How People-Pleasing Kills Intimacy & What to Do About It

There are 3 things I really want you to know about people-pleasing and intimacy. When you're a people-pleaser, you'll often feel like you're doing things to make others happy or doing things out of obligation. You'll also often feel like you're not getting the appreciation you want, like you don't have space and time for yourself, and/or like you are just tired of people wanting stuff from you. There's often an underlying current of resentment you may or may not acknowledge. 

Here's the truth: people-pleasing is hell on intimacy and relationships. This episode will walk you through how it wreaks havoc on your libido, your sense of connection and relationship satisfaction. It's a big deal -- and it's also fixable. 

Join me for this short episode and get started on the path to freedom today. 

Get my free email newsletter with helpful tips, plus a free guide to Finding Your Deepest Turn-Ons, and learn how to work with me at https://laurajurgens.com.

Transcript

[00:00:00] Welcome to Sex Help for Smart People. I'm Dr. Laura Jurgens. I'm here to help you have better sex, intimacy, and relationships. So let's get at it. Hey everyone, welcome to episode 58. I'm really glad you were here today. We are going to talk about how people pleasing kills intimacy and what you can do about this.

[00:00:23] And we're really going to talk about three things. That I want you to know that I have learned about people pleasing and intimacy, because boy, are they a rough combo. Alright, so first off, I want you to imagine hearing this sentence from a partner, uttered with absolute sincerity. Here's the sentence. I don't want you to do anything you don't want to do.

[00:00:51] I want to connect with you, but only when you want to. and the way you want to, and you don't need to take care of me. Alright? That is the sentence. It's pretty long sentence. How does that feel to hear? If it feels amazing, or like it would feel amazing if you could only let yourself believe it, or if it feels incredibly sad because you desperately want to hear that, that is the sentence.

[00:01:23] This episode is for you. That means you, just like me, tend to feel unfree to be your authentic self. This is one of the things that I have really worked on for a long time, and so I know it back and forwards. Those of us who have this challenge tend to feel like we aren't allowed to say no. And it winds up creating a lot of intimacy struggles.

[00:01:50] And it's our job to find our own right to say no. Our own freedom to have our own wants, have our own desires, have our own needs, have our own no's. Which help us find our authentic yes for us. Help us feel free to do what we actually want to do and to connect with what we actually want. And if we have denied this for a very long time, if we have suppressed our actual true yes and no for a long time, it can be hard to even feel it.

[00:02:22] It can be hard to find it. It can just feel like everything is a no and that's because we haven't let ourselves say no. If I have to do everything, then I don't want to do anything. So that's what happens over time. And our partners can help or hinder us. And it is important to understand how to ask for the help that we need.

[00:02:45] If we are partnered with someone who tends to, or if you are listening to this, you are a listener and you are partnered with someone who tends to caretake, who may have a lower libido than they used to. Or who you, oh, you, you know, like, you could always rely on your partner to know what's going on and what needs attention.

[00:03:05] Then this episode is also for you because your partner is probably a people pleaser. And it will have important implications for your sex life and how you approach things. I could do an entire course on this issue. It is one of the most common topics I coach people through. It is not a one episode podcast type of fix at all, but it is absolutely possible to recover from people pleasing.

[00:03:30] It is a wonderful journey, but we are just going to touch on a few things today that I want you to know about people pleasing and intimacy, three things in particular. So one, I really want you to know that people pleasing is a self protective coping strategy that does not actually benefit the other person, the person you were trying to please in the long run.

[00:03:51] Thank you. It does not benefit other people. It is about trying to protect ourselves. You are not being nice. By crossing your own boundaries. Ever. And this is where people pleasers get some tough love from me because I know you need it because I've been there. And I do love you and I really want you to have the best life possible for yourself.

[00:04:14] So I want to tell you the truth and you need to know this. Crossing your own boundaries only creates resentment and distance in relationships. and it will not ever feel really good to you. You will not feel connected and you will not be able to feel loved and approved of because you were not really present.

[00:04:31] People pleasing is a tactic that we use. And I can say all this because I did it myself for years and then I spent a lot of time studying it. to unwind it and a lot of time unwinding it for myself. So there's zero shame at you. I am not shaming you at all for having this coping strategy. It is a really effective one for a lot of kids.

[00:04:50] We pick it up to help us, but then it stops serving us as adults. It is a tactic we use to protect ourselves from rejection by hiding our real selves and trying to control other people's experience so that we feel approval and therefore safe. It is really common for people who were not attuned to as children, or who felt like they didn't, they weren't allowed to have their own experience of things, they weren't allowed to have their own feelings, or their feelings didn't matter.

[00:05:21] People pleasers are trying to get people to feel certain ways, or trying to get them to be pleased, by denying or ignoring our own needs and desires. When you people please, you're almost always trying to get something in return or trying to get the other person to feel a certain way. Sometimes people pleasers are self aware enough to admit this and sometimes not.

[00:05:44] Because we don't know what we're doing. We think we're trying to be nice. And so we can kind of live in this fantasy world where here we are just being a nice person. But if you notice, That you feel actually under that you don't feel very appreciated, you tend to feel resentful, you feel like you have to do stuff for other people, you feel frustrated that they don't respond in the way you like, or the way you want, or the way you expect when you do acts of service for them.

[00:06:11] You are people pleasing. And it's really important to understand that it is a type of manipulation. It's okay. It doesn't make you a bad person. You are not trying to do it to harm people. But it is still a type of manipulation because it's not actually showing up honestly with your own desires, needs, and boundaries.

[00:06:32] We're not letting people see the true you. And sadly, that means when we're in that, we can never feel truly loved and accepted that way because we aren't actually showing up authentically and showing people who we really are in order to love and accept us with our own needs, desires, and boundaries. On top of that, it feeds into a cycle of resentment in relationships because of this, because you really need the other person to feel how you want them to feel 

[00:07:00] and respond how 

[00:07:00] you want them to do too.

[00:07:03] Because, you know, you're doing whatever it is you're doing to try to make them ha quote unquote happy, and if they don't feel happy, then it makes us resentful. We're disappointed. We didn't get what we wanted out of the bargain. And the bargain's all in our head. We we usually, by the way, we're not asking people directly if they want this thing most of the time.

[00:07:24] We're just imagining what we think will make them happy. And then we expect them to be happy with it. It's really a pretty bum deal for the other person. And it can create weird dependencies in relationship dynamics, too. So it is just not helping, and it is important to understand that it is not being quote unquote nice.

[00:07:46] It is actually creating a bunch of resentment that the other person didn't sign up for. Alright, number two that I want you to know. I want you to know that having sex out of obligation When you don't want to, people pleasing with sex will over time always decrease your libido. I have never seen an exception to this rule.

[00:08:05] There probably are exceptions. I have not met them. Generally, people lose the authentic desire to actually have sex, or to even know when they want to have sex, and just start feeling really averse to sex because you are crossing your own boundaries. And a lot of times, start blaming our partners for it.

[00:08:24] And look, the partner is not forcing. They're, they're not, like, sexually assaulting you. They're just asking. So it's really important to own that we are the ones crossing our own boundaries when we do something we don't want to do. It's on us. We could say no. When we don't Our body stops trusting us, our authentic self starts hiding.

[00:08:46] Our body will start shutting down because we are crossing our own boundaries so often. This is very, very common. You will often find people with numbness in their genitalia, even from crossing their own boundaries. That happened to me, and I did a bunch of work to repair that. So there is repair work to do in your relationship with your body.

[00:09:07] If you have been doing this, if you've been having obligation sex, you probably do have some repair work to do in your relationship with your own body and with your authentic self, who's probably buried under all the shoulds and obligations to others, imaginary or real, and most of them are imaginary, that you have put on her or him or them.

[00:09:28] Your authentic self is buried underneath all those shoulds, and that's also a relationship to rebuild. Start honoring your authentic. Self and allowing that person to be enough. I can help. I do that all the time, but you do the work. Right? If this is you. And I can promise it's great on the other side, but it doesn't get better on its own.

[00:09:49] All right, this is a lot of tough love, but it's hopeful tough love because the third thing I want you to know is that it is 

[00:09:54] absolutely possible to stop people pleasing and that you will feel so much better when you do and you will have 

[00:10:02] way better relationships based on your own authenticity. Because underneath all this, you are actually worthy of love and acceptance.

[00:10:11] Even with needs and desires and boundaries of your own, I promise you are actually worthy of love and acceptance, even if you have needs, desires, and boundaries. And you will get to have people around you who love you for having needs, desires, and boundaries, who want to support those things, who want to respect your boundaries.

[00:10:37] Who love it when you tell them no, I really don't want to do that. Oh, and who will say thank you so much for being honest with me. I know now I can trust you and it's okay for me to ask for things because you'll say no when you don't want to do it and we won't get into this horrible drama thing where you wind up presenting me.

[00:10:57] They'll learn how to trust you because you hold your own boundaries and that is a gift. So look, it is totally possible to stop people pleasing. And at the end of the day, and even if you imagine yourself, you know, on your deathbed, chances are you are not going to be celebrating all of the people pleasing that you did in your life.

[00:11:17] What you really want is to feel free. You want to feel loved for who you are. You want to feel approval for who you are. And you want to feel like you showed up for actually who you, who you were in this life. So the deal is that we have to learn how to give ourselves all those things first. Freedom. Love.

[00:11:34] Approval. Then we can take them in from someone else and that feels amazing. So when you stop people pleasing, you will have access to all that stuff. You will also give a much better example to your children, because remember, kids actually learn much more from example than they do from what you tell them.

[00:11:51] So if you are people pleasing, that is what they are learning. Sorry to break it to you. But you will have way more joy, confidence. You will feel loved. You will feel a giant sense of freedom. It will be easy to be generous without feeling dragged down by a lack of appreciation. You will feel free of resentment.

[00:12:10] That all happens when we stop people pleasing and start being true to ourselves, when we let people know when we actually want to say no. When we show up more authentically, and it does take work, it takes practice, not just talking about it. We actually have to implement, and there are specific ways to rewire our thinking and practice having kind, healthy boundaries, speaking our yeses and nos, even when they're kind of scary.

[00:12:37] And we do that by taking little steps, one at a time, so that we feel confident, so you feel confident and get good results each step of the way. I really encourage coaching for this, but whatever you do, at least consider that stopping people pleasing could be the best thing you ever do for yourself and the people who love you.

[00:12:59] That has been my experience and the experience of my clients who have overcome their people pleasing history also. So here's all I want to say about this today, that is that those three things, it's totally possible to stop. It is not helping you feel loved and approved of. It's just killing your joy and definitely undermining your sex life.

[00:13:18] And if it's not undermining your sex life yet, then it will in the future if you keep at it. So this is really worth tackling. And if you are partnered with a people pleaser, you may or may not know. It can be hard for you to be aware of that being what they're doing. But one of the best things you can do for them is to ask them to stop.

[00:13:39] And if you know that there are people pleaser, definitely, you know, if you are capable of getting of pulling out of this dynamic, it will help your relationship. So ask them to stop doing things just to please you. Actually ask them to honor their own yes and no, and please, please support them when they do.

[00:13:56] Celebrate them when they say no to something. It is a huge gift to be celebrated when you say no. I do this with my friends all the time and we love it and it feels great. So try it out with your friends if you can't try it out with your partner yet. Ask them to say no when they really mean no and then give them like all the kudos in the world for doing it and thank them for preserving your relationship instead of trying to people please you.

[00:14:19] If you are partnered with a people pleaser, here is a, the sexy sentence, so sexy for a people pleaser here. If you can say it authentically, it's I don't want you to do anything you don't want to do. I want to connect with you, but only when you want to and the way you want to, and you don't have to take care of me.

[00:14:40] If you can say that to your partner honestly, and I hope you can, because that is a gift to everyone, whether they're a people pleaser or not, that can really help. And see if your partner can take that in. They may or may not be able to, and that's not your fault. It is a process, right? It can be a process to feel free enough to feel entitled to actually have your own needs, desires, and boundaries, but it is a wonderful challenge to take up and will really improve everything in your life, including your intimacy, your sex life, and your safety and like build like lack of stress in your relationships.

[00:15:20] You will feel much more connected. Alright my friends, that's it for today. I'll see you here next week. Hey, if you're curious about how you can have better sex and connections, go grab my free guide, Find Your Secret Turn Ons. It's right on my website, www.laurajurgens.com and the link is in the show notes.

[00:15:38] I'll see you here next time.