Counselling for People Pleasing in Milton Keynes

The Word You Have Probably Already Met

If you have looked this up before, you will have run into fawning. Fight, flight, freeze, and fawn: the fourth response, where the thing you do under threat is appease whoever is in front of you.

It is a useful description and I use it with people. But I am going to tell you something about it that the videos will not.

There is almost no research behind it. Fight and flight have a century of literature. Freeze has a solid body of work. I searched the academic databases for the fawn response and found effectively nothing: no trials, no measures, no studies testing whether it holds up as a distinct category. It comes from clinicians writing about what they see in the room, which is a legitimate source and is not the same thing as evidence.

So treat it as a name for something you recognise, not as a diagnosis you now have. Anyone presenting the four F's as settled science is telling you more about their marketing than about you.

What There Actually Is Research On

The measurable thing is self-silencing: the habit of not saying what you think in order to keep a relationship steady.

One study of 427 people found self-silencing sat alongside lower self-esteem and higher depression, anxiety and stress, and that the self-esteem part was doing much of the work in between. Which matches what turns up in the room: the cost is rarely the individual favour. It is what a few thousand of them do to your opinion of yourself.

Two honest limits on that. It was students rather than a general population, and the scale it used has been questioned on whether it measures the same thing in men as in women. I would rather hand you that than a clean number.

It Is Not Kindness, and That Is the Part Worth Sitting With

People arrive defending it. They are not a doormat, they are considerate, and they would rather be this way round than the other.

Fair enough. Here is the test I would offer instead.

Kindness is something you choose and feel fine about afterwards. What we are talking about is automatic, and the tell is what arrives later: resentment. You do not resent the things you actually decided to do.

If you are keeping a quiet tally of everything you have done for people who did not notice, that tally is the symptom. Not the proof that you are good.

Two Things to Try Before You Book Anything

Neither needs me and both work faster than people expect.

Put a gap in. Your default answer arrives before you do, so the job is not to say no. It is to stop saying yes automatically. One sentence does it: "let me check and come back to you." You are not refusing, you are buying the twenty minutes in which you get to have an opinion. Use it for everything for a fortnight, including things you would happily agree to, so it becomes the habit rather than a special occasion.

Write down the resentment, not the request. At the end of the day, note where you said yes and felt worse afterwards. Not what was asked. What it cost. After a week you will have a list, and the pattern in it is usually about two or three specific people rather than the whole of your life, which is a far more workable problem than "I need to be more assertive."

Where This Came From, Briefly

Almost always it was learned, and it was sensible at the time. A house where keeping the peace was the job. A parent whose mood set the weather. Several children and you were the easy one. None of those are exotic and none of them are your fault.

The trouble is that it does not update. You are running a strategy that worked when you were nine, with the authority of someone who never revisited it.

I have written more about the household end of this on the counselling for men page, because it turns up there constantly, and about what it does to how you see yourself on the self-esteem and confidence page. If the pattern is mostly happening inside one relationship, relationship counselling is the better room and you can come on your own.

Is This Assertiveness Training

Not quite, and the difference matters.

Assertiveness training teaches you the sentences. Plenty of people already know the sentences and still cannot get them out, because the problem is not vocabulary. It is what you expect to happen when you disappoint someone.

I do not run a course. This is one to one, and the work is mostly on that expectation rather than on phrasing. The phrasing tends to sort itself out once you stop bracing for a consequence that has not actually arrived in years.

What Working With Me Is Like

No reception, no team and nobody else in the building. You send a message, I am the person who replies, and I am the person you sit down with.

I have been in practice since 2013, I am an integrative therapist, which means I trained across several approaches rather than one, and I tutor counselling and hypnotherapy students at RQF levels 3 to 6.

Worth saying that this work has an awkward phase. When you start doing it differently, some of the people around you will not be pleased, and the ones who liked the old arrangement will be the loudest. That reaction is information rather than evidence you were wrong, and it is easier to hold when somebody has told you it is coming.

In person in Wolverton, within reach of Stony Stratford, Newport Pagnell, Bletchley and Woburn Sands, or online anywhere in the UK. This sits under counselling and psychotherapy, and you can read what happens in a first session before deciding anything.