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As an anxiety therapist in Los Angeles, I help clients understand the real definition behind what is a people pleaser — not just how it started, but how to actually change it. In this post, we’ll break down what people pleasing really is, why it happens, and how somatic therapy and parts work (IFS) help untangle it from your identity.
I’m a dual-licensed therapist in Los Angeles who specializes in anxiety therapy, trauma, somatic work, IFS, and attachment repair. I’ve been featured in TIME Magazine, HuffPost, Verywell Mind, and other major outlets for sharing honest, human insights about what real healing actually looks like.
People pleasing doesn’t show up because you’re too kind or too agreeable. It shows up because, at some point, being easygoing kept you safe. If smoothing things over meant fewer blowups at home, or if caretaking made you feel needed (and therefore secure), your body adapted to that real fast.
This isn’t about craving gold stars. It’s about avoiding the stuff your body once learned was dangerous—like conflict, rejection, or emotional abandonment. So you got good at reading the room. At staying quiet. At offering support when you needed it most yourself.
And here’s the kicker: it worked. That’s why your system keeps doing it. Because deep down, it doesn’t fully believe there’s another way to be loved or safe without over-extending.
People pleasing isn’t your whole personality. And it’s not who you are — it’s something you learned to do long before you even realized it was a pattern.
Being a people pleaser isn’t just about being nice. It’s about growing up in an environment where making things easier for others felt like the only way to belong. It’s the instinct to nod along even when everything in you says this doesn’t feel right. It’s chronic shape-shifting—whatever keeps the peace, whatever keeps you close.
People pleasing means your body learned that harmony was more important than honesty. That your needs were optional if they risked rocking the boat. So you default to keeping things smooth—even when it hurts.
It’s not about politeness. It’s about proximity. The way your nervous system learned to protect connection by erasing parts of you that might be “too much.
It’s easy to tell someone to “just speak up” or “say no”—but if your nervous system learned that doing that led to punishment, disapproval, or emotional withdrawal, then boundaries won’t feel empowering. They’ll feel dangerous.
Even today, when nothing bad actually happens, your body still anticipates the blowback. The guilt. The disconnect. The fear that you’re being selfish, difficult, or too much.
This is why people pleasing isn’t a simple “thought” or logic issue—it’s a safety issue. Your nervous system might know it’s okay to have needs, but it still feels like those needs come with consequences.
You’re not weak for struggling with boundaries. You’re someone whose nervous system is trying to protect you using an outdated blueprint. Therapy helps you build a new one—one where saying what you mean doesn’t feel like a risk to your survival.
This is where behavioral advice falls flat. You can practice boundary scripts all day—but if your nervous system still registers assertion as danger, it’s going to resist. You’ll freeze. You’ll fawn. You’ll collapse into guilt or over-explaining or immediate repair.
Change doesn’t happen because you memorize the right words. It happens when your system starts to believe that it’s safe enough to try something new—and survive what comes after.
That’s the real threshold: not saying the thing, but staying with the feelings that surface when you do.
People pleaser syndrome isn’t a diagnosis—it’s a lived pattern. It’s what happens when your nervous system gets stuck in fawn mode. When saying no feels unsafe. When conflict feels unbearable. When guilt hits harder than anger.
It’s not about being nice. It’s about staying safe. Until your system feels that safety is possible without losing yourself, it will keep falling into the old habit of putting everyone else first.
You feel physically tense when someone’s even slightly disappointed in you — like your stomach drops or your chest tightens.
You’ll say “no problem” while your brain is screaming actually this is a huge f*cking problem.
You over-explain everything, even simple boundaries — like you’re trying to pre-defend yourself from a guilt trip that hasn’t happened yet.
You can feel someone’s mood shift across the room, and immediately wonder what you did wrong.
You cancel your own plans because someone else needed something — and then say it’s “totally fine” while feeling completely invisible.
You don’t know if you’re hungry, tired, or just dissociating — because you’re so used to checking in with other people first.
You secretly wish someone would just tell you what to do, because the pressure of deciding — and possibly disappointing someone — feels unbearable.
You confuse closeness with compliance — if you’re not easy to be around, you’re scared they’ll leave. That’s anxious attachment doing the driving.
People pleasing is basically high-functioning anxiety hiding in plain sight.
It doesn’t look stereotypical “anxiety.” It looks composed. It looks like you’re checking in on everyone, showing up to all the dinners after work, keeping the mood light when you’re quietly spiraling underneath. It looks like being “good at relationships” — while losing track of your own nervous system in the process.
As an anxiety therapist in Los Angeles, I see this all the time: the clients who don’t describe themselves as anxious, but who can’t stop overthinking every interaction, who feel actual panic when they imagine disappointing someone, who live in constant tension because their worth feels tied to how “easy” they are to love.
This is patterned anxiety that trained your body to stay small, agreeable, and low-maintenance — even if it costs you your sense of self.
Real healing doesn’t just mean becoming less anxious. It means no longer outsourcing your safety to everyone else’s comfort. Curious about what to expect in anxiety therapy? Learn more about how anxiety therapy works, and what to expect when you start.
Somatic therapy helps you interrupt the reflex to abandon yourself—without demanding that you “just do it differently.”
Instead of talking about why you can’t say no, we track what happens in your body the moment a no is on the table. Do you tense up? Freeze? Go blank? Smile even though you’re uncomfortable? Those signals matter. They’re the language of survival.
In somatic work, you learn to feel those responses without getting hijacked by them. You build capacity to stay with discomfort—without collapsing into guilt or fawning. And that changes what your body believes is possible.
Not because you force it. But because it actually feels safer to choose differently.
That’s why the work isn’t about becoming someone else—it’s about coming home to the parts of you that never got to feel safe being fully seen.
Let’s say you just agreed to something and immediately felt that pit in your stomach. You knew you didn’t want to—but it happened before you could even name what you needed.
That’s not failure. That’s a protective part doing what it’s always done: keeping you safe by keeping things smooth.
Parts work (IFS) helps you pause there—and instead of overriding that part or trying to shut it down, you get curious. What is it protecting? What did it learn about what happens when you say no, or speak up, or need too much?
IFS isn’t about getting rid of the parts that jump in to keep the peace. It’s about building a relationship with them. Because when they feel understood, they don’t have to work so hard. They trust you more. And that’s when the more grounded, boundary-holding parts of you get to take the lead.
If you tend to override your needs to avoid tension, working with the parts of you that learned to do that can be a powerful shift — especially the part that still believes saying no will cost you connection. This is something we explore deeply in my work as an IFS therapist.
If this is hitting home, you don’t need to keep untangling it on your own. I work with people who are done performing calm and ready to actually feel it. Through somatic therapy and parts work, we help your nervous system stop bracing—and start trusting.
You can learn more about my approach to therapy or reach out for a free 15-minute consult.
This isn’t one-size-fits-all. In my work offering somatic therapy in Los Angeles, clients come in exhausted from over-functioning, hyper-aware of everyone else’s needs, and deeply disconnected from their own.
We slow everything down—not to analyze it, but to make space for your system to feel safe enough to shift.
Whether we’re working with fawn responses, freeze patterns, or the guilt that kicks in the second you take up space—therapy helps you change the rules your body’s been living by.
Cheryl Groskopf is a dual-licensed therapist based in Los Angeles, specializing in anxiety, trauma, attachment wounds, and nervous system regulation. She works with adults who feel stuck in patterns like people pleasing, over-functioning, and chronic self-abandonment—especially those who grew up as the “responsible one” in their family.
Cheryl integrates somatic therapy, parts work (IFS), and a trauma-informed lens to help clients stop performing calm and start actually feeling it. Her work has been featured in TIME, HuffPost, Popsugar, Verywell Mind, and other national platforms for offering clear, honest, and human insight into what real healing looks like. Cheryl offers in-person therapy in Los Angeles and virtual sessions throughout California.
That’s your nervous system remembering what it used to cost you to say no. If you grew up in a home where “no” led to blowback — anger, guilt trips, emotional distance — your body learned to associate boundaries with danger. So now, even when the situation is technically safe, your system still sounds the alarm.
Thoughtfulness is about choice. People pleasing is about urgency. If you jump in automatically — out of fear that saying no will create tension, or that you’ll be seen as selfish — that’s not just being nice. That’s your system trying to stay safe by staying needed. If you’re constantly saying yes and then feeling annoyed, exhausted, or secretly hoping someone will cancel, then your nervous system is probably running a script that says you don’t get to opt out. It’s not kindness. It’s pressure dressed up as being “the reliable one.”
Because somewhere along the way, your body learned that having opinions might cost you closeness. Maybe when you spoke up as a kid, it caused tension, or got dismissed, or made someone upset — so now even the tiniest preference feels risky. It’s not that you’re “too sensitive.” It’s that your system still thinks speaking up = disconnection.
Completely. If you’ve spent years scanning the room and adjusting yourself to keep things smooth, your own wants probably got buried. When you’re always focused on “what will make this easier for them,” you stop checking in with yourself. Over time, that disconnection doesn’t just happen — it becomes default. Therapy helps you relearn how to hear yourself again.
Yes — because understanding it isn’t the same as feeling safe to change it. Most of the clients I work with already get what’s happening. They’ve read the books, followed the therapists on Instagram, and still freeze when it’s time to speak up. That’s not because they’re doing it wrong — it’s because insight doesn’t override survival. Somatic therapy helps your body learn that saying what you need doesn’t put you at risk anymore.
That moment is where the real work begins. That pit in your stomach is a protective part saying, “This is how we stay safe.” In session, we don’t just talk about it — we slow it down. We track what’s happening in your body, what that part of you is afraid of, and what it needs to feel like it has other options. We don’t force change — we create the conditions for your system to trust that change won’t cost you connection.
Honestly? That fear makes sense. When your identity has been built around keeping the peace, change feels risky. And yes — some people might push back, especially if they’ve benefitted from you not having boundaries. But people who truly care about you will adapt. The goal isn’t to lose people — it’s to stop losing yourself in order to keep them.
The kind that doesn’t just give generic advice and tell you to “speak up” or “set boundaries.” People pleasing at its core is a nervous system survival pattern. That’s why somatic therapy and parts work (IFS) are especially effective.
In somatic therapy, we look at what your body does in the moment you try to say no or take up space — the tension, the freeze, the guilt. We don’t force you to push through it. We help your system feel safe enough to do something different.
With parts work, we work with the internal parts of you that still believe keeping others happy is how you stay safe, loved, or connected. We don’t shame those parts — we get curious. And when they feel seen, they stop running the show.
So the best therapy isn’t just about insight — it’s about helping your whole system believe that you can take up space and still be safe.
If you’re constantly putting other people first, struggling to say no, or feeling anxious when you even think about setting a boundary, you’re not alone. I work with people in Los Angeles who are ready to stop people pleasing and start reconnecting with themselves. Whether the pattern shows up in your relationships, work, or everyday decisions, therapy can help you shift out of that constant pressure to perform. Using somatic therapy and a trauma-informed lens, we focus on what’s happening in your body—not just your thoughts—so change actually sticks. Sessions are available in person in LA or online anywhere in California.
