I didn’t expect to find the answer in my mother’s kitchen.
She was seventy-three. I was visiting for a week. And every single morning, she asked me the same question. “Do you want eggs, or do you want the porridge?”
I said porridge. She made eggs. Then she sat across from me and watched me eat food I didn’t want, smiling the whole time.
On day four, I finally asked her why. She looked confused. “Because you always say porridge, but I know you like eggs.”
Here’s the thing. I do like eggs. But I stopped saying so a long time ago. Somewhere in my childhood, I learned that what I wanted was less important than what she wanted me to want.
Which brings me to the question that started this whole essay. Is people-pleasing a trauma response?
Where Does This Habit Come From?
Not from one big event. From ten thousand small ones.
A kid says “I’m cold.” A parent says “No, you’re not, it’s warm in here.” A kid says “I don’t like Uncle Wei.” A parent says “Don’t be rude.” A kid cries. A parent says “Stop crying, you’re fine.”
None of this looks like harm. That’s exactly why it works.
The kid isn’t being hurt. The kid is being slowly edited. And after enough edits, the kid stops offering a version of themselves that gets corrected. They offer the version that gets approved.
I recognize this in myself. I recognize it in my mother. And I recognize it in my own kid, who is nine, and who last month told me she liked a movie she clearly hated because her friend liked it.
What Does “It’s Fine” Actually Mean?
They’re not lying. They’re surviving.
A nine-year-old doesn’t have the language for “I am afraid that if I disagree with you, you’ll like me less.” So they say, “It’s fine. I don’t mind. Whatever you want.”
The words are small. The math behind them is enormous.
Is People-Pleasing a Trauma Response in the Way Most People Mean It?
Here’s where I have to be careful, because I’m not a clinician and I don’t want to pretend to be one.
What I can tell you is what I’ve watched. People who grew up in households where one person’s mood controlled the weather learn to read that weather before they learn to read books. They become excellent at detecting small shifts. A sigh. A pause. A slightly different tone on the phone.
And then they spend the rest of their lives trying to keep the weather nice.
Is that a trauma response? Some writers I respect say yes. Dr. Gabor Maté, in Scattered Minds, describes how children adapt to unpredictable environments by becoming hyper-attuned to others. That sounds about right to me. It also sounds like something that was done to them, not something they chose.
But I want to be honest about a second possibility too.
Sometimes people-pleasing is just a habit. A groove worn into a person by years of positive feedback. You got praised for being easy. You got told you were such a good kid. You kept going. That’s not trauma. That’s a pattern.
The two can look identical from the outside. And honestly? The fix is more or less the same.
Why Is “No” So Hard?
Because somewhere along the way, you learned that no is a door that closes.
I remember the first time I said no to my mother. I was thirty-one. She asked me to drive her to a relative’s house across town on a Saturday I had already promised to my daughter. I said no.
She didn’t yell. She didn’t cry. She just got very quiet for about two days.
I felt like I had broken something. It took me a week to realize I hadn’t broken anything. I had just stopped carrying something I was never asked to carry.
That’s the part nobody tells you. The weight doesn’t disappear when you set it down. You just notice how tired your arms were.
The Three-Second Pause
I call it the three-second pause. It’s not clever. It’s not a system. It’s just a small fence.
When someone asks you for something, you wait three seconds before answering. That’s it. You don’t say yes. You don’t say no. You say nothing, for three seconds, and you notice what your body is doing.
For me, the first three seconds are always panic. My chest tightens. My mouth wants to open and say yes before I’ve even thought about it. My whole nervous system is screaming, just agree, it’s easier.
Then the fourth second comes. And in the fourth second, I usually know what I actually want.
I’ve been doing this for two years. It hasn’t fixed me. But it’s slowed me down enough that I sometimes choose instead of react. That’s a big difference.
What My Mother Taught Me Without Meaning To
She’s seventy-three now. She still asks me what I want for breakfast and then makes what she thinks I should want.
But last month, she said something new. She said, “I don’t know what I like anymore. I spent so long liking what everyone else liked.”
I didn’t know what to say to that. I still don’t.
Is people-pleasing a trauma response? I think for her, yes. For me, partly. For my daughter, maybe not yet, and I’d like to keep it that way.
So I ask her now. Directly. “What do you want?” And when she says “whatever,” I ask again. And again. Until she tells me the truth.
It takes a while. It always does.
References
- Maté, Gabor. Scattered Minds. Knopf Canada, 1999.
- Brown, Brené. The Gifts of Imperfection. Hazelden Publishing, 2010.
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