Let me tell you about my client Sylvie. She was referred to me by a friend because she was in a repetitive cycle of emotional and psychologically abusive relationships and she wanted to break that cycle.

She understood that she was codependent and a perpetual people-pleaser, but to help relieve her anxiety when speaking her truth, she turned to YouTube videos. Now this gave her a better understanding about her affliction, but it did nothing to relieve her symptoms of being overwhelmed, exhausted and discouraged for never standing up for herself.

Her father was psychologically and emotionally abusive towards her mother and Sylvie modeled this behaviour in her adult relationships. She was always told to be quiet and it affected all her relationships: at work, her siblings and her marriages.

During her childhood, she was taught not to have any boundaries, not to speak her truth but to stay quiet and walk away. She learned to become a doormat and it was painful. She realized as an adult that she goes numb when she experiences verbal abuse from her spouse or others.

After coaching her, she came to the understanding that she had developed her people-pleasing behaviours from her actual birth. Previously, her mother had had a stillborn and due to this trauma, the parents had separated. Obviously, they came together later on and Sylvie was born. So she felt like she was responsible for bringing her parents back together which made her feel safe and loved.

Once we had discovered this deep understanding, we started to heal her little girl inside and as an adult she felt much stronger, assertive, and empowered to say no and feel safe doing so. By introducing daily meditation, she was able to stay connected to her truth and she found the courage to set her limits in her relationships.

Jenny struggled for YEARS with wanting to break her people-pleaser cycle. She worked at a large technology company. Jenny was well respected because she seemed to be selfless and often took the burden of the entire office on her shoulders.

Jenny had a habit of going above and beyond the call of duty. She took over presentations that colleagues were stuck on. She stayed late at the office at least two nights a week. Etc, etc.

Her thinking was that she had to make herself available as a valuable asset to the organization. This was particularly really important to Jenny because she was terrified of being unemployed. She had spent 22 months on unemployment after the 2008 market crash, during which she thought nobody would ever hire her again. She figured that by working extra hard, other people in the office would consider her indispensable and would never replace her.

But somewhere along the way, Jenny turned that obsession into a subconscious obedience. Not only did she want to make everyone around her satisfied and happy, but she also became utterly petrified of rocking the boat in any way.

Jenny worked in the marketing department; her job was to suggest and execute product packaging design elements that made her company's products look attractive and she fully believed in the less-is-more principle – that you shouldn't overload a given product package with too much clutter, extraneous information, or bad imagery. The market trends overwhelmingly agreed with her and so did the sales data.

Unfortunately, her managers loved all that stuff and they essentially believed in the more-is-better approach. They believed customers wanted to see every single piece of information they could possibly want, right on the box.