People-Pleasers Start Out As Parent-Pleasers
Selflessness may earn us love and acceptance, but it comes with a cost
I used to wear my selflessness like a badge of honor. It was my best trait, the thing I prided myself on most.
I was the person who always said yes. The friend who listened and gave advice. The daughter who always made time for family. The partner who never complained, no matter how unhappy she was. The student and coworker juggling a million things at once, dedicating herself to countless causes and projects, regardless of what was going on in her personal life.
In my mind, being there for everyone else was a reflection of my worth. It felt good to be needed, to earn that external validation.
But there’s a dark side to that kind of selflessness. Giving, and giving, and giving… it comes with a cost. A heavy, painful cost: our mental, emotional, and physical health.
Over time, I began to feel the weight of that sacrifice pressing down on me, suffocating me. I started to notice the cracks forming beneath the surface—anxiety creeping in, exhaustion following me everywhere. My mind and body were screaming for a break, yet I ignored them, convinced that my worth was tied to my ability to keep giving.
It was during this struggle that I finally asked myself: why am I like this?
I always thought my people-pleasing was just part of who I was, something innate, a natural extension of my personality. It felt as if being accommodating and selfless was embedded in my very being.
But as I dug deeper, it became clear that I couldn’t have been more wrong.
See, people-pleasing doesn’t come from nowhere. It’s a survival mechanism, a response to the environment we grow up in. It's a way of navigating relationships, rooted in the belief that love and acceptance are conditional, granted only when we meet the needs and expectations of others.
And that belief has roots. Deep roots that trace back to our childhood and the dynamics that shaped our understanding of love.
The Price of Peace
It starts early. You learn that you’re “good” when you keep quiet, helpful when you anticipate needs before they’re voiced, lovable when you don’t ask for too much.
You pick up on the subtle cues—the way your parents react with smiles and praise when you’re obedient, rewarding you for putting their needs first, even when it means suppressing your own feelings. The way their voices soften when you go along with their plans, creating a sense of warmth and approval that feels like love.
But when you dare to say no or express your genuine feelings, the atmosphere shifts. You feel the tension in the air, the anger in their eyes. You sense it in the way their smiles disappear, replaced by glares that cut through you like daggers. Sometimes, their anger bursts forth in a harsh tone that makes your stomach drop, leaving you scrambling for words to make it right. Other times, they retreat into a chilling silence, making it painfully clear that your honesty has severed the connection.
You can almost hear the unspoken messages: Your truth is unwelcome here. Your thoughts and feelings are irrelevant. And worse—they come with consequences.
In those moments, vulnerability feels like a betrayal. Instead of feeling genuinely seen and heard, you feel like there’s something wrong with you. As if you didn’t have the right to express yourself or share your true self with others.
So, you learn to swallow your truth, convincing yourself that it’s safer to keep the peace than to risk losing their love. You become a master at anticipating their needs and desires, molding yourself into the child they want you to be.
And slowly, without even realizing it, you begin to build a version of yourself that exists to keep the peace, to earn approval, to make others happy.
Attachment vs Authenticity
Dr. Gabor Maté, a trauma expert and one of my favorite authors, has a way of cutting straight to the heart of why we are the way we are. His work dives deep into the roots of childhood conditioning, trauma, and how our earliest environments shape our sense of self.
According to him, we all start out with two basic emotional needs: attachment and authenticity.
Attachment is the need for connection, for feeling loved, safe, and close to our caretakers. As infants, it’s the only thing that matters—our survival depends on it. We’re wired to seek this closeness because, without it, we can’t thrive.
Then there’s authenticity. That’s our ability to be true to ourselves, to feel and express our real thoughts, needs, and emotions. Authenticity is how we stay connected to who we really are and what feels right for us. When we’re in touch with our authenticity, we know where our boundaries are; we understand when something doesn’t sit right or when we need something different. It’s an anchor to our inner selves.
Ideally, both needs would coexist. If we had emotionally mature, unconditionally loving parents, attachment and authenticity wouldn’t be in conflict. We’d feel safe to express our real feelings without fear that love and acceptance would be taken away. We’d be seen and valued for exactly who we are.
But for so many of us, these needs collided early on. Maybe we’d try to speak up, to show a little bit of who we really were, only to be met with anger, disappointment, or even indifference. Maybe they said things like, “Why can’t you be more like…” or “Stop being so sensitive.”
These moments left an impression that ran deep. We began to believe that our needs were too much, that our boundaries were a nuisance, that our real selves weren’t worth holding onto if it meant rocking the boat.
Dr. Maté says,
“Parents convey these messages all the time. Not because they mean to, not because they don’t love the child, not because they’re not trying to do their best, but because they themselves are suppressed, or traumatized, or hurt, or stressed.
So, we learned to adapt. To play the role.
We buried parts of ourselves to keep our parents happy, thinking this was just how love worked. We became good at reading the room, anticipating moods, and making ourselves small. And while these behaviors helped us survive our childhoods, they don’t just disappear when we grow up. They become our default settings — who we think we have to be.
When you’re a kid, the need for attachment overshadows everything. You’re not even aware of authenticity as something you’re “choosing” to sacrifice; you just know you need to feel loved, so you start performing. You sense what your parents want from you—what makes them happy, proud, calm—and you do your best to fit that mold. When they react poorly to your genuine feelings or boundaries, you learn that being true to yourself comes with a cost.
So, as kids, we make a choice we don’t even realize we’re making: we cling to attachment, letting authenticity slip away. And the scary part is, this choice shapes us well into adulthood. We grow up never learning how to honor our own needs, to trust our own voices. We carry the belief that love and acceptance come only when we’re who others want us to be, not who we truly are.
And over time, that belief gets lodged so deep, it starts to feel like the truth.
Selflessness used to be my pride and my purpose. But now I see it for what it really was: a way of erasing myself, one small sacrifice at a time.
Because that’s what selflessness means: the absence of Self. But we’re supposed to have a Self! We’re supposed to honor our own needs, feelings, and emotions. We’re supposed to listen to our intuition, to develop our own values, to have space to just be—without needing to make ourselves small to survive.
As Dr. Gabor Maté says, “the loss of self is the essence of trauma”. And that’s exactly what this kind of selflessness can do—it carves away our core, our sense of who we really are. It teaches us to ignore our instincts, silence our voices, and let go of the most fundamental parts of ourselves just to keep the peace.
Healing, for me, has meant reclaiming that Self. It’s meant allowing myself to take up space, to say no, to listen to the parts of me I once ignored. It’s learning that I don’t have to live for others to be worthy of love. I can live for myself, honor my own needs, and still be whole.
Turns out, I’m someone worth showing up for—someone I’m proud to know.
And so are you.
Thank you for reading 🤍
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This is the exact journey I’m on right now. I’ve been calling it my reclamation era. I grew up as a people pleaser, that disappointment in adults eyes when I didn’t act or say what they expected hit me hard and I would avoid that at all costs. This followed me into adulthood and into my marriage. Luckily my husband was brave enough to point it out that both of us seemed to be acting in ways to just please each other and it we were suppressing our authenticity with each other which has shown up in many different ways. We have come to a point where we are both supportive of each other reclaiming our authenticity in proximity but aware that it may not leave us together in the end. It’s definitely a strange journey to be on but I am feeling the benefits.
You have perfectly captured my childhood. I am now in my 50s and figured out 2 years ago I didn't know who I was. I thought I would be a mother, but that is not the case. I did have some boundaries but have many more now. Also, I am the first daughter in my family so I show symptoms of parentification too.