No more people-pleasing

March 13, 2025 ~ The Healing Modalities ~ Leave a comment

Now what?

When we begin the work of letting go of people-pleasing, it can feel like everything is shifting.

For so long, acceptance and connection may have looked like being agreeable, accommodating, pleasant, helpful, easy to get along with. We may have shaped ourselves around what others needed or expected. We became the supportive friend, the reliable colleague, the one who didn’t rock the boat.

And underneath all of that was the quiet hope: If I can be who they want me to be, then I’ll be accepted. Then I’ll belong. Then I’ll be loved.

But people-pleasing is not the same as genuine acceptance or connection. It’s performance masquerading as intimacy. It’s self-abandonment in the name of belonging. And at some point, we realize that the cost is too high.

We realize that we’ve been offering curated versions of ourselves in exchange for “acceptance” or “connection.” But “acceptance” by others of curated versions of ourselves – is that really the acceptance or true connection we want?

So what do acceptance and connection look like now, in this next phase, post-people-pleasing?

It looks like showing up as your full self, not just the “palatable” parts.
It looks like being honest about your needs, your limits, your preferences.
It looks like saying “no” without over-explaining or justifying.
It looks like letting go of the idea that you have to manage other people’s emotions in order to feel safe in relationship.

And yes—this might feel strange and uncomfortable at first. We might worry that we’re being selfish, or “too much,” or not “nice enough.” That’s normal. We’re unlearning patterns that were reinforced for a long time.

But as we keep choosing honesty over false harmony, self-respect over self-sacrifice, we’ll notice something: our relationships begin to shift. Some will fall away. Some will deepen. And new ones will emerge—ones rooted in mutual authenticity, not some performance.

True connection doesn’t require us to stay small. It invites us to expand. It welcomes all of who we are.

Your turn:

In what ways have you curated yourself to maintain acceptance or connection?
What does authentic acceptance and connection feel like to you now?
What are you willing to let go of in order to experience more aligned relationships?

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Work with me: Want to see how self-care is transformative and can help you create the results you want in your life? I can show you how. I offer first-time seekers a complimentary 45-minute exploratory session. Sign up here.

What’s on your mind? It can be powerful to learn from each other and our common struggles when it comes to our practice of self-care–or just being a human being. If you have something you’re struggling with and would like some perspective, share it here. Your issue may be chosen and addressed in the next post–it’ll be totally anonymous.

Choose discomfort?

February 27, 2025 ~ The Healing Modalities ~ Leave a comment

Your new currency.

Why is it so hard to make changes in our lives, even when we know they will benefit us?

Because change requires discomfort—and our brains are wired to avoid it.

We make changes because we recognize that our current habits, routines, or mindsets aren’t fully aligned with who we want to become. It’s not that who we are right now is “wrong” or “not good enough.” It’s simply that we know we’re capable of more. We know we can grow.

Making changes is an act of self-care. We choose to eat healthier, deepen relationships, find more fulfilling work, or be more present in our lives—not because we’re trying to “fix” ourselves, but because we care about the person we are becoming.

At first, change feels exciting. We’re motivated, thinking, I can do this. This feels good.

But then … it gets hard.

The discomfort sets in. We feel resistance. Our brain urges us to return to what’s easy, comfortable, and familiar—even if that old comfort is exactly why we wanted to change in the first place.

We think:
🔹 I don’t feel like it today.
🔹 I’ll just scroll for a few more minutes.

🔹 It won’t make a difference anyway.
🔹 I miss him so much—maybe I’ll just text him.

These urges pull us back to comfort. But if we keep answering them, we’ll never pass through the hard part.

So let it be hard—and keep going anyway.

Discomfort is the price we pay for growth. The more we allow it, the closer we get to real transformation. When we stick to the plan, sit with the discomfort, and honor our commitment to ourselves, something shifts.

What once felt impossible becomes second nature. The habit becomes part of who we are. The future version of you is waiting. Are you willing to pay the price of some discomfort in the short term to get there?

Your Turn:

Are you ready to stop flaking on yourself?
What would happen if you let it be hard or uncomfortable—and kept going anyway?
How would your life be different if the thing you’re struggling with now simply became part of who you are?

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When you go all-in

January 30, 2025 ~ The Healing Modalities ~ Leave a comment

Bet on yourself.

“Leap and the net will appear.” – John Burroughs

This year, I’m deciding to go all-in with the goals I have. It sounds obvious—of course we need to be all-in to succeed. But how often do we quietly talk ourselves out of what we want?

“It probably won’t happen, so why try?”

“What if I give up before I get there?”

“What if I’m not cut out for this?”

These are just ways our brain tries to keep us “safe,” by convincing us NOT to take actions towards our goals. Because goals can be scary. The unknown feels risky. Disappointment, failure, and letting ourselves (or others) down feels scary. So, we hedge our bets. We put in half-effort as a built-in excuse for why we didn’t make it.

But half-effort isn’t going all-in.

Something shifts when we decide to go all-in, when we DO take actions—even if we ultimately don’t end up with our intended goal.

Even if we don’t end up with our intended goal?!

Yes. Because by doing this, we are seeing what’s possible for ourselves, stretching ourselves past who we already are and becoming an expanded version of ourselves.

I want to see who I can become through this process. I know that no matter what the outcome, I will grow from going through this process.

And maybe that’s the whole point of having goals. Not only to achieve the goal, but to see who we can become by working towards the goal. In working towards the goal, we will be strengthening our belief in ourselves, we might be taking actions we’ve never taken before, and we might be feeling the discomfort of doing these new things, these hard things.

Then it doesn’t matter so much if we actually achieve the goal or not. Because we still get to be the person we’ve become from the effort we’ve exerted. That part doesn’t go away. That growth becomes part of us. We can take this version of ourselves to the next thing, and the next.

And that version of us? That’s the real win.

Your turn: What do you want for yourself that you’re willing to go all-in on and bet on yourself to make happen? What would you need to think and believe? What would you need to feel? And what actions would you take (or not take) to get the result you want? Who will you become along the way?

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An easy way to care for yourself

May 16, 2024 ~ The Healing Modalities ~ Leave a comment

Even more.

One of the ways I started taking better care of myself was through thinking about my Future Self and what she would appreciate.

It’s easy to do or not do something in the moment for reasons of instant gratification. But would your Future Self appreciate that action?

Here are some examples:

When faced with washing the dishes in my kitchen sink, would my Future Self appreciate the instant gratification of my Current Self leaving dishes in the sink for her to wash the next day? (Sometimes I DO choose to leave the dishes for the next day – on days when I know I don’t have to rush out of the house first thing in the morning. Then I DO have time to do them in the morning. But if I leave them there the night before a long day, I know I won’t be able to wash them until I get home later the next evening. And by that time, I might be too tired and there goes another day with dishes in the sink. In that case, my Future Self would appreciate me washing the dishes sooner rather than later.)

Would my Future Self appreciate me spending an hour scrolling on social media at night when I could be sleeping earlier or reading instead? I think my Future Self would appreciate some extra sleep or making progress in the book I’m reading.

Would my Future Self appreciate me skipping my morning workout routine today? What would be the consequences of that? If I’m sick or in pain, that’s a different story. My Current Self would appreciate it greatly if I skipped my morning workout routine today. My Future Self might also appreciate it, if it means that I rest and recover more quickly instead of pushing myself and prolonging the pain or sickness.

Would my Future Self appreciate me giving in to the urge to text someone who is better for me NOT to text in the moment? Probably not, because she would have to deal with the consequences of feeling anxious, waiting to hear back, receiving a message that she doesn’t want to hear, or engaging in ways that are unhealthy for her.

Would my Future Self appreciate me eating another helping of food when I want to lose weight? No, because she’s the one who will be frustrated that her body weight isn’t changing and “nothing” is working. Even though it might meet my Current Self’s need for instant gratification, it will delay my Future Self’s desire for a more healthy weight and well-being.

In thinking about our Future Self, what we’re doing TODAY contributes to what and who our Future Self will be, do, and have.

Today, if we don’t overeat, we are taking care of our tomorrow Future Self who won’t feel lethargic and guilty for overeating.

Today, if we spend an hour working on the report, we are taking care of our next-week Future Self who won’t need to scramble at the last minute to finish the report.

Today, if we decide to finally leave the toxic relationship we’re in, we are taking care of our 6-month later Future Self who is in a healthier relationship with themself (or even someone else).

Today, if we create a monthly payment plan to pay off our debt and choose on each of the following months to stick with the plan, we are taking care of our one-year later Future Self who no longer has debt.

We get to decide today with our actions how we are taking care of our Future Self.

Your turn: What will you decide to do today to take care of your Future Self tomorrow? What about your Future Self in a week? In a month? In a year?

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When you try to escape from yourself

May 9, 2024 ~ The Healing Modalities ~ Leave a comment

Do you know what it means to escape yourself? We may avoid ourselves or escape from ourselves for different reasons, which I’ll talk about in a minute.

Forms of escape or avoidance that might be familiar to you are overeating, overdrinking, overspending, over-Instagraming, over-Netflixing, overworking, over-cleaning, over-exercising, or eating edibles.

It could be ANYTHING, if we’re using that thing/action to prevent ourselves from being present to feeling an emotion.

I call this type of escape “buffering.” What is buffering?

We buffer to avoid feeling emotional pain or uncomfortable emotions. When we buffer, we use external things to change how we feel internally. This means engaging in an action to put a buffer between us and a feeling we don’t want to feel.

We might feel like we’re taking care of ourselves by engaging in some of these actions. Sometimes we are. And sometimes, these things become false pleasures that have a net-negative outcome: when we overeat, we gain weight. When we overdrink, we end up with hangovers and half of the next day is ruined. When we overspend, we go into debt or don’t meet our savings goals. When we eat edibles, we are less present for our lives and those around us.

If buffering is what we do to avoid pain/discomfort, it makes sense that when we stop buffering, we’ll feel pain/discomfort. But most of us don’t understand this, which makes it almost impossible to stop buffering or escaping ourselves.

We have to be willing to feel uncomfortable in order to move past our buffers.

An analogy for this is like stepping into a house and turning on the lights and the house is a mess. The obvious and easiest answer is to turn the lights back off (to buffer) so the mess will “go away.” But the mess doesn’t go away – you just can’t see it now because the lights are off.

It’s similar with emotions. Avoiding an emotion doesn’t make the emotion go away – it just helps us not to see or feel it. We pretend it isn’t there, but it IS there, and it’s there for a reason.

And this is part of the reason WHY we buffer sometimes – to NOT find out what that reason is.

Buffering is a way to tolerate our lives when we know there’s some misalignment occurring.

We may be unhappy at our job, but we need to keep the job in order to support our family. So we buffer by overdrinking wine every night or impulse buying on Amazon or eating edibles.

Or we might be in a relationship that’s not working for us, but instead of having an uncomfortable conversation or making a scary, difficult decision, we stay in the relationship and buffer instead.

Or we don’t like the overall trajectory of our lives but don’t know what to do, so we buffer – which is easy – instead of doing the harder work of looking within, seeking professional help, or making tough decisions to help change our lives.

When we stop buffering, we’ll likely experience temporary pain. And the pain isn’t caused by the lack of buffering. What we need to do is stop buffering ourselves long enough to find the real cause of the pain.

It might mean taking a closer look at ourselves and our lives, our decisions and choices up to this point, and asking ourselves what we really need and how we truly want to take care of ourselves and our lives.

Your turn: What feelings have you been avoiding? What are the false pleasures you’ve been engaging in? In what way would your life be different if you didn’t have these false pleasures? Are you ready to stop buffering and willing to feel some discomfort instead, in order to move towards true knowing and well-being for yourself?

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Want more confidence?

February 22, 2024 ~ The Healing Modalities ~ Leave a comment

Your thoughts about you.

How many of us want to have more self-confidence? There’s a difference between confidence and self-confidence.

Confidence comes from experience. If we’ve done something well before, when we do that thing again, we’ll likely have confidence that we can do it. The thought might be, “I’ve done this before and I can do it this time.”

Self-confidence comes from within. Even if we haven’t done something before, our thoughts about ourselves and our abilities can create self-confidence that we can figure something out. Or if we can’t figure it out, we’ll see it as a learning process, and we won’t beat ourselves up for that.

Self-confidence comes from having our own back and what we’ll tell ourselves when something doesn’t go the way we thought it would. The thought might be, “I tried my best, I learned what didn’t work, and I’ll try it again to see what might work differently. I know I can figure it out.”

Confidence and self-confidence are feelings. Our thoughts create our feelings. So if we want to feel confident and self-confident, we’ll need to think thoughts that create those feelings.

Many of us struggle with self-confidence because we’re used to telling ourselves mean and critical things when we think we’ve “messed up” somehow. Thoughts like:

“I’m just not good enough for this.”
“There must be something wrong with me.”
“Nothing ever goes the way I want it to, so why keep trying?”
“This is too hard for me.”
“They think I’m incapable.”

Those thoughts will create a feeling of disappointment, self-doubt, discouragement, or defeat. Are those feelings close to the confidence or self-confidence we want to feel? No. So let’s try different thoughts. Thoughts like:

“I’m figuring this out and I can keep trying.”
“I’m learning what works and what doesn’t.”
“It didn’t go the way I wanted it to this time, but let’s see if this other way works . . .”
“This is hard and I can do hard things.”
“I’m as capable as I need to be.”
“I’m deciding to believe in myself no matter what.”

When we become aware of the thoughts we think about ourselves, we can choose them on purpose. We can choose thoughts that serve us, that are kinder to ourselves than the ones we might be used to thinking.

Your turn: Are you aware of the thoughts you think about yourself? What thoughts about yourself serve you? Which ones don’t? What are some slightly kinder thoughts you could choose instead? What are some much kinder–and still believable thoughts–you can choose instead?

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Does success give you permission?

January 18, 2024 ~ The Healing Modalities ~ Leave a comment

Give it to yourself.

Last week we talked about redefining success. This week, let’s talk about why we want to “be successful” in the first place.

Most of us don’t realize this, but we want to be successful in order to give ourselves permission to believe certain things about ourselves and to feel a certain way. What?

Sometimes, because we don’t have certain things or haven’t achieved certain goals, we think something is wrong with our lives. We think something is wrong with us.

We might think that achieving a goal will fill some hole we think we have in our lives. Why do we think there’s a hole there?

We might think that in order to believe we’re good enough or worthy, we need to accomplish goals first. We might think that in order to feel confident and happy, we need to accomplish goals first. We think the way to “fix” what’s “wrong” is to get something we don’t yet have, something outside of us.

Does this sound familiar?

When I make $X amount of money, then I’ll feel secure.
When I have X job title, then I’ll feel proud.
Once I own a house, then I’ll believe I’ve made it.
Once I weigh X pounds, then I’ll feel comfortable in my body.
When I have a partner, then I’ll believe I’m lovable.
When I have my own business, then I’ll believe I’m legit.
Once I’ve done X, then I’ll feel worthy.
Once I have X, then I’ll believe I’m good enough.

Usually, even if we’ve done or obtained what we want, we wonder why we still don’t feel ____ or believe that we’re _____.

This is because achieving goals doesn’t create our feelings or beliefs. Our thoughts create our feelings and our thoughts create our beliefs. Beliefs are just thoughts that we’ve kept thinking over and over until we think they’re true. After achieving a goal, we might feel something temporarily, but it’s not sustainable without doing the belief and thought work first.

If we’re waiting until we achieve a goal in order to believe something about ourselves or to feel something we want to feel, we might be waiting a long time. What if it’s the opposite? What if in order to achieve what we want, we need to believe and feel FIRST?

If we believe that we’re lovable, how will that impact the way we show up for dates? If we believe that we’re legit, how will that help us start a business? If we feel secure, how will we think about the money we’re currently making? If we feel comfortable in our body, how will we show up differently for ourselves?

We can believe and feel FIRST. Then, going after the goals we want is just to see what’s possible for ourselves, to stretch ourselves, and to have fun. Not to prove anything to ourselves or to fix anything about our lives.

Your turn: What would you allow yourself to believe and feel about yourself if you achieved a certain goal? What if you could start believing and feeling that way about yourself NOW with what you DO have and who you ALREADY are?

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3 Pillars of Transformative Self-Care

December 7, 2023 ~ The Healing Modalities ~ 3 Comments

Relate to Self.

We’ve heard the term “self-care” being thrown about somewhat recklessly lately. It could mean anything from taking a bubble bath, getting a massage, going out in nature, or drinking a frothy, sugar-filled drink.

Yes, those are all things we can do to take care of ourselves – unless we’re cutting down on sugar, then maybe pass on the frothy, sugar-filled drink!

The way I view self-care is in a transformative way. And there are three pillars of transformative self-care:

1. How we think about ourselves
2. How we speak about and to ourselves
3. How we treat ourselves

All this adds up to how we relate to ourselves – our relationship with our Self.

How we think about ourselves will determine how we speak about and to ourselves. If we mainly think thoughts that reflect poorly on ourselves, we will likely speak poorly about and to ourselves. This shows up in self-denigrating language spoken out loud to others, like “I’m so lame, you’ll never guess what I did yesterday!” Or to ourselves, “I can’t believe I messed that up again! Why am I so stupid?!”

How we think about ourselves also impacts how we treat ourselves. If we don’t think we’re deserving of care, we will likely not take caring actions towards ourselves, even if we know what to do to take care of ourselves. This shows up in how we blow ourselves off by not doing what we say we want to do. For example, we scroll on social media when we have plans to take a walk instead. Or we eat three cookies when we said we’d only have one. We don’t take our commitments to ourselves seriously. We flake on ourselves. We self-sabotage.

And then we wonder why our relationship with ourselves can feel so frustrating. Why we never do what we say we’ll do. Why we end up feeling disappointed with ourselves. Why we feel discouraged about our goals. Why we keep making decisions out of alignment with ourselves.

We can start to build ourselves back up, to transform how we care for ourselves. We had a strong sense of ourselves when we were little kids. Over the years, most of us got that knocked out of us unintentionally by certain adults, society, peers, our culture, the media.

We can think about ourselves intentionally and with kindness and care. Start treating ourselves like our 5-year-old self who is just starting to learn more about the world and other people. What would we say to that 5-year-old when she (or he or they) makes a mistake? Or when she is excited about something she’s doing? Or when she is sad because something didn’t go her way?

This is one way to engage in transformative self-care: by becoming aware of our relationship with ourselves and to start nurturing it even more.

Your turn: What do you want to think about yourself on purpose, with kindness and care? Here’s a clue: What would you love to hear someone else tell you about yourself? What if you tell that to yourself and you believe it? How can you practice believing it even more?

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