People-pleasing is the habitual need to shape-shift according to another’s demands, and its root is often gendered or otherwise developed in us by needs we had as children. Many of us learned over time that it was safer to make our own needs secondary to keep someone else happy. When we focus so much on someone else’s contentment, we can deprioritize and quiet our own feeling. We lose a sense of who we really are other than who we need to become for another’s sake. When we give ourselves away so often, we can start to believe that who we really are is the guilt and shame we feel on the other
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