A lot of times while working with clients, I have observed that the struggle to set healthy boundaries is one of the most common issue. There are people who struggle to take their needs into consideration and focus on other people’s needs more than their own needs, due to which they people please in relationships. If this goes on for a very long period of time, it can lead to resentment, emotional exhaustion, and other mental health issues like anxiety and depression.
There are a lot of different reasons why individuals become people pleasers in the first place. If people had a childhood where their needs were constantly neglected, or if they grew up around authority figures who were abusive, controlling, and gave them a hard time for expressing their needs and boundaries. In such cases, the individual forms this belief in childhood that expressing their needs is unsafe, their needs don’t matter, and they need to constantly need to people please and over give in order to get other people’s approval at the cost of their own needs and boundaries.
It is important to note that most of the time, people pleasing is a survival strategy, not a personality flaw. I have observed, lot of my clients judge themselves harshly for being unable to set boundaries and don’t understand why it is easy for others to set boundaries, but they are unable to do it. They often feel taken for granted in their relationships and feel they are over extending themselves in the relationship without getting anything in return. The eventually causes resentment overtime which can show up in different ways. For some people, it expresses itself somatically, where they experience physical symptoms like body aches, some eventually have an emotional outburst, some keep repressing their feelings and pretending everything is fine, etc.
In order to heal from this, we need to explore the person’s past experiences and what caused them to develop this habit in the first place. It is important for people to develop self-compassion and gain understanding about their past wounds. Then we gradually work on some actionable steps to learn to set boundaries first in healthy relationships and later on with more challenging individuals. It is important to move at the pace of the individual’s nervous system instead of trying to push the healing process. Setting boundaries is not about being selfish or rigid, as some people think. It is more about considering yourself, valuing your needs, and being connected with yourself while being in a relationship with others.
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