CBT Therapy Case Study - People Pleaser
People Pleaser
Background
Jane* is a 51-year-old Headteacher in Oxford. She’s spent her life caring for other people and trying to make them happy. She is a single mum of an 11-year-old daughter, and also pops over to her 73-year-old mum’s house every day to check in on her.
She’s a member of the PTA at her daughters’ school and is also the secretary of the committee for her daughter’s gymnastics group. Despite all this, she describes feeling guilty every day that she’s not doing enough and feels like she should constantly be doing more.
She rarely has time for herself, and hasn’t read a book in years, a hobby she used to love. Although she is always there for others, she describes feeling like she is very alone herself.
Presenting problem
Jane had started to experience increasing levels of exhaustion and anxiety. She had been doing some google searching and came across my blog sharing my own personal journey as a people pleaser.
She related to it so much and was eager to see if someone that’s been through it might be able to help her too. She didn’t know anything about CBT Therapy, and to be honest didn’t care what type of therapy it was, she just knew when we spoke in our free phone consultation that I got it.
We agreed to work together using Online Therapy sessions.
Assessment
Jane had no past experience of psychotherapy and had never taken medication for her mood.
She had tried a number of holistic approaches over the years, from yoga to acupuncture, to healthy eating to supplements.
Although she felt they helped a little, nothing ever helped her with the overwhelming feelings of guilt.
Goals
Jane was clear from the start that she knew that she needed to stop saying yes so much, stop volunteering herself so much, stop sacrificing herself, and actually consider her needs.
However, the feelings of guilt, thoughts of this making her selfish or a bad person was getting in the way of this being possible and she knew she needed help with this.
She also knew she wanted to stop feeling so alone and set this as one of the target areas for therapy.
Over the next 3 sessions, we jointly created a list of target areas:
- To learn how to manage feelings of guilt in a healthier way
- To learn strategies to challenge negative self-judgment thoughts
- To pull back from current commitments
- To learn how to say no and resist volunteering
- To better learn how to better understand her empath nature & how this influences her perception
- To reduce her expectations of herself
- To increase her expectations of others and ask for help both at work and personally
- To protect time for herself each week
Treatment
CBT Therapy strategies were used across the course of 10 treatment sessions.
Outcome
- Jane now believes that considering herself is not selfish or rude and doesn’t make her a bad person
- Although she still has feelings of guilt, she no longer listens to them all. She’s realised through therapy that just because she feels guilty, doesn’t mean she is guilt, and doesn’t mean she needs to respond
- Jane undertook experiments to test out what would happen if she did less at work, took days off from visiting her mum occasionally, and didn’t agree to everything asked of her by others. She realised to her surprise that actually it was all okay.
- As a result, she is now increasing in confidence in putting in more and more boundaries in place
- Jane has had a meeting with the rest of her management team at work, and has re-distributed some of the duties she had taken on
- She has stepped down from both her PTA role and her committee role. She has decided she may go back to these at some point, but right now she is overdue a break from such things
- When people ask her to do things, rather than immediately saying yes, she explores other options with them, asks questions, gives herself time to think and then get back to them
- Jane has realised that most of the people in her life are people that learn on her for support, but are unable to offer support in return. Although these people are still in her life, she has now realised the importance of developing new relationships where the balance is more equal and is making steps forwards with this
- She has initiated custody changes with her ex, so that rather than him always having weekends, she now gets some weekends, and he now does some week days
- Time is now set aside each week for her to read and relax. She now believes that these activities are valid reason’s to say no to doing things for others if she wants to
- Jane has a better understanding of her empath nature, and realises that she absorbs things more emotionally than others, which can sway her perception of how others experience things
* This is a fictionalised client that takes little elements from many clients I’ve worked with over many years to demonstrate an example of a client’s problems I work with and what therapy offers.
