The Mother Wound Hiding Under your People Pleasing
Happy summer! I’m home from Family Vacation 2026 in Chicago with 13 people in my family. 😬
It was fun to be with them in the big city. And also a bit like personal development boot camp. It’s so easy to revert to childhood patterns. But this time I noticed that I was speaking my mind more than I used to. (For me, wanting to keep the peace is one of the hardest people pleasing tendencies to drop).
Growing up, I was good at being fake. Being nice, pretty, perfect. In this photo from Family Vacation 1978, I hadn’t yet learned how to perform for a camera. But I’d already learned how to perform for my mom.
If you’re like me, before you learned the term people pleasing, you learned how to track your mother's mood.
Not because she was a villain. Most of our mothers weren't. Mine wasn't. She was doing the best she could.
But you didn’t know that when you were a child.
A little girl doesn't experience her mother's mood as just an emotion. She experiences it as a message about whether she’s safe and loved.
😌 When Mom is calm, she relaxes.
😡 When Mom is angry, withdrawn, or unpredictable, she goes on high alert.
So the girl adapts. She walks on eggshells. She gets quieter and more agreeable. She does it because it keeps the peace. And because she believes it will keep her connected to the one person she depends on for everything.
That adaptation doesn't end in childhood. It continues to show up in the way you care way too much about what other people think. The way you avoid hard conversations. The way you constantly monitor everyone’s mood, even though you moved out of your mother's house decades ago.
This is the Mother Wound underneath your people pleasing.
🌟 Here's the realization that changed everything for me:
My mother learned the same pattern from her own mother (who learned it from hers and so on.) It didn't start with my mom, and it didn't start with me. It moved through the women in my lineage because that’s how they survived.
Blaming your mom won’t help you recover from people pleasing. Instead, try letting your Inner Child know you don’t have to keep the peace to be loved. You don’t have to DO anything. You are beloved just as you are.
Your mother deserves that compassion too. She was once a child doing the same thing you did: trying to avoid pain, to be enough, to earn love.
My upcoming blogs will continue to focus on recovering from people pleasing. Breaking that pattern has been the best way I’ve found to help women - including me - to stop playing small and live the life their soul intended.
I’m excited to announce that I’m creating a course to banish people pleasing at its roots - in the body, ancestry, and childhood conditioning - so that you reclaim the woman you were born to be. More to come on that!