Meg Josephson is a licensed psychotherapist who specializes in trauma-informed care. She is also a certified meditation teacher through the Nalanda Institute.
What’s the big idea?
People-pleasing is not a personality trait. It is part of the trauma response known as fawning. Although it can be a useful mechanism at times, existing in a state of fawning leads to exhaustion and losing touch with oneself: who you are, what you want, and what you need. To heal, it is necessary to learn how to focus less on what other people think for the sake of rediscovering who you are.
Below, Meg shares five key insights from her new book, Are You Mad at Me?: How to Stop Focusing on What Others Think and Start Living for You. Listen to the audio version—read by Meg herself—below, or in the Next Big Idea App.
1. People-pleasing is a common trauma response.
I grew up in a home that was quite volatile. There were certainly loving moments, but there were also lots of yelling and addiction. I had to be on high alert all the time. This question of “Are you mad at me?” was protective; being sure that my dad wasn’t mad at me kept me safe. When I left home, I noticed I was still hypervigilant but in a different form. Monitoring my dad’s moods turned into thinking I was going to get fired anytime my boss asked to have a chat, and walking around with the feeling that I’m always about to get in trouble.
Learning about people-pleasing as a trauma response made everything make sense for me. We have four responses to a threat: fight, flight, freeze, and fawn. The fawn response is common yet least recognized as a threat response. It is about appeasing the threat by trying to be liked by it, satisfying it, or trying to impress it. Through fawning, safety, and love come from doing more for the sake of approval. It’s a brilliant safety mechanism, often learned in childhood if you grew up in a tense, volatile, or critical home environment. But it’s also a socialized behavior, especially for marginalized groups, where needing to be liked and approved of can be necessary for survival in society.
Sometimes we need to fawn. But when we fawn as our default way of being, it becomes exhausting and manifests as chronic people-pleasing, overextending ourselves, overthinking social interactions, feeling anxious when someone puts a period instead of an exclamation point, and feeling like we don’t know who we are because we’ve spent so long being hypervigilant of what others want and need.
2. Awareness is the most important part of healing.
In my private practice, a lot of people come in with a sense of urgency: Tell me what to do! Fix it for me! For the record, that was also me when I was 20 and going to my first therapist. I said to her, “Why do I always think people are mad at me?” I thought she would take one look at me, tell me what to do, and I’d be on my merry way. Healing is a slow, subtle, and ongoing process.
“When we react, we’re usually doing so from an old place.”
Awareness is our best tool. When we react, we’re usually doing so from an old place. Something about a given situation reminds our bodies of a past situation, and so we react in a way that once kept us safe. Before immediately reacting in the way we usually do—like over-apologizing or overexplaining ourselves—just pause.
Take a second.
A pause is a people-pleaser’s best friend. By doing so, we bring an unconscious pattern into the conscious mind. This allows us to decide: Do I need to be doing this right now? Or am I safe? How do I want to respond? Even if we do choose to react in the old way, there is no need to feel shame because by virtue of becoming aware of it, we are already doing something different.
3. Nothing is personal. Nothing is perfect. Nothing is permanent.
“Nothing is personal” means that we all behave and react through the lens of our own inner world, which is composed of fears, beliefs, and past experiences. Nothing is personal doesn’t mean we’re never accepting feedback or aren’t open to constructive criticism. What it means is we’re being selective about who we take feedback from.
When we’ve been stuck in the fawn response, our minds have been trained to be hypervigilant of all that is happening externally: people’s reactions, their facial expressions, did they laugh at your joke? Are they mad at me? Remember that this is a survival mechanism, so we’re only supposed to be in it for a few minutes at a time. But for many of us (especially women), it’s as natural as breathing.
When we’re in this state for years or a lifetime, we completely lose connection with who we are, what we want, and what we need. So instead of “Do they like me?” ask “Do I like them?” Instead of “What should I do to make them like me?” ask “How can I move through the discomfort of them not liking me?” We can’t truly know ourselves and be liked by everyone at the same time.
4. You’re not responsible for managing other people’s emotions.
Many people who are drawn to the question of “Are you mad at me?” have historically found safety by managing other people’s moods. For me, being perfect, an overachiever, and relentlessly positive was helpful growing up. How I showed up was the one thing in my control to keep the peace.
What I’ve come to realize and what I work on with clients is that we cannot manage the moods or reactions of others. When we’re stuck in a fawn response, we’re entangled with the other person’s emotions. If they don’t feel regulated, we can’t feel regulated. Much of people-pleasing aims to prevent others from being disappointed or upset, so we can avoid discomfort. But it is not your job to manage their discomfort.
“When we’re stuck in a fawn response, we’re entangled with the other person’s emotions.”
We must create a distinction between what emotion is mine and what emotion is yours. I call this practice leaning back in relationships. This doesn’t mean being passive, but rather it releases urgency and the need to control. In this way, we preserve energy where we’d normally be overextending ourselves. We’re not leaving the room; we’re just leaning back.
5. Practice taking in small, bite-sized pieces of discomfort.
I’ve been meditating daily for over 10 years now. When I first started, I couldn’t do it for more than a minute. I had so much agitation and tension in my body that sitting in a meditation session felt unbearable. Forcing myself through 20 minutes back when I couldn’t get through one would have been a mistake. This healing work is about cultivating a sense of internal safety, so we wouldn’t want to do something super scary to start—like set a boundary with someone we’re terrified of—because it may not go great, and then our body will be like, “See? This is why I people-please!”
Similarly, if someone came into therapy and had a lot of unprocessed traumas, we wouldn’t start by diving headfirst into their traumatic memories. We’d go slowly to make sure they feel safe along the way. I call this dipping our toes into discomfort because if it feels too much, then we can back out. What we’re doing is slowly increasing tolerance for discomfort. With every instance in which we acknowledge that we are uncomfortable but still safe, we give new evidence to the people-pleasing part of ourselves that we can be judged and still be safe. You can be misunderstood and still be safe. Someone can be mad at you, and you can still be safe.
If a client is trying to be with their emotions or anxious thoughts, instead of sitting with those thoughts for 10 minutes, first sit with them for 30 seconds. As you’re sitting with that anxiety, maybe choose to start noticing sounds in the room, or all the things in the room that are green—something so that your body still knows that you’re here and not stuck in that memory.
If you want to practice setting boundaries, start with someone who makes you feel safe. Tell your best friend, “I only have 30 minutes to chat,” or “I actually don’t feel like drinking tonight.” Each time you do this, you build self-trust and show the younger part of you that learned that being perfect and accommodating secured love that, in fact, you’re allowed to have needs.
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