Episode 50 – Stop People-Pleasing: The ADHD Mum’s Guide to Boundaries, Balance, and Breaking Free

Jane McFadden:

Hello ADHD mums and welcome to the podcast. This is your place to feel seen, supported, and even have a bit of a laugh along the way. It’s that time of year again, Christmas.

A time that can be magical, yes, but also completely overwhelming. Between managing family dynamics, juggling endless to-do lists, and trying to create all of those Instagram-worthy memories can feel like you’re just holding it all together, barely. Today we are looking at something that many of us struggle with, but we just rarely talk about.

And this is navigating family conflict. And during the Christmas holidays, this can become even more obvious and we can struggle with it more than ever. If you’ve ever felt like you’re running on empty because you’re constantly saying yes to avoid disappointing others, this is the episode for you.

However, I want to acknowledge something really important. If you’re dealing with deeply toxic family relationships or unresolved trauma, this episode might not feel right for you just yet. And that’s okay.

This episode is about navigating tricky but non-toxic family member dynamics, where old habits, miscommunication, or emotional sensitivity might be causing the friction. So I wouldn’t use this episode if you have narcissist family members or any, as I said, really large unresolved trauma. I would be getting some counselling and working with someone one-on-one on those, but I’m sure you’ve got family members where it’s tricky and non-toxic, and this would be a great episode to apply to those people.

So whether you’re just starting to explore your boundaries or you’re looking to maybe refine your approach, this episode has something for you. Now, as neurodivergent women, we know that people-pleasing behaviour isn’t just about behaviour. Often for us, it’s a survival mechanism that we’ve learned over years of navigating a world that doesn’t always understand or accommodate us.

Many of us have experienced rejection, criticism, or been labelled as too much just for being ourselves. People-pleasing can feel like a way to avoid conflict, maintain relationships, and shield ourselves from the sting of being misunderstood again and again. People-pleasing is deeply rooted in the fear of being dismissed or excluded.

And let’s be honest, as mums, this instinct only grows because we don’t want just peace for ourselves, we want it for our kids too. And if you found yourself agreeing to things that you don’t want to do, biting your tongue to keep the peace or putting everyone else’s needs above your own, know this. This is not a flaw of your character.

This is a response to years and years of conditioning in a world that wasn’t built for your brain in mind. Let’s recognise that this is the first and most powerful step to break free. So this isn’t going to be easy.

This won’t be solved in one episode. Now, this is probably one area that I struggle with the most. I struggle in a lot of areas. This is one of them. However, when I end up in conflict with people, I often wonder why. And when I strip it all the way back, it’s because I people-pleased to begin with.

And in the short term, it feels easier and better to people-please. But then a couple of weeks later, I get myself into all these situations and I don’t know how I’ve gotten there. And for me, the root is people-pleasing.

So let’s talk about why people-pleasing feels so hard to escape. Many of us with ADHD or other neurodivergent conditions have experienced criticism, rejection in the past. People-pleasing can feel like a way to avoid the pain.

We also don’t like letting people down. Saying no can feel selfish. We worry about how other people will react.

Also, we can feel overwhelmed. So constantly saying yes leaves us drained and frustrated. However, we can also feel on the other side completely overwhelmed with being assertive for the first time.

Saying no, it doesn’t feel good. But these behaviors don’t just impact us. They also shape how our kids see our boundaries and our relationships.

But this is why breaking free is so important. And again, I want to acknowledge I don’t expect anybody to go from people-pleasing to having great, assertive, perfect boundaries right at the beginning. I’ve been working on this for years and I’ll continue to work on it for years.

The part that has made me want to stop and think about it and make changes is that I’ve realized that this leads to more conflict. When you bend over backwards to meet everybody’s needs, you get overwhelmed, frustrated, and then eventually, for me, the frustration leaks out.

Passive-aggressive comments. I get short with people. I get irritated. I want to avoid them.

Then they don’t know what they’ve done wrong. Then I have to either tell them, avoid them, or try and figure out what to do. Or push all of it down, as many of us do, pretend it’s fine, and try and start again.

So why should we stop people-pleasing? Number one, for your kids. If you struggle to get motivated to stop people-pleasing for yourself, do it for your children. Your children are watching how you manage family dynamics.

If they see you always bending over backwards, not standing up for yourself, they may learn to do the same. We can’t teach them how to be assertive by just telling them. We have to have them watch us.

We need to have healthy boundaries modeled out for our children and we need to teach them it’s okay to prioritize their own needs and well-being. That is probably the number one and one of the only reasons that I have started to address this because my nine-year-old daughter asks me lots of questions and hears me whinging to my husband about things that I’ve created and it’s been from that that I’ve realized I’ve had to make a change.

Also, number two, for your own mental health. People-pleasing keeps you stuck in the anxiety and the resentment and it takes a toll on your mental health.

Three, reducing conflict. When you suppress your needs and your feelings, they will often come out later in other ways that hurt your relationships.

Setting boundaries up front can actually prevent these misunderstandings and arguments and it’s more fair for the other person who has no idea what they’ve done wrong. Let me give you an example.

Take Sarah, a mum who’s always been a people-pleaser. Her friend, Amy, casually says, oh can I come over for a play date after school at your house when they were doing pickup and all the kids are going, please mum, please mum and Sarah starts to feel overwhelmed and Amy’s looking at her expectedly. Instead of saying today’s not a good day for me because she’s had a really busy day and she’s not feeling like it, she says, yeah sure, of course.

But what happens is that Sarah isn’t really prepared for the play date and it becomes chaotic and Amy’s kids are loud, they leave toys scattered everywhere, there’s juices spilled and it starts to get to a point where Sarah is just like, why did I say that you could come over? I wish this wasn’t happening. I wish that I’d never said yes.

But Amy doesn’t seem to notice that Sarah’s growing stress because she’s got things that she wants to talk about and she leaves without really helping to clean up. She overstays her welcome and at the end she says, thanks so much, let’s do it again soon. Sarah is actually fuming inside.

She has to clean up, she still has to make dinner, she’s feeling stressed out, her phone’s ringing but she doesn’t say anything in the moment. She tells herself, I don’t want to ruin the friendship and she keeps quiet.

However, she starts to avoid Amy at the pickup. She starts to walk to the other end because she doesn’t want to be put in the position again.

Then Amy starts texting about when would be a good time to meet up, when can the kids come over or when can Sarah go to her house. But Sarah starts to feel a pit in her stomach.

She avoids replying, she starts to feel stressed out and then she just wants to dodge all the plans. Over time that Sarah realizes she’s avoiding the friendship that she used to value because she never actually addressed how that play date upset her and she realized she never should have said yes when she wasn’t feeling up to it.

If Sarah had have just spoken up initially saying, look I’d love to catch up but today just isn’t a great day for me, she would have avoided the resentment. People-pleasing has led her to suppress her feelings which ultimately created more distance in the friendship than setting a kind and honest boundary which would have worked.

Can you see here now you end up in conflict but you don’t know why or you end up dreading it, you end up in anxiety but you just should have said no from the beginning because maybe you would have been okay with the play date if it was planned and you were ready to go and you had your snacks ready and you were feeling good because Amy was your friend.

But by saying yes in the short term you’ve created more of a long-term issue and now the resentment and the stress has made you not want to hang out with Amy and the kids now are wondering why they’ve lost the play date friend.

Sometimes neurodivergent people talk about the struggle with friendship and relationships and at times I wonder with some of it does it come back to the people-pleasing particularly with women where we don’t say what we need up front and we get ourselves into this tricky situation and we just want to avoid.

But from the other friend’s point of view they don’t understand what the issue is, they ask to have a play date, you’ve said yes, they came over in a way that they usually do but yet now you’re avoiding them.

So what happens if you’ve never done this before and you can see what I’m saying, you want to do it but you’re like oh my god this would be really really really hard. That’s okay, I didn’t know where to start either and I’m still working on it.

If this is new for you, you just need to start super small. Starting small builds muscle. It’s like if you’re going to start training, doing strength training for the first time. You don’t start lifting 100 kilos, you don’t walk up to your mother-in-law, a highly inflammatory situation and just start being assertive and putting up boundaries.

You need to start really small and exercising it. Start from the beginning with identifying your needs. What do you need from this friendship, from this family member or in this Christmas period? What feels manageable for you? What boundaries do you need to protect your peace?

So identify what is it that you need to feel comfortable. For example, you may find that hosting the Christmas day is too much. So instead of saying yes out of obligation, consider alternatives.

Offering to bring the dish, offering to organize it, offering to bring extra things rather than hosting. Maybe you’re happy to host a Christmas if nobody stays overnight.

What is it about the situation that you can do and you can’t? And then start to practice saying no. So saying no doesn’t have to be confrontational. Here’s an example.

I really appreciate the invitation, I just can’t host this year but I’d love to contribute by bringing dessert or I’d love to contribute by bringing this which is an extra. If you’re feeling a little bad about it because it is your turn, offer to do something that you can do that you don’t mind doing.

If saying no feels really hard, practice in the mirror. Send a really nice text message that you’ve spent a while writing down and ask a friend to read it.

Also plan for the pushback. If you have always been the go-to person in your family, you may find that people do not like you stopping the people-pleasing and putting up the proper boundaries.

That’s normal. When you are first doing this with people that you have always pleased with, they’re probably not going to accept it straight away. Stay calm and repeat your boundary and remind yourself that prioritizing your well-being isn’t selfish, it’s actually necessary.

For example, to start with for myself, I started using my husband as a bit of a human shield and I used him in a way to slow down the communication. So if I was presented with a sticky situation in person that I would usually just agree to, like as an automatic response, and I would usually have a practiced response, oh, I have to just check with my husband because he usually looks after that.

Oh, I’m not sure what he’s doing, let me just check. Would you mind if I text you later? Taking a moment is really, really helpful.

And he was also one of the ones that let me know that I say yes and I’m too nice up front and I get myself into the situation. So I’ve asked him to be my go-to person, I call it when am I digging myself a hole.

So now I’ll say to him, this person messaged me, I was going to write this, am I digging myself a hole? And I use him to run something by. Now he’s not my keeper, I can do what I like, but I’ve noticed that he’s better at it than I am, though I use him as the voice of reason.

It doesn’t have to be him, it can be a family member, can be a friend, it can be anybody. The next step is to manage emotional reactions.

So on the flip side, there might be others of us that struggle with losing our temper and then we regret it later. So some people, people-please up front, but then when they get caught and they’ve dug themselves a hole as I do, then I like to avoid and back away slowly.

Some people just get really angry when they’ve been pushed and pushed. If you are one of those people that gets angry, says something they regret, get triggered, then one technique I like to use is called pause and reframe.

If you feel yourself starting to get triggered, pause and take a breath and ask yourself, what is the story that I’m telling myself right now? Now this is narrative psychology, it is cognitive behavioral therapy, that’s where it’s rooted from.

So I just want to acknowledge this is what therapists often use in their sessions, where you would say, well what is the story I’m telling myself right now? So sometimes we assume we know what the other person is doing, or asking, or that they’re being passive aggressive, but are they really if we strip it back?

Let’s say for example, if your sister-in-law makes a comment about a store-bought cheesecake, your immediate thought might be, she’s judging me for not baking that from scratch. But what if she’s actually dealing with a family member who’s coming who has an allergy, and she’s asking because she wants to know the ingredients?

Reframe the situation to look at what are the other reasons she could be asking? Respond more calmly instead of just reacting defensively. Yes it is, is there a reason that you’re asking me?

Another technique is grounding exercises. Now a lot of people just think this is too hard, annoying, I’ll tell you what, this stuff works.

A lot of people with grounding exercises think they have to go outside and you know go into nature and take half an hour and they don’t have time. Actually I like to hide in a kitchen, a cupboard, I like to go to the toilet, and I like to do that there.

You only need a minute. Managing emotional regulation in high stress moments can be under 10 seconds. One powerful strategy is the 5-4-3-2-1 technique where you name five things you can see, four things you can touch, three things you can hear, two things you can smell, and one that you can taste.

You can Google it. Or you can do box breathing. A lot of people know this one where you inhale for four seconds, hold, exhale for four, you can Google that as well.

My favorite that I do, and I think this is probably a little bit more neurodivergent friendly, this one, is when I actively use my body. This is my favorite and I do this generally when I have to talk to a teacher that I don’t like.

This is when I know that I need to do this before I speak to them. If I think I’m regulated, I know I’m not going to be really.

And what I do is I press my thumb and my finger together, I take a slow breath, and then I start to focus on the feeling of my pants against my other hand. I look around me, I start to name things around me.

I might do each finger at a time, but this is a bit of a stim for me. Remember, I’m doing something that I know feels good that I do just naturally. If you know what your stim is, you might do that.

But I know that I often put my fingers together in a pattern, which is an autistic stim, when I’m feeling stressed, and I do that in a rhythm. I know you can’t see me, but I’m doing it now, and it just feels so relaxing.

You can put your fingers onto your thumb anytime. You can do it anytime. So figure out what it is. Some people will hold their hands, the palm of their hands, onto their thighs, and it’s kind of like I used to do that for like holding on for dear life, because if I get stressed or overwhelmed, anxious, I often cry.

I try not to cry in front of people because sometimes it’s unprofessional and embarrassing. So I’ll hang on for dear life on my palms onto my thighs.

So practice doing something at home where you know you can do that to ground yourself immediately and quickly, and it may not be completely noticeable to others around you.

Next one is to model healthy boundaries for your kids. One of the most important reasons to work on these skills is for your children.

By studying boundaries and managing conflict in healthy ways, you’re showing them how to navigate relationships without sacrificing your well-being.

Let’s say, for example, a family member makes a critical comment about your child’s behavior. Sometimes if we’re people-pleasing, we just brush it off to keep the peace.

You might say, oh yeah, I get it. Yeah, he can be like that, can’t he? Yeah, sure, we’re going to work on that. Yeah, you’ve got to stop doing that.

You might even side with your relative just to get them to be quiet. But if you were looking to model a healthy boundary, now remember this may be hard. So if you’re starting out, you may not be able to do this, but this might be a goal to work towards.

Or if you’re already doing this in a small way, this might be examples of what to do next. You might say, I understand that this looks different to you, but this works for our family.

You’re teaching a child that it’s okay to stand up for themselves and their choices. One of the reasons that I’ve started doing that is because I’ve realized that I’m going to expect my children to be able to stand up for themselves in front of others in the long term.

I want them to be able to say, I don’t drink, I don’t do drugs, I don’t come to parties. Or for my daughter or for my sons, no, I don’t want to come into that dark room with you when everyone’s been drinking.

If they’re people-pleasing and they’ve watched you do that, it may be hard for them to stand up for themselves in that moment. I have gotten into some sticky situations from people-pleasing and going along with things when I was a teenager.

I don’t want my children to do this. We have to address it and we have to teach our kids and model it how to stand up for themselves.

And I know this is hard to hear. I’ll probably work on this skill my whole life and not be able to get it right.

I want to take it a step further and I’m not expecting anybody to do this, but what I just want to throw it out there as an advanced technique is that boundary creep happens when we’re people-pleased because we unintentionally teach others that our boundaries are flexible.

If you, for the first time, put up your healthy boundary and you have family members that don’t understand because remember you’re people-pleased for ages and so they start to push the boundary, we have to hold that boundary.

There’s no point putting up a boundary if you’re going to be flexible with it later. If you start to bend your limits to keep the peace or saying yes to something that you don’t want to, it sends that subtle message that our boundaries are not fixed and with a little push they’ll move.

If you say I’m not going to be hosting Christmas dinner or Christmas lunch, it’s too much for me. But on the run-up to Christmas your sister-in-law says to you, oh I’m getting stressed, I wish I’d never said yes and then you say you’ll do it or she says can we come to your house at night and stay over and you say yes, you’re sending messages that you don’t mean what you say and that when you set up that boundary you are going to get run over the top of.

So over time those around us start to expect that we’ll accommodate their need even when we put up their boundary and remember this isn’t malicious, right? These are nice people. These might be well-meaning relatives and I’m talking again about non-toxic people but they’re just responding to patterns that we’ve allowed to form.

There’s a really great quote and I don’t know who said it and it is that people treat you the way that you allow them to treat you and again I’m really speaking to people that have done this for a while so I just, I want to create episodes where everybody gets something from.

You’ve got a starter, you’ve got a medium and you’ve got an advanced. So if you’re just starting out this is something to work towards once you’ve done all the first steps and if it can be confronting to hear when you feel that people have been treating you poorly or not the way that you deserve or maybe you treat people in this way and they treat you in this way that’s different. Why?

If we are talking advanced self-awareness it is because you’ve allowed it. That’s why. Consistency is key to be taken seriously.

If you waver even once it reinforces that you know might actually be a maybe. Holding a boundary doesn’t make you difficult or unkind it establishes respect for your needs and teaches others how to interact with you in a healthier way.

So remember if you are wondering why people are breaking your boundaries the first person to honour the boundary is you. You teach them how to treat you.

It’s very similar to parenting when we say to our child if you do this at the park we will leave but then when they do that at the park and you don’t leave your child knows that you don’t mean it and you get walked all over. It’s the same thing.

The last one is the power of letting go and talking about forgiveness and again I don’t mean excusing toxic behaviour or pretending everything is okay. It’s about freeing yourself from the weight of resentment.

Forgiving somebody is not about them it is about you. One of the best things I’ve done this is is to forgive someone without inviting them back into your inner circle.

Forgiveness is about saying I’m not going to let your behaviour take up space in my mind. I don’t need an apology from someone to forgive them. I don’t.

Do I make friends with them have them in my life if they’re toxic? No I don’t. But can I forgive a huge thing that’s happened to me? Yes I can.

The other thing is to focus on your why. Whenever you feel conflicted come back to your why. Why are you setting the boundaries? Why are you working on emotional regulation?

For me it’s simple. I want my kids to see a version of me that is calm, confident and capable handling life’s challenges. It wasn’t modelled for me and I want to be that model for them.

So we don’t need to have it all figured out. Taking one small step whether it’s scripting a boundary or saying no to an obligation is a victory.

Each action builds confidence and sets the stage for healthier dynamics moving forward. You don’t need to change everything at once. Start small, honour your needs, trust it by taking care of yourself.

This is so important this subject and I really hope that you enjoyed it. This is not just to be used for Christmas this is for all the time.

I’d love you to share what you got out of this in the Facebook group, it will be in the show notes because there’s so many of us that people-please and for me it’s been the epicentre of a lot of my conflict in my friendships.

I hope you’ve enjoyed this episode. Thank you so much for listening. Remember you don’t have to do it all, you don’t have to say yes to everything and you are allowed to prioritise yourself.

Thank you so much. You’ve got this. I know you’ve got this. Take care of you.

Until next time and thank you. The key message here is you are not alone. Thank you for listening.

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