~ I have a lot of agency in my own life.
~ And I have far less control than I once thought.

Those two t…

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The person literally couldn’t even name or label good obvious qualities they had.

First, they couldn’t think of much. Then, when they did, they said it felt “arrogant” to name it. Then, it triggered them to feel like WHO EVEN AM I?

All this in response to, “Name some of your good qualities!”

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They were built around my perceived failures.

I didn’t think, “What do I want to work on this year?” so much as I thought, “What should I improve so I’m not letting others down?”

I believed I needed to do more or better so my kids would become better adults. I needed to be better for my husband, etc.

I needed to fix myself so everyone around me could have an easier, happier life.

I created goals based on how I thought I was failing others, not by what would actually make me healthier or better.

The truth is that sometimes even self-improvement is done in a spirit of people pleasing.

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She said she lies to her husband to avoid hurting his feelings👀.

Not about big major things like affairs or finances.

But she lies about herself and what she thinks and what she feels. She has learned that telling the truth creates discomfort, tension, or emotional fallout, so she edits herself instead.

Without meaning to be dishonest, or even seeing herself that way, she chooses “peace” (not having to deal with his moods) over living honestly. She knows she does it, but is so worried about “hurting his feelings.”

What struck me was not the lying itself.

It was how reasonable it sounded to her.

As if emotional safety depended on not being real.

That is where people pleasing leads when it goes unchecked, and it’s how you end up living a life you don’t love and saying things you don’t mean. To keep SOMEONE ELSE’S moods in check.

Of course, as mothers, this applies to kids too.

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The man of massive strength that he was.

While he’s remembered for his supernatural power, Scripture shows a different kind of weakness running through his life.

The man was a people pleaser. To be specific, a woman pleaser.

Again and again, Samson makes decisions based not on wisdom, conviction, or obedience to God, but on how the women around him reacted.

He is repeatedly worn down, pressured, and emotionally cornered until he gives in.

First, it is his Philistine fiancée

She cries, complains, and accuses him of not loving her until he finally gives her the answer to his riddle, even though he knows he shouldn’t.

Later, it is Delilah. She nags, questions, and presses him day after day until Scripture says he is “vexed to death.” As mamas, haven’t we been vexed to death?💀

Eventually, he tells her the truth about his strength, even though it goes against his instinct, because he cannot tolerate the pressure anymore.

He traded his own conviction for some relief from whoever was harassing him. He chose peace in the moment, even when the results were catastrophic.

He allowed someone else’s emotions to override what he knows he should protect.

What stands out is not just that Samson gives in.

It is that he allows himself to be hounded.

He stays in conversations that should have ended. He is under pressure that should have been shut down. He believes he must respond to their emotional persistence.

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Then this week, a deeper root surfaced and surprised me.

I have never struggled with perfectionism in the usual sense. I don’t need every task to be just right. I do not avoid trying things unless I have every detail figured out. I am not paralyzed by or worried about failure in the way many are.

But I realized I have carried a different kind of perfectionism for years.

A moral perfectionism.

I felt the need to be superhuman.

Always calm, patient, wise, and the strong one. Always the one who took the high road.

Somewhere inside me was the belief that if I could just be good enough, pure enough, righteous enough, then I would finally feel acceptable to myself.

And yes, even to God.

The epiphany hit me hard this week when I hit rock bottom in energy and mood.

It is very hard to let yourself be human when you believe you must behave almost like God in order to be approved by God.

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I’d raised my kids to express their feelings and I didn’t want them to feel “repressed” (anytime a mom says that, it’s usually SHE who is repressed, ha).

He talked for 15 minutes about all the ways I made him mad, how he was upset with me, on and on.

After a bit I said... why on earth am I listening to the entitled, angry ramblings of a dysregluated child who is upset because he couldn’t get what he wants? It wasn’t even a heart to hear talk, it was a rant (or a 5-year-old’s version of a rant) and much of what he said didn’t even make sense.

I finally hung up the phone and thought about it. I had been scared to stop the conversation because I didn’t want to “crush” him, but really I had been letting HIM “crush” all of US with his moods and behavior.

From that point on, things changed.

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I constantly felt like others were trying to “control” me. My kids, included!

I didn't realize that the dynamic I’d set up was that if others were unhappy enough, I’d jump in to try and make them happy so I could relax.

Other peoples’ emotions controlled me… because I’d let them.

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She tried to hold everything together by being good. The good wife, good mother, the good Christian. She homeschooled the kids, baked bread, started a garden, kept the house spotless, and didn’t complain.

When he yelled, she stayed calm or cowered. When he lied, she prayed harder. When he called her selfish or demanding for asking the smallest thing, she backed down. When she thought about standing up for herself, shame hit her like a wave.

“Maybe I am selfish.”

And that’s how the cycle held her.

Even when things got dangerous and her health was deteriorating, she hesitated. Because the act of leaving, of saying no more, still felt selfish.

That’s what people-pleasing does. It convinces you that caring for yourself is sinful, that choosing sanity is selfish, that protecting your life is pride.

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This week, I read this statement on X and immediately had a 🤯 moment and memory come up of a situation in early marriage.

My husband, a diagnosed (by himself and me) people pleaser, was driving us to the mall when we lived in Australia, near the Blue Mountains. We were planning to go shopping with our 1-year-old and baby.

He missed the beginning of the turning lane to get into the mall, and I said, “Oh, that’s our turn!” expecting him to put on his blinker, wait a beat or two, then get into the turning lane at the point we were at.

He said, “I can’t slow down now, I’ll get honked at.”

The thing was, this was a one-way street and there was no second chance to turn, so I quickly said, “Just put on your blinker, wait and there is a gap coming soon!”

He got mad, wouldn’t do it, and then we had to take an entire 10 minutes to get back to where he could have just braked with his blinker. I was livid. I remember saying, “You are more worried that a stranger might think you’re rude for ten seconds than about taking your whole family on a huge detour.”

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He squealed, and I yelped, and then I was flooded with anger.

Knowing it was irrational to have this reaction to a cat, I still was ragey. I felt like this cat’s choice to walk in front of me had made me the bad guy. He walked into my path, I reacted, and now he was looking at me (or maybe it was all in my mind) like I was mean.

It hit me later how often that same dynamic plays out in relationships. Someone else’s actions, moods, or irresponsibility put us in a hard spot, and when we feel pressured to “make it right” by making them feel happy again, we get angry.

My cat’s unhappiness felt like an accusation! Absurd, but here we are.

The Root

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But one night, after weeks of friendship drama and tears, she looked at me with those desperate eyes and asked if she could please, just this once, go spend the night.

I could feel the war inside me.

I was afraid to let her down, afraid she’d feel left out, andd afraid she’d lose her friends if I said no.

So I said yes.

The next morning, after I picked her up she told me they’d all stayed up too late, and she couldn’t sleep. So she left the room where the girls were and went to the main living area of the house.

She slept there, all alone, where the men of the house had easy access to her.

Nothing happened, praise God.

But it was, as my friend Cypress says, a beautiful lesson: when something goes wrong but you don’t pay a steep price for it, and it reminds you to stand by your convictions.

I gave in out of fear.

And while she was perfectly safe that night, in another situation, she might not have been.

That moment stuck with me, how quickly fear can feel like love, how easily a mother’s desire for her child to belong can make her disobey her own discernment.

The Root

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One night, I sat at the dinner table with my five precious children, the oldest only eight. They were laughing and saying sweet, funny things, and I wanted to join in. I tried to, as a good mom would, but it felt forced.

Sounds weird to desribe it, but my smile stopped at my collarbone. The joy couldn’t get down to my heart.

At the time, I was working so hard to make my husband happy so he’d act right, and to make my kids happy so they’d love me, that I had completely abandoned myself.

Instead of seeking God’s wisdom for how to handle hard situations, I buried my pain and grief and kept trying to please everyone else.

For me, eventually, they came out as cancer.

People-pleasing and abandoning my own needs, intuition, and convictions didn’t just drain me. It nearly destroyed me.

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It wasn’t just, “Should I do this or not?”

Instead, it went something like: “If I do this, how will they feel? And if they feel that way, what will that mean for me?”

If my little one asked me for something, instead of thinking…

“What is my boundary here?” or “Does this make sense right now?” the thought process was…

“If I say no, how will they feel? And if they feel that way, what kind of person will that make me?”

As you can imagine, it was absolutely exhausting. Every situation felt like a minefield. I could sense my own intuition and instinct, but I couldn’t drown out the overwhelming desire to keep others happy so I could avoid anxiety.

Ironically, the whole cycle made me deeply anxious.

The Root

At the root of much people-pleasing is not just kindness or “being a good mom.”

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One afternoon, I headed back up to my room. I stepped into the elevator, pressed “7,” and a couple walked in asking for the third floor. I pressed “3” for them.

The elevator started moving, then stopped. When the doors opened, I realized we’d gone right past floor 3 and were on the seventh floor.

Instantly, the old, familiar People-Pleasing Feeling bubbled up.

I looked at them like I’d just run over their kitten and blurted, “I’m sorry!” They shook it off and said, “Oh, it’s fine, it happened to us the other day too!”

As I walked down the hall, I started laughing at myself. The elevator skipped their floor and went to mine first: something I had zero control over.

But because it felt “unfair” and out of order, I felt somehow responsible. Like my good was automatically their bad.

A Root

This was a classic blast from the past (as I’m largely healed in this area) of “If I could, I should” false responsibility. It’s a deep belief that:

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But during my early years, he was mostly absent, with occasional visits that often left me feeling worse off than if he’d never come at all.

As a child, I didn’t know how to process this.

So I created a narrative: “My father abandoned me.” That story shaped so much of my inner world. I felt I needed to be perfect to prevent disaster, blamed myself for things I didn’t even understand, and tried to micro-manage everything around me to avoid pain.

(Side note: later I realized it wasn’t so much that my father abandoned me as it was that my mother protected me, which was very healing.)

But for years, that old narrative left its mark:

• I worried constantly about how my actions affected others.

• When something negative happened, I always looked for what I did wrong.

• I obsessed over what I needed to do to prevent future catastrophe (parenting perfectly, never messing up, holding everything together, etc.)

In short, I felt like everything was my responsibility. And when things went wrong, I thought, “It’s all my fault.”

Can you relate?

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He is the child I wanted most to please, because he is the child who made my best parenting efforts look useless. I wanted him to be “normal” and “easy.”

Yes, so life would be simpler, but also because his hard behavior felt like proof that I was not a good mom.

His struggles felt like pain to me. I did not want him to have them. And every time he felt pain, was rejected, did something awkward, or said something ridiculous, I secretly believed I was to blame.

That I was not doing mom life right.

I became excellent at Ninja Moves. I would quietly move at lightning speed to smooth his path so he could stay calm and be okay.

If he was okay, I was okay. Except I wasn’t okay, I was stressed to hades.

My biggest breakthrough with him came when I realized this:

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In the dream I was inside an apartment when I heard a knock on the door. I opened it to find a woman standing there, calm and authoritative. No anger, no yelling, no threats.

“Give me your laptop,” she said.

I felt confused, but I went and got it and handed it over.

Angry and victimized, I stewed a little bit. Time passed, hours or days, I’m not sure. Then another knock came. My stomach sank because I knew it was her.

She stood there again and said in the same calm, mildly friendly voice:

“Give me your phone.”

This time I felt furious and frustrated. But I gave it over anyway. She thanked me politely, as though we had just closed a deal (in a way, I suppose we had), and walked out.

In that moment of the dream, I had an epiphany 💡…

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These two were at it again.

And because I want them to love each other for the long haul, I was hoping to teach them how to work through disagreements instead of sliding straight into name-calling and “You always…!” accusations.

But as I sat there listening to both sides, I started to feel hopeless. A low-key dread swirled in, and sadness settled over me.

The thought running through my head was this:

I can’t please both of my kids right now. No matter what I do, I’m always letting someone down.

The thought of not doing right by one of my children put me in a funk. It was an ever-present worry of mine. That someone would feel unloved, unchosen, or not quite the favorite.

The Fear Hiding Under People-Pleasing

For many of us, there are layers of fear.

But one driving fear shows up again and again for people-pleasing, over-responsible mothers:

If I don’t get it right, the people I love won’t be okay.

And if they’re not okay, I’m not okay.

It goes something like this.

A young child creates a lot of drama at bedtime. Coming in and out, crying, voicing fears, making demand after demand. What should be a short routine stretches into what feels like (and often is) hours.

What mom wants to say is this:

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“Am I now trying to win the approval of human beings, or of God? Or am I trying to please people? If I were still trying to please people, I would not be a servant of Christ.” Galatians 1:10

I would never have identified myself as a people pleaser.

I’ve always been loud, opinionated, and able to speak my mind. Or at least, it felt that way to me. I have never been afraid of arguing or standing up for myself.

On the surface, I was a confident secure woman.

Until I got married and had kids.

My husband and I met at a Christian prayer ministry training program in England. And, starting on my honeymoon, I developed nerve pain in the female region.

Because I am overly identified with the concept of sowing and reaping…

💡 INSIGHT: Over-functioning women are big believers in principles like cause and effect and sowing and reaping, that we connect anything negative that happens to us to something negative we must have done.

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