5 Bizarre (But Common) Phases in People-Pleasing Recovery
Recovering from people-pleasing can be an unpredictable journey.
After years of burnout and imbalanced relationships, you start naming your needs, setting boundaries, and making healthier choices. Naturally, you expect things to get better. Simpler. Less frustrating.
That’s why it can be totally disorienting when, months into your healing process:
Your healthy boundaries have turned into rigid walls
You want to withdraw from your social life for a month (or a year)
You’re suddenly more annoyed at everyone than you’ve ever been before
Everyone’s telling you “No, you’re the problem,” and for the life of you, you can’t decide if they’re right
You discover you don’t want the life you spent years or decades building
If you’re experiencing one of these phases, you might be wondering: Is what I’m experiencing normal? Am I getting this self-advocacy thing all wrong?
But I can assure you that you’re not alone. After coaching hundreds of recovering people-pleasers, I’ve noticed five common (but little-known) bumps in the road that come up again and again in folks’ recovery.
In this article, I’ll describe the five phases; explain how each actually plays a pivotal role in your recovery; and offer a few tips for how to navigate them so that you can continue healing with discernment and self-compassion.
(If you’re ready to learn how to stop over-giving and set boundaries with confidence, join me live on February 26 at my virtual workshop, Boundaries 101 for the Recovering People-Pleaser. Financial aid tickets are available.)
1) The Pendulum Swing
Most people-pleasers spend decades over-giving. Eventually, it drives you to bone-deep weariness, resentment, mysterious health concerns, or the painful dissolution of a relationship—and this experience of rock bottom often propels you into healing.
Whether you attend therapy, read an illuminating self-help book, or have a confronting talk with someone who can’t stand to see you neglect yourself any longer, seeing your patterns clearly sparks a surge of commitment to protect yourself at all costs.
You look back at your past and make a firm promise to yourself: “Never again.” And here, your pendulum may swing to the other side.
In your self-protective commitment, you may shift from being boundaryless to rigidly boundaried. You may go from over-extending for everyone to avoiding even the slightest inconvenient commitment. You may transition from tolerating all sorts of unhappy relationships to distancing from any relationship that contains even the slightest dissonance. You may pivot from focusing entirely on others’ happiness to focusing entirely on your own.
Some people feel a sense of righteous karmic balance on the pendulum swing: “I’ve focused on others for too long. Now, it’s my turn.”
Others feel disoriented and even afraid: “I need to put myself first right now, but I’m afraid of losing touch with my empathy. Will this go on forever?”
The pendulum swing, though a temporary over-correction, is not necessarily a bad thing. For many, it’s actually a necessary stage in the process of healing. By prioritizing yourself unequivocally, you develop self-trust: self-trust that you have the tools, the motivation, and the ability to take care of yourself properly.
This self-trust is refreshing after a lifetime of self-abandonment—and once you get a generous taste of it, your pendulum may naturally settle back into center. Once you trust yourself to honor your limits, you become more willing to be flexible; to strive for compromise; and to seek out conflict resolution in relationships with mismatched needs.
Be Warned:
While your desire for fierce self-protection is understandable, the pendulum swing can blind side your friends and family. The healthiest relationships involve compromise, conflict resolution, and ability to hold space for self and other—and foregoing these commitments in favor of self-prioritization can cause ruptures. Ultimately, the pendulum swing is an over-correction that may improve your self-relationship, but may negatively impact your interpersonal relationships.
Try This:
To the extent that you’re able, communicate the shifts that you’re needing in your healthy relationships with family, friends, and community-members. Explain that you’re going through a period of healing and clearly, kindly explain your limits and boundaries. For support developing an action plan to find your boundaries and communicate them to friends and family, join me on February 26 at my live workshop Boundaries 101 for the Recovering People-Pleaser. (Financial aid tickets are available.)
2) The Hermit Phase
In the Hermit Phase, you withdraw from the world for a while, eager for the calm and absence of conflict that comes from spending time in your own company. (The Hermit Phase can be an element of The Pendulum Swing, or a phase all its own).
Most enter the Hermit Phase after feeling completely run down by the outside world.
Perhaps you’ve reached a point of emotional or physical burnout after chronically bypassing your mind and body’s limits.
Maybe you’ve already been setting boundaries for a while, but all of those difficult conversations have been emotionally taxing. Self-advocacy is challenging work, and you may crave a temporary respite from the effort—and from the company of others—to regroup.
Or perhaps you’re entering the Hermit Phase because, like someone in the honeymoon stage of love, you’re investing deeply in a new relationship—and that new relationship is with you. After years of feeling disconnected from yourself, it’s thrilling to want to spend time in your own company—and you’re wanting to savor that sweet, foreign feeling.
When temporary, the Hermit Phase can be a valuable opportunity to reconnect with self, reduce distractions and triggers from the outside world, and rest.
Be Warned:
Connection and community are core human needs, and the Hermit Phase can easily become healing into isolation. The goal is not to become so good at taking care of yourself that you don’t depend or rely on anyone else. The goal is to become so good at taking care of yourself that you naturally gravitate toward reciprocal relationships where you can abundantly depend and rely on each other. If you notice yourself veering into hyper-independence, extreme self-reliance, or chronic judgment or cynicism, it can be a sign to remind yourself of the good that can come of healthy relationships.
Try This:
Make an effort to prioritize small, safe doses of connection to remind yourself that interpersonal relationships can feel restorative and energy-giving. If you’re feeling burnt out on relationships from your pre-Hermit Phase days, try prioritizing a novel connection, like grabbing coffee with a new friend or enrolling in a community class. Even a short conversation with the barista at local cafe can help remind you that connection can feel nurturing.
3) The Even-More-Annoyed-Than-Before Phase
Most of us expect healing to make us feel stronger, happier, and more resilient—so it’s disorienting when, months into the journey, you may find that you’re even more annoyed by others’ behavior than you were before.
Your friend’s insensitive comments hit a nerve. Your family member’s way of communicating drives you up a wall. Your boss’s trespasses of your boundaries feel utterly intolerable.
Everything and everyone around you drives you absolutely crazy.
Increased annoyance in longstanding relationships can be a sign that you’re finally acknowledging your (often long-ignored) needs and feelings. Instead of sweeping them under the rug, you’re allowing yourself to attune to your frustration, overwhelm, resentment, or hurt—and realizing which of your needs (respect, mutuality, balance, fairness) are going unmet in the connection.
This recognition usually leads to making requests around our unmet needs, or setting boundaries and limiting others’ access to us when they cannot meet our needs.
Increased annoyance may feel like a backslide—but it can be a indication that you’re raising your standards for how you want to be treated. The work you’ve been doing to heal has lowered your threshold for mistreatment—and ultimately, that’s a good thing.
Be Warned:
Behavior that doesn’t align with your needs isn’t always “mistreatment.” Disagreements, differences, and mismatches in needs are inevitable in all relationships—and they can be annoying or uncomfortable without necessarily being bad. (For an example of this kind of mismatch, check out my article about The Three Communication Differences.)
If we’re not careful, we can begin to see ourselves as victims, feeling personally attacked by natural mismatches in needs, desires, or communication styles between people—which can erode our relationships and narrow opportunities for healthy connection.
Try This:
Instead of basing your boundaries on the “goodness” or “badness” or others’ behavior, experiment with basing your boundaries on your current capacity: what you have the space, time, and emotional bandwidth for at this moment. It’s normal for your capacity to shift based on your schedule; your health; what you’re experiencing emotionally; even the season.
4) The “I’m The Problem” Cascade Effect
The Cascade Effect occurs when someone breaking out of dysfunctional cycles is told that they’re “the problem” in multiple relationships. As a result of compounding negative feedback, they begin to wonder if they’re too sensitive, and may doubt their self-advocacy efforts. Here’s how this one unfolds:
After years of being “the chill one” in your family, friend group, or workplace, you start speaking up about your needs and feelings.
Perhaps you name the elephant in the room in your family, set boundaries in the dysfunctional friend group, or speak up about toxic dynamics in the workplace.
Systems—whether they’re families, workplaces, or friend groups—tend to seek homeostasis. They resist being shaken up or disrupted. This is why, in dysfunctional systems, the person who speaks up about the dysfunction is usually scapegoated to be “the problem”: because nobody else is ready, or willing, to address it.
So, you receive feedback that “it’s not a big deal.” That “you are the one with the problem.” That “you are too sensitive.” And if you’re practicing assertive communication in multiple areas of your life—as most recovering people-pleasers are—you will likely receive this feedback from multiple sources.
This negative feedback can shake your confidence. After all, if your family, friends, and workplace are all telling you that “you’re too sensitive,” it must be true—right?
Not necessarily. This is the Cascade Effect in action, and when it happens, it’s important to zoom out and look at the big picture: you’ve been engaged in many dysfunctional systems, and when you were people-pleasing, that dysfunction got to stay hidden in the shadows.
Now, the relationships that depended on your silence to survive are threatened by your voice. But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t speak.
Be Warned:
Like we discussed in The Pendulum Swing, when you’re new to self-advocacy, it’s common to over-correct for your people-pleasing, erecting rigid walls and cutting off relationships indiscriminately. When you haven’t yet learned how to use a variety of tools for a variety of situations, you might always resort to a blunt hammer.
How we set boundaries matters, and if you’ve set a boundary with rage, vitriol, or uncompromising rigidity—especially in a generally healthy relationship— others might be justified in critiquing your approach.
Try This:
There are ways of communicating hard truths gracefully, compassionately, and honestly—in prosocial ways—and that’s ultimately what we’re aiming for. We’ll give you a toolbox of these boundary-setting approaches at Boundaries 101 for the Recovering People-Pleaser on February 26.
5) The “I Don’t Want The Life I Built” Phase
As you heal, you may suddenly realize that the life you spent years building no longer aligns with what you want, what you value, or the person you’re becoming. Ultimately, the “I Don’t Want The Life I Built” Phase can be explained by a shift in core values.
When you’re people-pleasing, you’re externally motivated. Disconnected from a core sense of self, you depend heavily on others’ approval to feel okay. Often, you internalize the values that your loved ones, institutions, and cultures tell you are important. (We all do this to a certain extent, but people-pleasers are especially prone to it.)
Values like harmony, achievement, fitting in, and security may become your unconscious inner compasses, propelling you toward certain relationships, careers, and lifestyles.
As you heal, you begin excavating your sense of self—and you likely find that you hold personal values that go against the grain. It becomes clear, for example, that you value authenticity more than harmony; community more than achievement; true connection more than fitting in. And as a result, the relationships, jobs, or lifestyles that were a match for you before don’t align with who you’re becoming now.
Like plants sprawling out from tiny pots, these shifts in values almost always include a process of outgrowing. Your new insides are demanding new outsides to match.
Because outgrowing your old life can involve a lot of discomfort for everyone involved, it’s normal to doubt or minimize the misalignment you feel: to see the transition not as an evolution, but as evidence of your personal deficits: too sensitive, ungrateful, selfish, broken, picky, etc. The logic is: “Maybe I can just change my dissatisfaction so I don’t need to suffer the discomfort of changing my circumstances."
But typically, ignoring the misalignment you feel only makes it louder. Eventually, you’re forced to accept that your new values are calling you in new direction—and it takes courage to heed that call!
(If this phase resonates with you, be sure to learn more about it in my article “Outgrowing What’s No Longer for Sure: 3 Steps for Brave Transitions in Relationships, Work, and Life.”)
Be Warned:
It can be tempting to completely pull the plug on aspects of your life that no longer align with your values. This approach can be useful when outgrowing toxic or harmful environments—but it neglects the fact that some misaligned situations can be changed by making smaller shifts from within. Some people-pleasers prematurely call it quits on a relationship, job, or community, only to later realize that it could have been happily salvaged with adjustments.
Try This:
If you want to give the situation a chance to succeed, experiment with divesting (pulling back) from values-misaligned aspects of the situation, and investing in values-aligned aspects of the situation. (I explain how to do this in my on-demand workshop Headed True North: Using Your Values as a Compass Through Transitions in Relationships, Work, and Life.)
Yes, what you’re experiencing is normal—and you’re in good company.
These bumps in the road may jostle you at first—but ultimately, you arrive on the other side with a stronger relationship to self; a clearer sense of your boundaries and non-negotiables; and a deepened appreciation for flexibility in your healing.
Knowing these bumps in the road are normal doesn’t always make them easier. As you practice speaking up for yourself, having support and hands-on guidance can help you move forward with confidence and self-trust. Click here to learn more about working with me one-on-one in private coaching .
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