You apologize when nothing is your fault. You say yes when every part of you wants to say no. You over-explain your decisions at work, manage everyone’s feelings in your relationships, and somehow always end up last on your own list. From the outside, people call you generous, easygoing, so giving. But inside, something feels off. There is a low hum of exhaustion you cannot quite shake, and a resentment you are too tired to name.
Susan Podbielski, a licensed psychotherapist in private practice in New York City, has spent more than a decade helping people untangle exactly that feeling. A graduate with a Master’s in Mental Health Counseling and a fellow selected by the Institute for Psychoanalytic Education at NYU Langone Medical School for exhibiting outstanding potential in the field, Podbielski brings a rare combination of clinical depth and lived experience to this conversation. Before becoming a therapist, she spent years as a network television producer, a world that rewards achievement and punishes vulnerability. She burned out before she changed course, and that history shapes everything about how she now helps others recognize the same patterns in themselves.
People Pleasing Is Not About Being Nice
The first thing Podbielski wants people to understand is that people pleasing has very little to do with genuine generosity. “People pleasing is actually a form of perfectionism,” she explains. It is the part of a person that compulsively needs everyone around them to be okay, to be happy, to never be disappointed. That compulsion is not the same as choosing to be kind from a place of abundance. The line between the two is important, and Podbielski is precise about where it falls.
Genuine generosity, she says, comes from a full cup. When you do something kind freely, from a place of real choice, it tends to feel good. It does not diminish you. People pleasing, by contrast, shows up as saying yes when you desperately want to say no, overscheduling yourself to avoid letting anyone down, and doing things you resent because you feel you have no real alternative. The behavioral markers Podbielski watches for include chronic fatigue, building resentment, physical symptoms like gastrointestinal problems, and the persistent feeling that no matter how much you do, it is never quite enough. “If you find yourself depressed, burnt out, always saying yes when you want to say no, something’s wrong,” she says.
The pattern is particularly common among women. Podbielski points to both socialization and the layered expectations placed on women to be successful, agreeable, capable, and pleasant at all times, without ever appearing difficult. That combination, she explains, creates the perfect conditions for a compulsive giving pattern to take hold.
The Four Fear Responses, and Why Fawning Gets Overlooked
To understand where people pleasing comes from psychologically, Podbielski draws on the work of therapist and author Pete Walker, whose book on complex post-traumatic stress disorder is one she frequently recommends to clients. Walker identifies four classic responses to anxiety and threat: fight, flight, freeze, and a fourth response he calls fawning. It is this fourth category that captures what people pleasing really is.
Fawning, as Podbielski describes it, is an anxiety response. It is the internal question: how do I make this calm down? How do I prevent an attack? The answer the nervous system lands on is appeasement. Say nice things. Go overboard. Smooth it over. Make everyone comfortable so nothing bad happens. “You can see this a lot with people who apologize constantly,” Podbielski notes. Another version of the same response is over-explaining. She describes a client whose need to justify every professional decision was quietly damaging her credibility at work, until someone pointed out that no explanation was required. The client realized she was doing it to make people like her, to prevent criticism, and to manage her own anxiety about not being seen as good enough.
Understanding people pleasing as a fear response rather than a personality trait is significant. It means the behavior was never really about being nice. It was about staying safe.
How Childhood Wires the Pattern In
Podbielski traces most chronic people pleasing back to early experiences, specifically to the messages received in childhood about what it means to be safe, loved, and acceptable. One of the most common dynamics she sees is what clinicians call parentification, where a child takes on the role of emotional caretaker for a parent. “Every child wants and needs to be loved,” she explains. When a child learns that the parent’s emotional stability depends on the child’s behavior, that child will begin suppressing their own needs to keep the peace. Getting along becomes more important than being honest. Saying yes becomes safer than saying what you really feel.
She also describes homes where one sibling’s struggles consume so much of the family’s attention and resources that the other children quietly learn not to add to the burden. They stop voicing their needs. They stop making demands. They become, in effect, invisible to protect everyone else from having one more problem to manage. And then there are the families where people pleasing is simply modeled across generations, where a child watches their mother manage the world through appeasement and absorbs the lesson without a single word being spoken. Podbielski worked with one client who, as a young girl, was forced by her mother to spend time with a neighbor she did not like. The message she internalized was that getting along with everyone matters more than being who you really are. Decades later, she was still living by that rule, and still feeling guilty when she pushed back against situations that were genuinely harmful to her.
“You can give, as long as you don’t have expectations of how it’s gonna all work out. Because that’s giving to get control, and you might be very disappointed.”
Susan Podbielski, Licensed Psychotherapist, NYC
The Real Price of Chronic People Pleasing
People pleasers are often unaware of what the pattern is costing them physically, emotionally, and existentially until those costs become impossible to ignore. Podbielski does not soften this part of the conversation. Chronic resentment, she explains, creates real physiological stress. The suppressed anger and toxicity that build when someone keeps doing things they do not want to do contribute to inflammation, heart disease, and persistent gastrointestinal symptoms. Depression, she notes, is often resentment and anger that has been turned inward rather than expressed.
But the cost she considers most serious is what she calls betrayal of self. “You no longer, if you keep doing this chronically, you end up betraying yourself to the point where you are living a completely inauthentic life.” People in this position wake up one day and cannot identify what they feel, what they want, or what kind of life they actually meant to build. They are in careers their parents chose, relationships structured around other people’s comfort, and daily routines defined entirely by obligation. Podbielski is clear that this is not a dramatic failure or a rare extreme. It is the quiet, accumulated result of a thousand small yeses given when the real answer was no.
She adds something that often surprises people: burnout and breakdown are not the worst things that can happen. “Sometimes having a breakdown or having a burnout is your psyche’s way of telling you, okay, this is not working.” She does not glorify the experience, but she does reframe it. Hitting a wall, when a person is willing to listen, can be the beginning of a much more honest life.
Boundaries Are Not Walls, They Are Gates
When Podbielski talks about setting boundaries, she is careful to dismantle the version of the concept that most people misunderstand. “Boundaries are not forever,” she says. “They’re not brick walls that you build forever. It’s like you build a fence, you put a gate in it. And you determine who you open the gate for and who you close the gate for.” That distinction between a wall and a gate matters because it removes the all-or-nothing quality that makes boundary-setting feel so threatening to people who have spent years trying to keep everyone happy.
One of the most common obstacles she sees is language. A client told Podbielski she had tried to set a boundary and it had not worked. When they talked through exactly what the client had said, Podbielski recognized the problem immediately. The words were so vague, so softened by guilt, that the other person never registered that a boundary was being set at all. It sounded like an option, not a position. Podbielski worked with her on clearer language, something like: I cannot do that right now. I am feeling overextended. Maybe another time, but right now I have to say no. The words are still kind. But the meaning is unmistakable.
She also challenges the belief that setting limits is selfish. “If you take care of your needs by setting a boundary, by saying no, the other person doesn’t have to take care of you. It’s actually selfless.” And it is honest. For the first time, the other person is seeing who you actually are, rather than the version of you that has been managing their feelings for years.
Self-Compassion Is Not a Luxury; It Is the Mechanism
Recovery from people pleasing is not, in Podbielski’s view, primarily about technique. It is about learning to treat yourself the way you would treat someone you genuinely care about. “We don’t talk to ourselves very nicely,” she says. “If we talked to ourselves the way we talk to friends, no one would be friends with us.” The internal monologue for many people pleasers is relentlessly critical, holding them to a standard of perfection that they would never apply to anyone else.
The therapeutic approach Podbielski uses draws on cognitive behavioral therapy to identify and shift the core beliefs driving perfectionism and anxiety. From there, she moves into self-compassion practices and mindfulness, which she defines simply as being present rather than rehearsing future worries or revisiting past regrets. The deeper psychodynamic work then explores the original source of the pattern, not to stay there, but to understand it well enough to stop repeating it. She recommends the Mindful Self-Compassion workbook by Dr. Kristin Neff and Chris Germer as a resource that combines both tools in a format people can work through on their own. Her own website also offers free downloads on perfectionism, boundary setting, and self-compassion for anyone ready to begin.
The shift that Podbielski watches for in her clients is not the dramatic moment where everything changes. It is the accumulation of small behavioral changes over time. Starting low-stakes. Practicing clearer language. Noticing when energy is depleted and treating that as information. “It’s the small changes over time that actually add up to the big changes in your life,” she says. Guilt, she reminds her clients, is not something another person can force on you. It is a choice, and it can be made differently.
You Are Allowed to Give From a Full Well
The goal of the work Podbielski does is not to turn generous people into selfish ones. It is to help them understand the difference between giving that sustains and giving that depletes. She is clear that generosity is a capacity she genuinely admires. “If you give for the sake of giving, just because it makes you feel good, that’s wonderful. We need more people like you.” What she asks for is one addition to that: take care of yourself first.
Podbielski spent years running on empty before her own burnout forced her to stop and reckon with what she was doing and why. She changed careers at 58, with help from people she trusted, and she is direct about the fact that no one does anything significant alone. What she found on the other side was not just a new profession. It was a life that actually felt like hers. She shares that not as inspiration, but as evidence that the change is possible, even when it feels very late.
The person Podbielski most wants to reach is the one who is so skilled at taking care of everyone else that they have lost track of the fact that they are allowed to matter too. Her message to that person is not complicated. Fill the well. Set the limit. Say the no. And understand that showing up for your own life is not a betrayal of the people you love. It is, as Susan Podbielski has spent a decade demonstrating, exactly how you love them better.
