You're listening to On Attachment, a place to learn about how attachment shapes the way we experience relationships and where you'll gain the guidance, knowledge and practical tools to overcome insecurity and build healthy, thriving relationships.

I'm your host, Relationship Coach Stephanie Rigg, and I'm really glad you're here.

Hey everybody, welcome back to another episode of On Attachment.

In today's episode, we are talking all about people pleasing.

So this is a topic that I've touched on before on the show

and is one that I'm sure a lot of people can relate to. It's one of those terms that I think

bounces around so much in the world of, you know, Insta therapy and lots of online content.

But I'm prompted to talk about this today by a question that I

received on Instagram yesterday, which was, how do I know if I'm a people pleaser or if I'm just

a nice person? And I thought it was a good question because for a lot of people, I think it can be

a little

confusing.

And something I see all the time is this tendency to almost police our own behaviors and worry

that, oh, am I being empathetic because I'm empathetic or am I being empathetic because

I'm manipulative or self-sacrificing and I think we can almost create

more anxiety for ourselves because we don't have clarity around what the difference is and

what distinguishes one thing from another. And I think, you know, spoiler alert, it's rarely

that we're one or the other. It's not that people pleasing

means you can't be a nice person. People pleasing is just one of many strategies that you might

have picked up along the way as a way to keep yourself safe, as a way to navigate relationships

when you didn't know any better. But as with so many of these subconscious patterns and strategies,

they can follow us through life and they can become part of our identity

...