Dr. Don WoodResolving Your Trauma-Based Challenges So You Can Unlock Peak Performance

Overcoming the Need to Please Everyone

14 Feb 2025 · 1 min

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1:14

A short excerpt from a YouTube talk by Dr. Don Wood explaining how intermittent fear and reward (likened to Stockholm syndrome) conditions people—often beginning in childhood—to become people-pleasers. He uses a hijacked plane and parental yelling as examples to show how victims learn to keep others happy to avoid punishment, and how these patterns can persist into adult relationships.

Chapters

It's similar to the Stockholm syndrome. If you're familiar with that, have ever heard of that, Something that a terrorist would use to keep control of their victim. Let's just use a plane as an example. They hijack a plane, they'll go up and down the aisle screaming and yelling at the passengers so that they get so afraid they're shaking. One guy will come back and he'll say, you know, don't worry about it. Everything's going to be all right. You need some water? Can I help you out? And then you start relaxing, going, oh, okay, I'm safe. I'm safe. And then a few minutes later, it comes back, he's screaming at you. Now, what ends up happening because of that? The victim starts to try to figure out, what was I doing when they were happy. So they now start focusing on trying to keep this person happy and follow the patterns of whatever they did. And so it's very easy to get into people pleasing and trying to control the situation by not upsetting the person. That's always out of control. And a lot of times in situations, that's how a parent controls their home, by making the child afraid. If they're screaming and yelling all the time, that can happen. And then if it happens as a child, you're going to see it show up in the adult life, and they're going to be in relationships constantly trying to keep their spouse or their partner happy.