😈 Lessons of a recovered people pleaser

Ever feel like your eagerness to please others is more of a curse than a virtue? You're not the only one. I'm Christina Modaffari, host of the Hot Genius Podcast, and this episode is a deep dive into my own transformation from a chronic people pleaser to someone who now thrives on self-awareness and healthy boundaries. Peel back the layers of our brain's natural stress responses with me, and let's shed the shame attached to people-pleasing by understanding its roots in our nervous system. Learn how to recognize these patterns in your life and how setting boundaries can become your most liberating act yet.

This conversation is more than just personal anecdotes; it's an invitation to redefine the journey to self-improvement. During the quiet introspection imposed by Melbourne's lockdown, I confronted the truth that my people-pleasing tendencies were stress-induced survival tactics rather than intrinsic personality traits. Our discussion will guide you through the subtleties of recognising stress responses and the importance of demarcating your true self from these automatic reactions. I'm incredibly grateful to you, the listeners, for joining this crucial dialogue and supporting the growth of the Hot Genius community, as we collectively navigate the road to reclaiming our authentic selves.

Chapters

• 0:00 Lessons of a Recovered People Pleaser
• 7:50 Recovering From People Pleasing
• 20:38 Understanding People Pleasing and Seeking Support

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:00

Welcome back to another episode of the Hot Genius Podcast. I'm your host, christina Modafari, and today's episode is called Lessons of a Recovered People Pleaser. I actually just want to begin by saying that my definition of recovered is very different to most people, and what I mean by that is that I don't believe recovered means perfection. I don't believe recovered means you don't have a certain, you don't experience something bad in that arena anymore To me. I just want to begin by defining what I mean when I say recovered. To me, recovered, the thing is no longer debilitating your life. It's just that simple. Let's say, for example, if I exhibit people pleasing tendencies, I don't see that as me not being recovered. I see that as me being human and me understanding that people pleasing behavior is a stress response. Okay, so let's get this. I know you might be confused, but I assure you this episode is going to be incredibly eye-opening, because we're not just going to talk about things that I've learned from recovering, from being a people pleaser, but you're also going to have a new way of viewing recovery in health and wellness, and it's going to help. You see, I hope anyway that you're doing much better than you think you are. Are you ready for this or are you ready for this? Because I'm serious, if you really pay attention and really take in what we're about to learn today and learn from my mistakes, I assure you that you'll be able to feel like you've walked away from this episode, truly like an evolved version of yourself. So sit back, enjoy and let's get into today's episode.

Speaker 1: 1:44

So, before you heard me say that people pleasing is actually a type of stress response, and that's because it is, and one of the lessons that I had learned is that, well, I didn't know that for most of my life I didn't know that, I had no idea In fact, most people don't really know that and I only discovered that maybe about two years ago. Well, yeah, anyway, I discovered that two years ago and, mind you, I was a counsellor and therapist for several years at that time. Yeah, I still didn't know, right, I heard the same thing. Like I wasn't taught in counselling school what people pleasing was, because it was so long ago and I think they even knew. But, like just throughout my own professional development, the closest thing I ever heard to explaining people pleasing behavior was like people pleases are parent pleases and it's like, yeah, I guess. Yes, that's true, but it's still not really helpful and it's not really clear, and what it really is. And so you know that I'm all about practical wisdom, practical spirituality, practical everything and anything, and so one of the most important lessons I learned was that, if you look at the stress response, we've got the fight, flight, freeze and form response.

Speaker 1: 2:58

Now, the form response is one of the stress responses meaning to form, which means that the brain has assessed that the perceived threat that that human is under it believes that it must succumb to the needs and desires of a person that they believe is making them feel threatened. Okay, so that whole thing, you know, when you hear, oh, you know, people pleases or parent pleases, and that's the answer, what they mean is that, well, the reason why someone would, even the brain, would even assess the best way to survive in that perceived threat of perceived danger, and then linking that to being a parent pleaser, was because if you were a child, like I was a child, and my brain went, yep, no, I'm not big enough to fight, you know my parent, or I have nowhere I can literally run away from, so flight and and there's, I can't just freeze like that's not going to help either, but I can definitely sacrifice my own needs, make my caregiver or guardian or whoever it is. I'll make them happy, I'll please them at the expense of myself. This is my highest shot of survival, right? And so if my brain did that, and it did that for several years, well, naturally I'm going to grow up as an adult thinking that it's normal, I'm going to think it's my personality, I'm going to shame myself, I'm going to think there's something wrong with me. Of course, I'm going to think that would ask what? How could I think differently when it's all I ever knew? And so the big lesson here that I want to share with you is that, well, people pleasing is not your personality.

Speaker 1: 4:34

People pleasing does not mean that you are weak. It does not mean you're a pushover. It doesn't mean you're a walkover. It doesn't mean you're anything that you thought, maybe that it meant. It doesn't mean you're a sook. It doesn't mean you're not strong, none of that. And if someone tells you otherwise, tell them to go check themselves and go study some science. Alright, because I'm sick and tired of hearing people preach shit that I don't understand, and it's harming people's recovery, harming people's growth. Right, if you're with me, you're with me? Are you with me? Aren't we done with people sending the wrong, accurate message? Right, because I'm so passionate about this, because I was shamed.

Speaker 1: 5:13

Right, I thought there was something inherently wrong with me not realizing, until you know, 26 plus years being on planet Earth where I'm like, oh my God, me being a people pleaser, me being so manipulative, me constantly trying to control people's perceptions over me, doesn't mean I'm a bad person. It's literally a stress response. And a stress response is a survival response. My brain had to adapt and it found that the safest, most effective way for me to survive my childhood and my perceived threats was for me to fawn, which just means to please and appease right, to befriend the enemy, so to speak, or befriend the threat right. And so me not realizing that most of my suffering wasn't that I was a people pleaser. The suffering was that I felt like there was something wrong with me. I thought that I was such a bad person. I thought I was weak, I thought I was a souk, I thought I was fragile, like. No, I wasn't, it was just again a stress response.

Speaker 1: 6:22

But you can imagine, if I'm stuck in that stress response, which I was again for most of my life, then it's going to now also harm me to literally be a people pleaser and I actually discovered and recovered from people pleasing by accident. I actually didn't realize that I was a people pleaser by the way, I don't know if you've ever experienced that but I didn't even know I was a people pleaser. And then we tell you how I found out by accident, it was when the C word happened, in 2020, right, I was having the time of my life. I'm not going to lie. Obviously, I don't mean to be insensitive to the shit that was happening in the world I'm talking about selfishly for a moment. Ok, if you are a people pleaser, then you might relate to this, where now you have a socially acceptable reason to say no, you like, if you know, you know, okay, oh, all of a sudden, like I felt free. I felt like a free woman. I'm like, oh, oh, I can finally take care of myself. I can finally, you know, stop being at the I guess, I don't know beckon call of literally every other person on the planet but me. You know, I could finally do the things that I've always wanted to do. Man, I was loving life and I felt guilty for it, and obviously has nothing to do with my Empathy and compassion to what was going on in the world. Of course, my heart was with everyone who suffered during that time, but we're not talking about right now.

Speaker 1: 7:50

I'm trying to point a paint picture here. I'm trying to create a point that I I discovered I was people plays of my accident. Because why is it that for the first time in my life, during that time where we because in Melbourne we were in lockdown, you know, like we couldn't even like leave to see a friend, like it was like full on, okay, you, if you, if again, if you know? You know, I noticed that when I had no, I had a socially acceptable reason to not have to do anything for anyone, not have to Sacrifice my needs in any which way or form. I said they're going wait, what is going on here? Like, why on earth do I feel like this? Why is everyone else kind of like, disappointed, like why am I low-key, really fucking happy that I don't have to, you know, answer to anyone, and I guess that's what got me to snap out of my denial.

Speaker 1: 8:39

You know I've been caught at people pleaser before, but I didn't. I'm like, no, I'm not. You know, I'm a tough bitch, you know, and I am a tough bitch okay, but it doesn't matter for you a tough bitch. If you, if you've got a nervous system Okay, and your nervous system, especially when you're a kid, found the only way it was safe was for you to Fawn and be a people pleaser, then you're gonna know that stress response all too well. If you're gonna think it's a part of your personality and you're gonna think that every time you say no, something dangerous will happen. Okay and so, anyway, my point here is that I decided to admit it to myself, and I'm glad I did, because we can't truly transcend or transmute or recover from something if we don't admit that we have the problem in the first place.

Speaker 1: 9:24

Right and so, from here, like I was just sort of like really struggling at this point, because at this point this was you know about yeah, it was four years ago I still hadn't gotten to that point where I Felt good or or neutral about it. I was really, really riddled of shame Because I didn't understand it yet. I didn't understand that it was a stress response. And so, obviously, when I understood it and I realized, oh my goodness, no wonder why I can't recover from it because I tried to recover from it, you know, because I didn't understand it. I was recovering it from it from, like, a Standpoint of this is my personality and I need to change who I am, sort of thing. You know, I didn't see it as, oh like literally anyone who feels a perceived threat If you, if my brain thinks I'm in danger, okay, and it doesn't feel like it can fight or flight or freeze, it's naturally gonna succumb to some form of sacrificing my own needs To protect myself, to keep myself alive.

Speaker 1: 10:31

And it's not a conscious decision, it's not voluntary, I don't see they're going. I'm gonna resort into my people pleasing behavior. And so you see now, when I say, when I said to you at the beginning of this episode, that, by right, my definition of recover is not what most people call recovery, because it makes no sense me to say that I'm never I, me being recovered as a people pleaser means I'm never, ever gonna resort to that kind of behavior. That's bullshit. Because I am probably gonna resort to that behavior if my body thinks that it's the right thing to do in that moment, even if it's not the quote-unquote right thing. It's a stress response.

Speaker 1: 11:06

Do you see the difference here, you know, because when, when it happens now, I'm straight away aware of it and instead of me shaming myself, I just, oh, I'm just my body is stressed and it thinks that, you know, this is the only way to cope. Cool, and in that moment I am in control, right, because I'm aware of it. And so there's that. And then in my everyday life, like I, it's taken some time, like it's taken some time from my nervous system to learn that it's safe. So it's more so me, the way I've recovered from people pleasing, like in a way where it's no longer debilitating my life.

Speaker 1: 11:45

Do you see how before I said, like that's recovery, it's when that thing that you were struggling with is no longer debilitating your life. Because it was, remember, I literally felt like I had never had a time to myself where I could put myself first, until I had no choice to because of a frickin lockdown. You know what I'm saying. And, like you can see now why it makes no sense to define recovery in any other way, because once again, it's sort of I want to say sort of it's sort of impossible to never people please again, not even for a moment, because it's part of the form response, which is a stress response, you know it's more so. How? What is my relationship to that? It's more so. How do I cope with that? It's more so. Do I do this in my everyday life anymore? And no, I don't. And look, sometimes I do.

Speaker 1: 12:30

If I'm dysregulated, if I'm just not thinking straight which is me dysregulated, then yes, I am going to engage in that behavior sometimes, but it's not debilitating me anymore. It's not who I am. Like I can see the separation. Like I can see that it's not Christina in her personality. It's Christina stressed, right, christina thinks that she's in danger and so this is what my body is doing, right, to befriend this person, to act like a punching bag. This is where my monitoring behavior came from. Like I had a very big monitoring complex that's for another episode which I believe is completely linked to the form response but I was stuck in that response right For a long time, for most of my life, I could say. And so I just I wish that I was taught this when I was younger.

Speaker 1: 13:21

I wish that I understood that whenever, you know, I felt like something came over me and I had no control over my mouth and body to literally sacrifice my own needs, that it had nothing to do with my willpower or my weakness or my personality or my self-worth, that it was again, for fuck's sake, it was just me being stressed, right, and that's it. And if you are going through that repeatedly, like if you grow up, you know, you know repeatedly going through some form of abuse, some form of neglect or something like this, then that's when it becomes debilitating, right, because your body, in a way, is constantly triggered, which means it doesn't even have a chance to regulate, so it does become almost like stuck. And the way I kind of imagine it is sort of like. Imagine like your car just being stuck on neutral, you know you can't move the gears into drive, it's a park or whatever else. Like that's how I view, like a chronic people, please are you know.

Speaker 1: 14:23

And I think that if you know, if you know that it's not you're not weak, that it's not your personality, right, that if you know this, like I'm telling you right now, like most of your suffering will ease because you will actually have a better understanding and awareness of the problem itself, because I'm not the only one, like even when I was practicing as a therapist and I had clients who went through this and they learn, oh like, wait, so I'm not weak, so I'm not this pushover because I chose to Like it is so much of their suffering so much. And they were empowered again, they were in control and because of that awareness, because of that knowledge, of course they could recover and remember they recovered in the definition that I have it that it was no longer something that was debilitating them. It wasn't, they weren't abandoning themselves anymore. They weren't, Because that's what it is like, that's where it comes from.

Speaker 1: 15:23

Someone who's constantly abandoning themselves, someone who's constantly murdering themselves, someone who's constantly acting like a punching bag and has no conscious control over it, like it's not voluntary. You know that can cause so much shame, so much shame, so much guilt, so much resentment, and it just keeps you stuck in this vicious cycle which makes you want to people please more, even though that's the one thing you want to stop doing. You know, and I hope that you also find so much ease and hope and courage and happiness, even truly like. I really wish that for you and if you're someone who has gone through people pleasing and you have felt shame and you thought that there was something wrong with you, I really truly hope from the bottom of my heart that you have so much ease from this conversation, because I did say to you I really hope for you that you walk away from this a different person and a more evolved version of you, a more kinder version of you, so you can understand that it's not your personality like.

Speaker 1: 16:26

And recovery does not mean you never go through the thing again, okay. And if you think that recovery means that you're perfect, then you have a type of anxiety that causes you to believe that perfectionism is the only way that you're loved. Okay, that's not true. Recovery is when that thing that you are recovering from is no longer debilitating you. It's very different. Yeah, recovery and healing are also two different things, and I think I'm going to make a whole separate episode on just that.

Speaker 1: 16:55

But, like for now, what I'm really wanting you to take away from today's episode is for you to understand that number one people pleasing is not your fault. It is not necessarily something you chose to be, it doesn't mean you're weak, and that it's literally a stress response that your body assessed at one point in your life, or will assess in another point in your life, that the safest way for you to survive. The perceived threat in your current environment is to sacrifice your own needs, and sacrificing your needs is the action of people pleasing behavior, and that I can confidently tell you that I'm a recovered people pleaser, because now I have no shame in saying no. But being recovered doesn't mean I will never people please, because, once again, people pleasing is a stress response and when you have the awareness that it's not your personality right, it's not it doesn't mean you're weak, it's not something you chose, it's just a foreign response yeah, then it's no longer debilitating you in your life. You know, and it just becomes this thing that you have awareness of. You know how to handle and when it happens, you don't freak out.

Speaker 1: 18:07

And every single time you are triggered and your people pleasing behavior comes out, and every time you stay grounded and you have that awareness. You don't let it take over you. You don't let the animal inside of you run the show. For you. Guess what that is? You recovering because your brain and nervous system become less sensitive towards stresses, and I always say this. But every single time you regulate yourself and you shift your response to whatever thing you're struggling with. You are making yourself more resilient and on a chemical, biological level. You are literally expanding your window of tolerance for stress. Yeah, like that's huge. That's huge, like every single time. Let me say that again. Every single time you regulate yourself. Every single time you do that. It is like a muscle. You are getting stronger and it is not a waste of your time. Your ability to regulate naturally with ease and adapt to your environment, to adapt to high pressure situations. You become stronger. Life doesn't change. You don't have a fear of stress anymore. You yourself get stronger that you don't really give three fucks if you're stressed. You don't give five fucks if someone triggers you, because your body and nervous system becomes so resilient and strong. You yourself, in your mind, become so confident because of all the reps you put in with your self trust that it creates a new cycle. But it's not vicious this time. This time it's the good kind of cycle. It's a cycle where you just become a fricking, growing and evolution machine.

Speaker 1: 19:50

So I hope you enjoyed today's episode and I'm sending my love to you. Please know once again there's nothing to be ashamed of. It's not who you are and any person who's ever gone through it. They're just the person who the nervous system assessed that the perceived threat that you are under required you to sacrifice your own needs. That's all it meant. And if you had to do that a lot as a child, then growing up into adulthood, naturally that was going to affect the way you behaved. It's going to affect the way you perceived stress and people and relationships. It's going to affect your behavior. And that awareness is your first step. Now that you know that this is not something to do with your personality, that you're not weak. Well then, guess what? Everything changed from here. Everything changes for you right now.

Speaker 1: 20:38

Like I'm so serious and I wanted to wrap up this episode by letting you know and remember that honestly, if you didn't really want to do anything different and just have this awareness, this will already support you more than fricking 10 years of therapy of someone who doesn't understand that people pleasing is not a fricking personality trait, and it becomes a personality trait because its origin comes from a dysregulated nervous system that is stuck in a form stress response. I love you so much. You're not alone. Thank you for being here. Please send this to someone who you know could really benefit this. As always, I want to remind you that I can't do this alone. This community grows because of you, and I'd really, really appreciate your love and support in sharing the messages that we have to say here at Hot Genius Podcast by you sharing this with someone that you know will benefit from the things we learned today. Very much love and until next time, bye.