Dr Kristina Tickler Welsome of The Key to Wellness and The Key Publishing House On How to Recover From Being a People Pleaser
An Interview With Brooke Young & Yitzi Weiner
Love and honor your own self as you do for everyone else in your life. Make sure to take care of yourself first. Make sure the oxygen mask is on by taking a pause and some deep breaths, filling your cup, and then sharing your love and care with others from a resourced place. Rest, recovery, sleep, and pauses can create time and space for radical self-care.
In today’s society, the tendency to prioritize others’ needs and expectations over one’s own can lead to significant emotional and psychological challenges. In this series, we would like to explore the complex dynamics of people-pleasing behavior and its impact on individual well-being and relationships. We would like to discuss the root causes of people-pleasing behavior, its effects on personal and professional life, and practical steps for cultivating healthier relationships and self-esteem. We hope that this series can provide insights, strategies, and real-life experiences that can help individuals navigate and overcome the pitfalls of being a people pleaser. As part of this series, we had the pleasure of interviewing Dr. Kristina (Tina) Tickler Welsome DPT, NBC-HWC.
Dr. Kristina Tickler Welsome DPT is a Doctor of Physical Therapy, a Health & Wellness coach, and the owner of The Key to Wellness and The Key Publishing House. Tina integrates human development, personality, growth, and healing with the heart, mind, spirit, and body to holistically guide you on your own transformative healing journey. She is the author of LOVE(d), an international bestselling book about the key to unlocking your true potential to create and live an authentic life you love. Tina helps you realize you are the courageous author holding the pen to edit, rewrite, and turn the page in the story of your healthier and more joyous life.
Thank you so much for your time! I know that you are a very busy person. Our readers would love to “get to know you” a bit better. Can you tell us your “Origin Story”? Can you tell us the story of how you grew up?
I grew up as the oldest child of a four person family — my biological mother and father, my 8 years younger brother, and me. My parents had lived in Wisconsin, but left due to the Air Force and spent some time living in Turkey, until they returned to the United States and settled in Northern California. We were a close-knit family unit, and very involved in and supported by a family of choice my parents created from the friends and families they met through our Catholic Church. I was raised with the expectations of being a good girl, of turning the other cheek, and of being attuned to the needs of my parents, brother, teachers, priests, nuns, and classmates. I strove to meet this ideal. For a long time, I believed that pleasing others was something children should do, and definitely something females should do. To be pleasing was to be nice, to be helpful, to keep the peace and to not be a problem. I was under the mistaken impression that if I could be what others needed me to be, they would be happy with me and I would be loved. If I was good enough they would approve of me. If I got good grades, I would get into graduate school and get hired and promoted to a good job. I would be selected by a life partner and would be respected, supported, and loved. All of this may have sounded good on the surface — unless the truth is that my own needs were not being met. The problem then was that I wasn’t chosen, selected, promoted, respected, or loved for who I actually am. All of the things I was striving to be were based on an inauthentic, false persona of who I thought I was supposed to be. And as a result, I never actually felt understood, chosen, or loved.
Can you tell us a bit about what you do professionally, and what brought you to this specific career path?
My professional career includes being a Doctor of Physical Therapy, an Author, a Coach, an Entrepreneur, and my most important role is being a mother of three boys. I find myself challenged on a daily basis with providing care, love and support to those around me, while also working to meet my own physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual needs. I was raised that to be selfless and giving was the ideal, but when the cup you pour from runs dry, you end up reflecting on what impact that has. I wanted to help others feel better, feel seen, and feel heard, but I was doing so at a cost to myself. Learning to know myself, respect my own needs and limitations, and communicate them in my relationships and career is an ongoing daily commitment. I am dedicated to serve and give care the best way I know how, while also honoring my Self in the process..
Thank you for all that. Let’s now turn to the main focus of our discussion about People Pleasing. To make sure that we are all on the same page, let’s begin with a simple definition. What does “People Pleaser” mean to you?
We like to think of people pleasing as a good-hearted desire to make others happy. In truth, it’s often the symptom of a deeper wound within the core of us, stemming from insecure childhood attachment, trauma, or a lack of self-worth. Seeking to stay safe, accepted, liked, and loved, people pleasing becomes an unconscious and habitual way of being in our lives. We want to be a nice person, be approved and belong and we fear being selfish, disliked, rejected, or abandoned. People pleasing and codependency are dominated by a need or desire to make others happy even at the expense of your own needs and desires. You may have a sense of “I’m ok if you’re ok”. People pleasers have a hard time saying no or showing disagreement and often assume responsibility and apologize, even when the situation is not their fault. Not wanting to disappoint or let others down, they offer help or assistance when they would really rather say no or don’t have the resources to offer. People pleasing is rampant in society as many of us learned it as a strategy in childhood to ensure we were safe, got our needs met, and were loved by our parents. As adults, we continue to use it as an ineffective strategy of trying to prove we are good enough and worthy of love.
On the surface, it seems like being a person who wants to please others is a good thing. Can you help articulate a few of the challenges that come with being a people pleaser?
People pleasers take pride in being needed — giving advice and counsel, being helpful, and offering to put others’ needs before their own. These habitual behaviors are often driven by an insatiable need for external approval and validation of their self-worth. Agreeing when you think differently or disagree may keep the peace, but it takes you out of integrity with yourself. Assuming responsibility to ensure all things are taken care of can be exhausting and enable others into learned helplessness, which means you will keep having to be the responsible party. Taking the blame when it doesn’t belong to you and apologizing when it isn’t your fault is a heavy burden to carry. Not wanting to say “no” to others means you often are saying no to yourself, which can lead to fatigue, resentment, and self-abandonment of your own dreams and goals. The constant attempts to please others, even when they haven’t asked anything of you, depletes your energy stores. When you don’t receive recognition or praise for your efforts, you lose sight of yourself, don’t learn how to self-validate, and fail to meet your own needs.
Does being a people pleaser give you certain advantages? Can you explain?
People pleasers tend to be seen as friendly, polite, and easy-going which can lead to an ability to make friends easily and have influence on others. Being sensitive and able to discern how others feel or what they need can certainly be useful in relationships and caretaking roles and professions. Being “pleasing” may gain you entry and membership into certain groups. However, it often comes at the cost of silencing your own voice to get along, keep the peace, or avoid conflict. Ultimately this does not promote the true connection or belonging we most desire.
Can you describe a moment in your life when you realized that your own people-pleasing behavior was more harmful than helpful?
I realized the harm of my behavior when I recognized my marriage was completely imbalanced and unhinged. My entire sense of being was wrapped up in whether or not my ex-husband was happy. He was not often happy. When he wasn’t, my children and I were blamed for that. As the mother, I was most to blame because if I couldn’t be perfect, control the kids, and keep them in line, then we weren’t pleasing him. We were the source of his unhappiness. At some point, I came to realize that I was so unhappy that I wasn’t sure how to even carry on with life anymore. I did not feel at all loving or compassionate towards myself. I judged myself a failure as a woman, wife, and mother. I wasn’t showing up as the mother I wanted to be for my three sons. All of this felt harmful to my health and wellbeing and to the health, growth, and maturity of my children. It was obvious that despite my self-abandonment and all the energy I spent people pleasing — ultimately I had not pleased my ex-husband and was not able to provide him with the life he wanted — it had incurred a great cost.
In your opinion, what are the common root causes of people-pleasing behavior?
People pleasing is rampant in society as most of us learned it as a necessary and normal survival strategy in childhood to ensure we were safe, got our needs met, and were loved by our parents. We learned to pay attention to and read the energy of the adult caregivers who were responsible for us. We did our best to be pleasing to them so that they would love us, keep us safe, feed us, and let us stay within the family. Ultimately, we wanted to avoid being rejected and abandoned. As much as these strategies may have helped us survive in childhood, they don’t serve us well as we move into adulthood. Ideally, as we grow into healthy mature adults, we learn more secure interdependent ways of relating and communicating with friends, family, intimate partners, and colleagues. If not, we either rebel against this learned behavior as an adult and lean towards hyper-independent and avoidant behavior, or continue to use people pleasing and codependent behavior as an ineffective strategy of trying to prove we are good enough and worthy of love. This indirect and inauthentic method of giving and receiving love leaves us feeling unseen, unsatisfied, and often resentful as well. Knowing our true inherent worth, becoming aware of our legitimate wants and needs, learning to communicate directly and effectively, and being prepared to manage and repair the inevitable conflict that arises in any human relationship will allow a people pleaser to become empowered to develop genuine connection in relationships. Learning to be present with and alchemize the emotions that arise when our Fight-Flight-Fawn-Freeze Response is activated so that we can be present with our own needs is critical for a people pleaser to be able to improve both their personal and professional lives.
How does people-pleasing behavior impact personal relationships?
We are very aware of the overt harm that is done in relationships when there is abuse, whether it be physical, emotional, psychological, or sexual. We are starting to become more aware of the unconscious damage that occurs when people self-abandon by people pleasing or codependency. People pleasing teaches us to subvert our thoughts, feelings, wants, and needs as we lack the self-esteem necessary to speak truth to our parents, siblings, partners, friends, and children. This leads to dishonest inauthentic relationships because we are not showing up in relationships as our true selves. How can someone truly love you if they don’t even know the real you? We claim we want to be fully seen, heard, understood, accepted, and loved — yet people can only love us to the degree that we know and love and express ourselves.
How does people-pleasing behavior impact professional relationships?
Similarly to personal relationships, our professional relationships also suffer from the lack of direct and honest communication. People pleasers say yes when they mean no, fail to express what they honestly think, and stay quiet when they feel projects and decisions lack integrity, all of which can lead to resentment, moral injury, and to burnout.
How can long-term people-pleasing behavior impact an individual’s mental health?
Long-term people-pleasing behavior is detrimental to both the mental health of the people pleaser themself, as well as to those around them. When a human spends their life pleasing other people, they never allow themself to be seen for who they truly are. Therefore, they never feel accepted or loved for their genuine authentic self, which harms their self-esteem and their ability to attain their life’s calling and become the highest version of themself. It also harms those they are in a relationship with or work with as they never share all of the magic that they contain. Those around them never benefit from all they truly are. They likely sense this lack of authenticity. You also may not be reading them as well as you think, and are giving to them in ways they may not even want or need. The people pleaser gives all they have until they run out of love and compassion and hit rock bottom, where the resentment from never having the love and care returned hits them full force. This can lead to a sense of rejection and abandonment (the very thing they sought to avoid!) and confirms the sense of not being enough, not mattering, and not being worthy. People pleasers end up with an empty tank because they gave all their love and care away and did not provide the same to themselves.
In your experience, what is the role of self-awareness in overcoming people-pleasing tendencies, and how can individuals cultivate it?
Awareness is key. The people pleaser is often aware of these feelings but does not understand why this cycle repeats and the love they seek is not being returned as they hope or expect. Until you become aware of your thoughts, feelings, and behaviors you certainly can’t do anything to change them. Once you become consciously aware, you can reach for a different thought, be present with and feel the emotions that come up for you in order to heal them, pause, and choose a different way to respond…all of this will lead to a new and different outcome. Awareness is the first step in overcoming your people pleasing tendencies. Cultivate this awareness by looking at yourself and your daily interactions through this lens of people pleasing. When do I choose to please others? In what ways do I people please? What do I seek to gain when I act this way? How is it serving me? Am I giving freely out of the goodness of my heart or are there earrings attached? What do I hope to achieve? Is there a better way for me to connect, communicate, and collaborate with others to cultivate healthier, more interdependent relationships?
Based on your experience or research, what are the “Five Strategies Or Techniques That Can Help Individuals Break Free From The Cycle Of People-Pleasing”?
1 . Love and honor your own self as you do for everyone else in your life. Make sure to take care of yourself first. Make sure the oxygen mask is on by taking a pause and some deep breaths, filling your cup, and then sharing your love and care with others from a resourced place. Rest, recovery, sleep, and pauses can create time and space for radical self-care.
2 . Get to know your own thoughts, feelings, wants, needs, and desires. Give others the time and space to meet their own self and needs too, it’s amazing what empowerment can arise if you don’t jump in and save them. Instead of doing for them, use the time to turn that skill for tuning into the unsaid thoughts and emotions of others onto yourself. Get in touch with what you are thinking, feeling, and desiring so that you can take the next step and communicate it as a statement, need, or request from another.
3 . Learn to communicate this directly instead of actively people pleasing or using passive aggressive behavior in an attempt to be approved, liked, and loved. Instead of trying to earn or hoping someone will read your mind and meet your needs, take what you have discovered about yourself and use that knowledge to directly state or ask for it. Keep in mind that asking does not mean they will necessarily have the capacity or willingness to deliver, but at least they know what you want and can consider it. Who knows, you just might get it. Or something even better that you couldn’t have even imagined!
4 . Secure, healthy, interdependent relationships require agreed upon expectations, good communication, commitment to face and repair conflict, and collaboratively work together to create mutually satisfying solutions. Directly communicating your hurt or anger when someone hasn’t read your mind, or the built up resentment of them created by being the recipient of all your giving through the years may not be the complete solution to the problem. There may be a problem of unexpressed or agreed upon expectations. Especially if you gave what they never asked for, and expected something in return that they never promised! Stay present and curious in this conflict, making sure you both honestly communicate your perceptions and feelings, listening to the other in a non-defensive manner until they feel you have truly heard and understood them. Work together to collaborate, not concede or people please, until you arrive at a win-win-win (for them, for you, and for the relationship).
5 . Know that we all left childhood in a people pleasing codependent space — and that we can each go back and grow ourselves up from wherever we are into the sovereign and self-fulfilled adult we desire to be. If reading this article has triggered you into recognition of your own people pleasing behaviors — please stop with self-blame and shame right here. Not many of us mature through childhood and arrive in adulthood without some or all of them. So let’s normalize the people pleasing phenomenon and have full faith that we can go back to those inner child wounds and heal them in order to mature into the being we were meant to be.
What steps should people pleasers take to establish healthier boundaries?
Boundaries are not a line you draw in the sand and expect people not to cross. Your boundary is where you end and another person begins. To establish your boundaries, you need to know yourself. When you become more self-aware of your values, wants, and needs and offer yourself the same love, care, and compassion you so readily offer to others, then you can choose to be fully present with and for yourself and decide how best to interact with others. It makes both your “no” and your “yes” a whole lot more balanced. Honoring your desires and limitations first, before giving away all of your precious resources, will ensure that you respect your boundaries.
How can someone who is naturally empathetic maintain their compassion while becoming more assertive?
Most people are empathetic by nature, nurture, or both. It is easy to find compassion, provide care, nurture, and offer empathy to others…this makes us feel good about ourselves. People pleasers know how to be compassionate and assertive to take care of their loved ones or people in their care. I think the key here is to learn how to find a balance between how much we give to others to please them in an attempt to earn love, and how much we can become empowered to offer the love that we are to our self. Being assertive and showing compassion for ourselves, as much as we are conditioned to do for others will help us bring equity and mutuality back into our relationships.
What are the most common misconceptions about people pleasers, and how do these misconceptions affect their journey toward recovery?
The most common misconception about people pleasers is that they are “nice” people who put others before themself. This is not to say that anyone who engages in people pleasing behavior is not a good human — we don’t want to confuse their behavior with the divine being that they truly are. However, living in a martyr or victim space of thinking, “I’m so nice. I do for everyone else. Why don’t they do it for me? Why doesn’t all that I do for them make them like me, love me, treat me with respect?”, allows for hurt, disappointment, and resentment to set in. A false narrative is created that keeps people pleasers from recognizing the role they play in their own life stories. Disconnected from their sense of self, self-worth, and self-efficacy, they remain in a state of powerlessness and dissatisfaction with their relationships. In not taking accountability and personal responsibility, they think they are ”just being nice” and don’t realize that how they are behaving is dishonest and doesn’t allow for a healthy space of secure, mutually equitable communication, conflict resolution, and collaboration within a relationship.
What role can therapy or counseling play in helping individuals overcome people-pleasing behavior?
Counseling, therapy, or coaching can assist people pleasers in becoming aware of the role they play in their relationships. Such a safe, supported environment with a skilled healer, who can guide them to explore what they genuinely think, feel, and desire will empower them to know themself better. In a couples or family session, the people pleaser can be supported to find their voice and speak their truth, as well as process all of the emotions that may arise when they do so. Uncovering and healing old wounds, learning to be present with themself and others in the moment, and preparing for the discomfort that may arise as they speak the truth, establish or hold boundaries, and confront and repair conflict as needed may require learning new skills and plenty of practice.
You are a person of great influence. If you could start a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger. 🙂
I believe that healed people heal people, that relationships allow for the greatest space for healing to occur, and that healed people have the power to change the world. The change we need to see in our world must begin with a transformation within each of us individually. If we can go back to the holes in our human development, we can get to the core wound that needs to be healed in order to feel loved and secure in that love. When we do this, we can mature into the healthy and whole adult we were always meant to be. One who knows their worth, shows up authentically and confidently as themself, can express their thoughts, feelings, wants, needs, and desires, and can give equally as much as they receive in equitable, mutually supportive relationships.
How can our readers further follow your work online?
I would love to continue this exploration and discussion with you online — you can find me https://www.instagram.com/tinaticklerwelsome or at https://thekeytowellness.net/.
Thank you so much for sharing these important insights. We wish you continued success and good health!
About the Interviewers:
Brooke Young is a multipassionate publicist, public speaking mentor, and communication consulting. She works with a wide range of clients across the globe, and across a diverse range of industries, to help them create, develop, and promote powerful messages through heart-centered storytelling. She has formerly worked On-Air with FOX Sports, competed in the Miss America Organization, and is the Author of a Children’s Book. She frequently works with children as a professional speaker where she educates on Volunteering and Therapy Dogs. She has over a decade of professional performing background and finds joy in sparking creative passions for her clients.
Yitzi Weiner is a journalist, author, and the founder of Authority Magazine, one of Medium’s largest publications. Authority Magazine is devoted to sharing in depth “thought leadership interview series” featuring people who are authorities in Business, Tech, Entertainment, Wellness, and Social Impact.
At Authority Magazine, Yitzi has conducted or coordinated thousands of empowering interviews with prominent Authorities like Shaquille O’Neal, Peyton Manning, Floyd Mayweather, Paris Hilton, Baron Davis, Jewel, Flo Rida, Kelly Rowland, Kerry Washington, Bobbi Brown, Daymond John, Seth Godin, Guy Kawasaki, Lori Greiner, Robert Herjavec, Alicia Silverstone, Lindsay Lohan, Cal Ripkin Jr., David Wells, Jillian Michaels, Jenny Craig, John Sculley, Matt Sorum, Derek Hough, Mika Brzezinski, Blac Chyna, Perez Hilton, Joseph Abboud, Rachel Hollis, Daniel Pink, and Kevin Harrington
Yitzi is also the CEO of Authority Magazine’s Thought Leader Incubator which helps business leaders to become known as an authority in their field, by interviewing prominent CEOs, writing a daily syndicated column, writing a book, booking high level leaders on their podcast, and attending exclusive events.
Dr Kristina Tickler Welsome of The Key to Wellness and The Key Publishing House On How to Recover… was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.