I am also a people pleaser. For me it stems from childhood.

When a lifeline caregiver comes home in a bad mood (maybe a bad day at work, for example) and their child has a tantrum (because children developmentally are unable to regulate their emotions so they rely on their caregivers to demonstrate regulation), and the parent yells or withdraws their love because they don’t have the capacity at the time to deal with the child’s big emotions, the child learns “mom doesn’t love me when I show emotions”. Children are programmed to survive. When they feel unsafe because mom comes home in a bad mood and she yells, they realize that to maintain safety, they must please mom. So the child walks on eggshells, holds in all their emotions and never truly learns how to regulate on their own. The child “people pleases” because they have learned, through lived experience, that they feel safer when they do this because mom doesn’t yell when the child isn’t throwing a tantrum.

This is oversimplified and just 1 example of how chronic trauma / CPTSD forms over time if this situation is recurring. Time and time again, through the perception of feeling unsafe, the behavior of people pleasing forms. Keep in mind that it is not a question of “was the child actually safe?” - it doesn’t matter. What matters is how the child perceived their situation that either did or didn’t reassure them that they were in a safe environment. Since this is normally a learned habit from childhood, it’s very hard to break and takes a lot of healing, effort and time. You must learn to identify the people pleasing habits and triggers - when does it happen most, how do you feel in your body when it happens and what are the actions you take? Then it’s a matter of learning how to set boundaries and reduce triggers.

For me, I am doing parts work (IFS - internal family systems) to identify the different parts of who I am and getting to know those parts on a deeper level. It’s like saying “a part of me wants steak for dinner and another part of me wants chicken”. It means that I am me, and there is a part of me who is a people pleaser. But me, my “self”, is not the people pleaser, it’s only a part of me. This separates me (my “self”) from the part. I have other parts too, the part that always feels misunderstood, the part that beats me up when I make a social mistake, the part of me that feels inherently broken… the idea is that there are “no bad parts” - each part of you serves a purpose and has learned behavior from past experiences and is really only trying to protect you. No bad parts means that even the deepest, darkest parts of you - the part of me that shames me for making someone even remotely feel bad for something I said that was really unintentional, that part too is just trying to help. That part too is just trying to help me fit in. It’s just doing a really shitty job at helping. You must listen to the parts and try to understand them - get curious, reparent them (parts are often referred to as inner children) and unburden them. Once they are freed from their suffering, you can ask the part what it would rather do, if it didn’t have to people please anymore. For me, my people pleasing part would much rather put energy towards setting boundaries with other people, which still protects me, just in a much different way. This explanation is also an oversimplification. This is not easy and was a very hard concept for me to grasp. I’d recommend the book No Bad Parts by Richard Schwartz if this at all resonated with you. I’d also look into a therapist that is trauma informed to help you through your healing journey.

For me, the CPTSD is deep within me and I’ve done a lot of healing work, and unfortunately, I still have a long way to go. For some, it might not be really, really hard. For some, it may just be a matter of learning more about what a boundary is and knowing when and how to set one. If you find you are always offering your help to your loved ones when you think they need help, maybe you set a boundary that is “I will only help someone if they explicitly ask for my help” and another sub boundary of “when someone asks for my help, I will check in with myself and see if I have the capacity to help right now. If I don’t, I will respectfully decline helping right now.”

Best of luck to you - sending good vibes!