Therapy for people-pleasing, codependency and boundaries

I grew up in Maryland in a Salvadoran family, with Spanish at home, and I learned early that "no" works differently depending on which door you've just walked through. In a lot of American settings it's a word you can simply say. In many Latino families, a flat no to your mother or your tía lands much closer to rejection. People decline sideways instead. "Ahorita." "Vamos a ver." A yes that everyone understands probably won't happen.

Most boundary advice is written for the first kind of household. It hands you a calm, direct script ("That doesn't work for me") and tells you their reaction isn't your responsibility. Said in Spanish to a mother who gave up her country so you could have choices, that script can sound like an announcement that you've stopped being her daughter.

Many of the bicultural clients I see have tried it, watched it go badly, and decided they're bad at boundaries. Usually they were skilled at a different kind. The work then isn't learning the blunt version. It's finding a no your family can actually hear, which tends to mean changing what you do and on what terms, while staying inside the relationship. Fewer announcements, more consistency.

That's also my position on estrangement. When someone is being harmed, distance can be necessary, and I'll support it. As a default answer to guilt, I think cutting people off is overprescribed.

Before graduate school, I worked at the Community Action Council of Howard County, counseling families in financial crisis about housing and building the agency's rental assistance program. One pattern came up often enough that I still think about it. Behind a family close to losing their home there was frequently a relative, often the eldest or the one with the steadiest job, who had already covered more than they could afford.

People-pleasing in families is very often financial, and almost nobody calls it that. The sibling who always lends. The adult child sending money home from a paycheck that doesn't stretch. Some of that is love and duty, and I respect it. Some of it is a yes nobody in the family feels allowed to refuse, and it's worth knowing which is which.

I want to be careful here, because "stop people-pleasing" too often gets sold as permission to be careless with people. Generosity is real. So is duty, and some family obligations are worth honoring even when they cost you something.

The distinction I use: generosity is chosen, and it leaves you basically intact. People-pleasing is compulsory, and it leaves you depleted and resentful. A rough test is whether you could have said no without hours of guilt, and whether you knew what you wanted before you answered or only what they wanted. If you can't say no, your yes is automatic.

It usually started as a smart adaptation. Maybe you were the responsible child, parentified early: managing a parent's moods, translating at the doctor's office, looking after younger siblings. If you were the eldest daughter, the role came with a job description nobody ever said out loud. Maybe love came with just enough conditions that approval felt like something to keep maintaining. Maybe conflict at home was frightening, in which case reading the room and heading it off was accurate risk management.

For many of my clients, culture sits at the center: a marianismo-shaped standard of the good woman, a family where putting yourself first reads as a moral failing, expectations handed down by generations who never had the option to say no themselves. My post on intergenerational trauma traces some of that, and immigrant and first-generation therapy speaks to being the one who was supposed to make the sacrifice worth it.

For some people it's fawning, a trauma response, where appeasing was what ended the danger fastest. That has a different feel, and it calls for a slower pace.

At work, people-pleasing is almost invisible, because it looks so much like excellence. You're the one who gets asked, not always because you're best qualified but because you're the safe bet: you'll say yes and it'll get done well. That load is one nobody else is tracking, including the manager who sees someone who seems fine with it.

It often pairs with perfectionism, where the standard is set by what you imagine will keep everyone happy. That's why "just lower your standards" never lands. What helps is getting specific about what you were hired to do, then finding out, by testing it, that a colleague who hears no from you once doesn't reclassify you as unreliable. If the load is wearing you down, these signs you're heading toward burnout are worth checking, and therapy for professionals goes further into the work side.

Family is harder. The scripts are older and stronger, and it's also often the work most worth doing. You don't have to choose between your family and yourself. We'll go slowly and respect what your family means to you while making room for what you need. There's more on the cultural side on my multicultural therapy page.

For many women the pattern follows them into motherhood, where pleasing everyone becomes trying to be the perfect mother. I wrote about that in how trying to be the perfect parent can backfire.