lab. Hi, everybody, and welcome back to this episode of the universe is your therapist. Today we're going to talk a little bit about why people pleasing is such a hard behavior to stop. A lot of times we've talked about it is being a habit like Do you have the habit of people pleasing. And what I've realized as I've become more knowledgeable in terms of how we have autonomic defense mechanisms that come from our autonomic nervous system is that people pleasing actually is less of a habit. And it's much more of a symptom. When you've grown up or been exposed in a time period prior to this period in your life, in which your brain memorize trying to please people in order to keep things from being chaotic, to keep yourself from being blamed or abused. To keep yourself from being harmed physically, then the response or the reaction with people pleasing is designed to keep you safe so that if the people you have grown up with like the caretakers of the parents that you've grown up with, have difficulty regulating their emotions. The people pleasing allowed you to become hyper vigilant to what was going on for them emotionally and to try to interfere and calm down their nervous system to calm their emotional reactivity. So that you would not be harmed or hurt by their behavior that came out of emotional reactivity, that you would not be harmed or hurt by the chaos that may have occurred in your relationship at home with siblings or with parents. If we understand that people pleasing is actually designed to keep us safe, and we events can start paying attention to our tendency to please and we do that without judging ourselves. We become more of a ninja in being aware of what's happening in our nervous system and when we engage in more extreme actions of people pleasing. I really struggled with this most of my life because our family had a lot of chaos because of raging and mental illness. And so I got really good at making sure as the oldest of five that all my siblings were always doing what they were supposed to do so that mom or dad wouldn't get angry and hit one of us So now that people pleasing actually no longer serves me, and I'm not a young child anymore, and I don't need to engage in people pleasing as a way to protect myself. So my, my conscious mind is aware of that. But my subconscious mind has memorized that pattern of response that happens without any conscious volition or will. That's why we call it an autonomic nervous system response, because it comes out of your subconscious. And it's related to how you learned how to cope with people's displeasure, or dysregulation. In your early years, if we think about how people pleasing in our early years actually did help us survive, we can understand why this can be such a deeply ingrained, automatic response for us, we can understand that it's not a weakness or a lack of sense of self that contributes to our people pleasing behavior, what it is, instead is a memorized reaction to perceived danger. That actually was really helpful to us as children and and now does not serve us. And I have noticed over the years that because my dad is tall and male, and his rage was really terrifying to me, that even at my age of 50, if I watch a movie, in which there's a toll male who rages I get so stressed out, my nervous system just turns on and goes into that fight or flight pattern. So instead of beating myself up, because I, I recognize that that person on the screen is not my dad, what I do is I say to myself, I don't have to make my nervous system This triggered, I don't need to watch a movie that stresses me out. And that is where being able to understand our people pleasing response. And the anxiety that can come to us. When we experience triggers that are similar to what we experienced as children can help us decide as adults, whether or not we want to expose ourselves to certain things that get our nervous system going. It's not a sign of weakness that my people pleasing gets going in a tense or tough situation. It's not a lack of personality, it's not something wrong with my ego strength has nothing to do with any of those things. It merely has to do with my brains memorized response to conflict or rage, or anger. And the wiring my neural pathways are laid down to have this automatic response. So if you've struggled with people pleasing, or if you still do struggle with people pleasing, just know that it is a symptom of the things that have happened to you. And that you don't need to be angry with yourself and beat yourself up because you have this response. As I mentioned earlier, when we can notice our tendency to do this, and the occasions in which were triggered, so that our, our subconscious brain has the response of people pleasing. And as we increase our awareness without judging ourselves, then we can learn how to become more aware of what's happening and pay attention to the very subtle cues in our physical body. That may inform us that we're heading into a place of fight or flight. This takes a lot of practice. One thing that we talked about in trauma work is that wires that fire together, wire together. And so when you've had a traumatic experience or a series of traumatic experiences, then your wiring with anything related to that becomes automatic. So if you think about it, like a hand and this is the traumatic experience, oops, my face, you can't see, okay, this is the traumatic experience here. Then we have all these other things that can be linked to the traumatic experience that then can bring us into reactivity. And so the idea becomes, I'm going to pay attention to what's happening for me without being critical of myself. I'm going to understanding about this response, and then I'm going to get my nervous system calmed down enough that I have more of a conscious choice of how I want to respond or react to this kind of thing. And again, when you're in trauma or terror, your wiring gets instantly deep and it gets instantly set. And when we're trying to undo that wiring and learn different responses and overcome our subconscious reactions to triggers, that takes a lot of kind, compassionate, remind reminding of ourselves, it takes a lot of repetition. And it is much easier to do when we don't become hypercritical of this pattern of response is responding within certain situations. If you find this interesting or would like to know more about how trauma can affect your nervous system and how we behave in our relationships with others, please check us out at mending trauma.com and we will look forward to seeing you there. Thank you.