People Pleasing Is Making You Sick!
This Jungian Life Podcast
Joseph Lee, Deborah Stewart, Lisa Marchiano
4.7 • 2.1K Ratings
🗓️ 9 October 2025
⏱️ 81 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
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People Pleasing is a compulsive strategy that disavows your needs and surrenders your agency. It begins in family systems that only reward compliance, which produces a false self. If your soul is constantly devalued, you may develop dependent narcissism with a covert contract: “I’ll keep you happy, and you’ll keep me safe.” Healing comes when you identify your true experience—notice whether you feel drained, tense, or obligated versus calm, interested, or genuinely willing. Give yourself permission to pause before agreeing. Say, “I’ll think about it,” step away to check in, rate how much you do or don’t like the request, and give a clear yes/no. Say yes only when it aligns with your values and can be revised; a yes aimed at managing someone else’s mood or bolstering your self-worth is unhealthy and requires deeper work. Growth requires inner authority and the courage to be disliked so that your choices follow Psyche rather than external approval.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to this Jungian life. |
| 0:04.2 | Three good friends and Jungian analysts, Lisa Marchiano, Deborah Stewart, and Joseph Lee, |
| 0:09.7 | invite you to join them for an intimate and honest conversation that brings a psychological perspective to important issues of the day. |
| 0:19.4 | I'm Lisa Marchiano, and I'm a Jungian analyst in Philadelphia. |
| 0:23.4 | I'm Joseph Lee, and I'm a Jungian analyst in Virginia Beach, Virginia. |
| 0:28.3 | I'm Deborah Stewart, a Jungian analyst, on Cape Cod. |
| 0:48.9 | Thank you. Many of you probably know that we're always interested in getting your suggestions for podcast topics. |
| 0:56.3 | If you'd like to submit a topic, you can go to our website and under the menu item podcasts or drop down menu, one of those is submit a topic. So today's episode is one that we took |
| 1:02.6 | from one of your suggestions. We're going to be talking about people pleasing. I thought this |
| 1:06.9 | was just a really terrific topic. So people pleasing is a pattern of compulsively over-accommodating, |
| 1:13.8 | attending to other people's needs, uh, not attending to your own needs, looking for acceptance, |
| 1:20.3 | approval, to avoid conflict. And, uh, a little bit of it may be a good thing, but too much of it certainly gets in our way and prevents us from engaging our own individuation process. |
| 1:35.9 | So we're going to be, as we like to do, circumambulating that topic today. |
| 1:41.8 | I think that key word there is feeling compulsed, feeling that there is some |
| 1:46.7 | psychological factors inside of us that are driving us to be people pleasing that may be fear |
| 1:53.7 | driven or trauma driven or have some other elements inside of us that are not necessarily |
| 1:59.7 | aligned with our natural way of being, |
| 2:02.7 | and therefore become something worth being curious about. |
| 2:08.5 | What I think about often is what is the feeling of when, you know, |
| 2:17.0 | somebody comes over or you have an obligation or whatever it |
| 2:20.9 | might be, what is the feeling that you're having? Is it the feeling of, oh my gosh, I just have |
| 2:27.6 | to do this or it's on my list or I need to run to the store. I need to manage. Check your stress level and check that sense of obligation and duty and service and what you think |
... |
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