Being Each Other's Messiah”
Courtney shares that there is a lot of freedom when we unhook from being each other's Messiah. When we go into relationships and realize that we have expectations for the other to fulfill us, complete us, fix, and rescue us – we have to unhook from this. When we can do this, we create margins where we can just be with each other. This creates a lot more acceptance and compassion.
We can think of codependency as two circles. Courtney shares that she was always overlapping with everyone else because her happiness was dependent on them. Over the last 10 years, she has slowly opened up the overlap. They are still celebrating, grieving, and enjoying life together but they are not each other's everything. We live in a society now where if a mother is not obsessing over her children, she is not a good mom. Or if she is not catering to her husband's every need, she is not doing it right. For healthy relationships, we need to create this space between each other because a healthy connection requires healthy separation for us to truly appreciate each other.
[21:35] How Did Jesus Manage The Line of Pleasing God versus Not Pleasing Man?
The most common way that we saw how Jesus modeled pleasing God versus not pleasing man (while still lovingly serving) was that he took time away to rest. He took time to sleep on the boat and he took time away to pray. We have to ask ourselves “How often do we carve out time for prayer? How often do we nap? How often do we permit ourselves to take a day of Sabbath?” We have overcomplicated what it means to walk with Jesus, she says.
Being obedient to God is not going to always be well received by other people. We have become a culture where being liked is everything. If someone does not like us, we become paralyzed and lose sleep over it. Courtney believes that God wants us to get through eternity with Him and He does not care whether or not we like how we get there.
The book, “The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry: How to Stay Emotionally Healthy and Spiritually Alive in the Chaos of the Modern World” is a sweet reminder that the way Jesus lived was not always butterflies and rainbows. Jesus died on the cross not because he wanted to, but because he knew that God had a bigger plan. He was obedient but he did not want to suffer or leave his friends. Each day, God is asking us to be a little less comfortable.
In our culture, there is a status that comes with how well we serve and how giving we are. We have confused keeping others happy with being obedient to God. Scripture does not require us to fill people up and try help make them whole. Courtney suggests that sometimes making people unhappy is serving God in a way.
Codependency led her to believe that she was helping these people she cared about but she was actually hurting them. The thing that was between them and God was that they needed to change and by her being the safety net, they were not able to get the help that they really needed. This is a reminder that people pleasing is not just hurting us and our relationship with God, it could also hold back what God wants to do in someone else's life.
[26:42] Ways We Can Start to Work Through People Pleasing
In her book, Courtney lays out a family of origin inventory that we can use to start working through these people pleasing patterns. This walks women through the messaging and early conditioning that they had as children. Whether this is boundary work, discipline, structure, or safety – we can unpack these things and see what we have been carrying around.
Unpacking this stuff takes time and we often need to give things over to God again and again. It also takes grace with ourselves because we often become aware of our dysfunctional traits and manufactured ways of connecting. We start to realize why we have been doing this our entire lives and what people have expected from us. This tool is a great one to start with if we are willing to do the work to replace these patterns.
Alicia shares that when her children were little when they did something they were not supposed to, they would say to them and say, “God is going to allow you to encounter this situation again, so keep your eyes open and when the test comes you can decide on how you are going to respond”. This gave them a second chance and we can also look at this as we unravel our people pleasing patterns. We will be given opportunities to practice what we have learned.
Courtney has a client who had a co-worker who had kissed her husband before they were married. Instead of speaking up as her co-worker told her this, she smiled and laughed it off. We often feel that if we do not assert ourselves, these feelings will just go away. But what happens is we consume this. In this example, she started fighting with her husband about it and it ended up turning into a big thing that she carried home with her. She ended up speaking up and letting her coworker know that this was inappropriate. It is never too late to assert ourselves. We are consistently given opportunities to confidently not people-please and assert boundaries that will help to establish our self-worth and help us grow our God-centered confidence.
[32:02] Alicia’s Reflections: Can We Implement God-Centered Confidence and Move Forward With Change in Our People Pleasing Patterns?
When we are in a situation where we are being taken advantage of or trying to please other people, we often get stuck in this overthinking cycle. This creates a lot of anxiety because we are playing out scenarios in our heads of how things could happen. This is the number one thing that would spike my anxiety and thankfully, at this point in my life, God has taken a lot of this from me. I feel like I can now see the difference between when I am serving well and obeying Him and when I am trying to please somebody else to not make people mad.
Once we have this awareness, we have to actually do something about it. If you do have this awareness, I would encourage you to ask God what the next step is to obedience. Ask him to give you the courage and the strength to do it and if your relationship is distributed, to give you the confidence to know that the love He has for you is not going anywhere.
Ultimately, the fear comes from the potentiality of our security being stripped away. We need to feel confident enough to move forward and be solid with who we are in Christ. When in those situations, it is a great opportunity to reestablish that reminder from God that He's got it and we do not have to prove ourselves. This is scary but we have to always ask God to help us move forward in these situations with what He wants us to do.
God will help us with the repercussions if they come up and our ultimate safety and foundation in Him is not going to be threatened. I hope this conversation was encouraging and I suggest the following reflection questions for you to journal on:
– Is people pleasing happening in my life?
– How am I being a people pleaser?
– How can I take a step forward in changing this pattern?
I want to remind you that there is hope on the other side of these patterns!
RESOURCES:
Stuck in the overwhelm and exhaustion of perfectionism, people pleasing, or trying to prove yourself worthy? This doesn’t have to be your reality! Sign up for the Free Workshop, Break Free From Feeling Never Enough, to find healing from a lifetime of worry, shame + striving.
Connect with author, speaker, and teacher Courtney J. Burg