Dr Margaret Paul of Inner Bonding Educational Technologies On How to Recover From Being a People Pleaser
An Interview With Brooke Young & Yitzi Weiner
Become aware of your feelings, which is Step 1 of Inner Bonding. This means moving your focus from your mind into your body and becoming aware of the pain of anxiety, depression, and the other painful feelings you likely feel when you abandon yourself and make others responsible for your feelings. It takes practice to move your focus from your mind and into your body, but this is essential for becoming aware of your feelings and learning to take responsibility for them.
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. Margaret Paul
Dr. Margaret Paul is an international bestselling author of 12 published books, a relationship expert, and co-creator of the powerful Inner Bonding® self-healing process. She has appeared on numerous radio and television shows, including Oprah, and has successfully worked with hundreds of thousands and taught classes and seminars around the world for over 54 years. See https://www.innerbonding.com
Margaret is a member of the Transformational Leadership Council.
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 an only child with an angry narcissistic mother and a father who was loving until I was 12, and then became sexually abusive, so I had to stay away from him. Being a highly sensitive and empathic child, I learned to turn into their feelings, but they were unable to be aware of or empathic about my feelings. I learned to be a very good girl, a people-pleaser, to avoid my mother’s anger.
By the time I was 5 years old, I was a wreck — anxious, nervous cough, nail-biting, with problems sleeping. My mother took me to a child psychiatrist, who, after speaking with each of us, told me to tell me mother not to yell at me. I remember thinking, “You tell her. I’m only 5 years old. She won’t listen to me.” My next thought was, “I can do a better job than you.” That’s the moment I decided to become a psychologist, and I never veered from this decision. Since, even as a child, people would seek my help, this was a natural choice for me.
School and friends were my saviors. I loved school and easily excelled, and I spent most of my time either outside or with my friends and their families. This allowed me to be away from my angry mother, controlling grandmother who lived with us, and my father.
Can you tell us a bit about what you do professionally, and what brought you to this specific career path?
I’m a psychotherapist, working with individuals, couples, families, and groups. I write books, teach workshops, have a bi-monthly Inner Bonding Masterclass, and offer many different courses. I worked as a traditional psychotherapist for 17 years and I wasn’t at all happy with the results with my clients, nor with the results of the many different modalities I had sought for myself. At that time, I started to pray for a teacher or for process that would work fast and deep, and at that time I met Dr. Erika Chopich. She had half the Inner Bonding process, and I had the other half. That was 40 years ago and since then, Inner Bonding has evolved into a very powerful self-healing process. It has completely changed my life and the lives of hundreds of thousands of people around the world. Now, all my work is centered around Inner Bonding.
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?
People-pleasing occurs when a person is trying to say and do the ‘right’ thing, perform ‘right’, and look ‘right’ in order to attempt to have control over how others feel about them. Instead of being their authentic self, they are giving themselves up, trying to be what they think others want and caretaking others to avoid rejection. People-pleasing has an agenda, which is to get approval, while true caring has no agenda and you are giving for the joy of giving.
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?
Trying to control how others feel about you is totally different than receiving joy out of caring about others. When you are people-pleasing, you are not being your true authentic self. You are operating from your ego wounded self that want to control others to get approval and avoid disapproval. You are working hard to impress others, essentially making others responsible for defining you as a good and worthy person. When you have not learned to define your own worth, you try to get your sense of worth through others’ approval. This is a very hard way to live. People pleasers often convince themselves that they are being loving, when instead they are trying to control others to give them the approval they are not giving to themselves. Instead of learning to take responsibility for their own feelings of self-worth and safety, they are handing to others the responsibility for these feelings. People pleasers are often approval-addicted, due to abandoning themselves.
Does being a people pleaser give you certain advantages? Can you explain?
I have never seen it give people any advantages. In fact, when people are dependent on others for their sense of self-worth, others often don’t have much respect for them and may treat them badly. They might be overlooked at work, and they might feel unappreciated at both work and in their relationships. They might find that others treat them the way they treat themselves, disregarding them as they are disregarding themselves, or judging them as they might be judging themselves.
Can you describe a moment in your life when you realized that your own people-pleasing behavior was more harmful than helpful?
This occurred for me when I was 45 years old. I was in a long marriage with three children, and I had been a people pleaser for my parents, my husband, my children, and my clients for many years. As a result of always trying to please others and not taking care of my own feelings and needs, I was very ill. I had been eating all clean organic food for many years, so I couldn’t understand why I was life-threateningly ill. When Dr. Erika Chopich and I created Inner Bonding with the help of our spiritual guidance, I realized that I was so sick because of abandoning myself and people pleasing others. As I learned to love myself instead of always trying to get others to love me and approve of me, my health returned. It was very challenging because many of the people I thought loved me were very angry that I was no longer caretaking them and instead I was taking responsibility for loving myself. Two of my three children were angry at me, and I lost my 30 years marriage, and my parents disowned me, but I got me back and my work soared. I’ve never regretted learning to love myself and give up people-pleasing.
In your opinion, what are the common root causes of people-pleasing behavior?
The root causes of people pleasing is self-abandonment. There are four major ways we abandon ourselves:
- We stay focused in our mind rather than in our body to avoid feeling our feelings and learning from them.
- We judge ourselves as a form of trying to control getting ourselves to be better.
- We numb our feelings with substance and process addiction.
- We make others responsible for our feelings of safety and self-worth.
How does people-pleasing behavior impact personal relationships?
People pleasing can seem to work for a while, but since the agenda of people-pleasing to get love and approval, if you don’t get this, you end up feeling used and resentful. And because people-pleasing is a form of control and most people don’t like feeling controlled, people-pleasing may create the opposite of what you want — it might create resistance. People who people please rarely feel happy and joyful. While giving to others from a heart full of love is joyful, if you are abandoning yourself instead of loving yourself by taking responsibility for your own feelings of self-worth, what you give to others isn’t love — it’s giving to get back what you are not giving to yourself. It doesn’t lead to happiness or joy.
How does people-pleasing behavior impact professional relationships?
Many of my clients wonder why people at work ignore them or treat them badly, and I help them to see that others may be treating them the way they are treating themselves. They may be over-working to gain approval and then wonder why others leave work on time yet get the promotions. People pleasing indicates a lack of self-respect, so others might not respect them. They often end up feeling resentful and used and decide to change jobs. But until they learn to love and value themselves, they will take themselves with them to the next job and likely create the same problems.
How can long-term people-pleasing behavior impact an individual’s mental health?
It can undermine your trust in yourself, creating much inner self-doubt. It perpetuates feelings of fear, insecurity, and inadequacy. It can create anxiety, depression, guilt, shame, anger, aloneness, emptiness, jealousy, and so on. As occurred with me, it can also create illness.
In your experience, what is the role of self-awareness in overcoming people-pleasing tendencies, and how can individuals cultivate it?
Self-awareness plays a huge role in healing people-pleasing. You cannot heal what you are not aware of. Inner Bonding is an amazing process for healing people-pleasing. Anyone can learn the 6-Steps of Inner Bonding to change their lives. The Inner Bonding process starts with learning to be aware of the painful feelings you will always feel when you are abandoning yourself and making others responsible for your feelings of safety and worth.
Here is the primary question of our discussion. 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”? If you can, please share a story or an example for each.
1 . Become aware of your feelings, which is Step 1 of Inner Bonding. This means moving your focus from your mind into your body and becoming aware of the pain of anxiety, depression, and the other painful feelings you likely feel when you abandon yourself and make others responsible for your feelings. It takes practice to move your focus from your mind and into your body, but this is essential for becoming aware of your feelings and learning to take responsibility for them.
2 . Open to learning. In Inner Bonding there are only two intentions possible in any given moment: the intent to control getting love and avoiding pain, or the intent to learn to love yourself and share your love with others. If you don’t consciously open to learning about your feelings, false beliefs that fuel your people-pleasing behavior, what is true and what is loving to you and to others, you will automatically be trying to control with people-pleasing, as well as with anger, blame, withdrawal, or resistance. This is what we all learned to do when we were growing up. This is Step 2 of Inner Bonding.
3 . Discover how you are treating yourself and what you are telling yourself that is causing your painful feelings. This means being honest with yourself that you are causing much of your own pain rather than being a victim of others’ choices. This is where you become aware of the false belief that you can control getting love and approval from others with people-pleasing. This is part of Step 3 of Inner Bonding.
4 . Open to learning with your higher self, your inner older wiser self, about what is true and about what would be loving to you. The loving actions for your highest good can be many different things, such as speaking your truth with someone, eating better, learning to listen to your own wants and needs, being honest about something, getting exercise, and so on. This is part of Step 4 of Inner Bonding.
5 . Take the loving actions. If you receive guidance about what is loving to you, but you don’t do it, then you are continuing to abandon yourself and nothing will heal. If you take a loving action, then tune into how you feel. If you have taken a loving action, you will feel some relief of painful feelings. This is Steps 5 and 6 of Inner Bonding.
What steps should people pleasers take to establish healthier boundaries?
Boundaries are what you set for yourself, not something you set for others. For example, saying to someone, “You can’t talk to me like that,” isn’t a boundary. It’s a form of control, but it doesn’t accomplish anything because you don’t have control over how someone else talks to you. A boundary would be, “When you talk to me that way, I will end the conversation and walk away. I don’t like being talked to like that.” You will naturally set loving boundaries for yourself as you learn to see, hear, understand, and value yourself.
How can someone who is naturally empathetic maintain their compassion while becoming more assertive?
Empaths do have a harder time being assertive, and the key is to first have empathy and compassion for yourself — for your own feelings. When you are able to be compassionate with yourself, you will naturally be assertive while maintaining compassion for others.
What are the most common misconceptions about people pleasers, and how do these misconceptions affect their journey toward recovery?
The most common misconception is that they are being loving when they are actually trying to control. This was a shock to me when I realized that I wasn’t being loving at all when I was giving myself up and people-pleasing. I wanted to be a loving person, who realizing that people-pleasing wasn’t loving was a big motivation for me to learn to love myself.
What role can therapy or counseling play in helping individuals overcome people-pleasing behavior?
Since this is what I do, I know that therapy or counseling can be hugely helpful in helping people learn to see and value themselves so that they are no longer dependent on others approval to feel they are okay. They will stop people-pleasing when they no longer need others’ approval to know they are lovable.
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’m doing my best to bring Inner Bonding to the world because I know how profoundly helpful it is to people. We offer a free Inner Bonding course on our website to get people started. They can learn Inner Bonding from my books, my courses, my Masterclass, from me personally, and from our many well-trained Certified Inner Bonding Facilitators. We have a wonderful world-wide online facilitator training program for people who want to help others heal through Inner Bonding. All of us are devoted to bringing the self-healing process of Inner Bonding to those who are ready to learn to heal the fears, false beliefs, and controlling behavior of their ego wounded self and become loving human beings.
All the problems in our world come from people’s ego wounded selves. Racism, misogyny, homophobia, violence, food insecurity, homelessness, and wars all come from the wounded self wanting to control — needing to feel one-up so as not to feel one-down. When people learn to love who they are in their true soul essence, they are then able to see and value the souls of others, as well as of animals and the planet. They move beyond fear, greed, and the need to control and into being loving and caring with themselves, with others, and with our planet.
How can our readers further follow your work online?
They can go to https://www.innerbonding.com. As I said, we offer a free course, other free help, thousands of articles, books, courses, my Masterclass, and personal sessions with me as well as from our other well-trained Certified Inner Bonding Facilitators.
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.
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