Strong, rigid, people pleasing repertoires often start in childhood. This may be related to childhood trauma. If you had caregivers that were very violent, then it was really important to please those people and keep them satisfied and happy at all times. Otherwise, the consequences were devastating. May also be a result of childhood neglect. If it was very hard for you to get positive attention from your caregivers then maybe the way you learned to do that was really going out of your way to please them.
And of course, it's often related to just having very strict parents that have very high expectations. Maybe very high expectations for academic achievement or sports achievement or maybe just very disciplinarian authoritarian parents who just have very high demands about how you behave in the house and what your role is in this family. Of course, the culture you grow up in plays a big role in the development of these rules and ideas about your needs and the needs of others and how you respond to other people in your relationships. There may be rigid rules that are actually imposed by your culture or by your community or by your religion.
And if you are introduced to these at a very young age, you're not even really consciously aware of these rules. You just internalize them as part of a normal way of living. Most of our clients really initially lack awareness of these rigid rules that they're obeying and the effects they're having on their health and well-being. It's unusual for a client to come to therapy and say, hey, I just spend so much of my time pleasing other people and I don't have any time for myself and that's sucking the life out of me.
That that does occasionally happen, but in my experience, that's quite uncommon. Normally, you'll have clients that come to therapy and they're depressed or they're burnt out or they're highly anxious or they're wanting to work on self esteem or they're just worn out and wrung out and they don't really know why. And often they're kinda quite surprised when we start raising their awareness of these rigid rules that they're obeying that are running their life. And when clients do become aware of these rigid rules and the impact that following them is having on their life and their health and well-being, there's often quite some resistance to change.
Following these rules has real benefits for the client. And not only does it help them avoid anxiety and kind of fear of disappointment, fear of negative consequences if they've let others down or disappoint others, But also, it helps them to feel like a good person and get some escape from that not good enough story.