People pleasers often end up feeling ignored because pleasing runs on one of the hamster wheels I work with: Attention/Ignore. You pay everyone else attention and ignore yourself. So when someone goes quiet, it doesn’t just sting. It drops you back into an old feeling of being worthless. A better reply won’t fix that. Seeing the wheel will.
A woman came to me last week with a voice note.
Four minutes long. Sent late at night by a man she’d stopped seeing a fortnight earlier. He told her he’d never had a connection like it. He wanted her in his life. He couldn’t offer her a relationship.
She’d played it over and over. She had twenty versions of a reply in her head. And her mind kept landing in the same place. He doesn’t want me because I’m not good enough.
A man spends four minutes telling her how much she means to him, and she hears that she’s worthless.
The people pleasing happened earlier, while she was seeing him. What she did with the voice note was her defence system at work. It keeps her safe by keeping her worthless.
What she thought the problem was
She came in saying she couldn’t stop questioning herself. A text message could set it off. A friendship. A date. Did I do the right thing? Did I trust my gut or ignore it? Could I have avoided this? She called it quadruple guessing.
And she’d done the work. Years of it. Books, therapy, reflection. She told me that the more she tried to heal, the more anxious she got.
I hear this a lot. It makes sense once you see what’s running. You can’t think your way off a hamster wheel, because the thinking is the wheel. The hamster gets in, runs like hell, and ends up exactly where it started, a bit more tired than last time.
Her guessing wasn’t random. It sat on a pair of opposite words.
The two words
The mind works in opposites. Gain and loss. Right and wrong. Able and unable. For her, the pair was pay attention and ignore. Underneath that sat the real charge, valuable and worthless.
People on the left side of this wheel pay attention to everyone else. Partners, kids, friends, clients. They’re brilliant at it. She works with people for a living and told me she’s always excelled at it. Of course she has. Paying attention to people is how she learned to be valuable.
What lefties don’t do is pay attention to themselves.
People on the right side do the opposite. They pay attention to themselves and to what’s valuable. They’re often driven, building something, careful with their time. And they cannot stand being ignored.
Lefties are attracted to righties. Righties are attracted to lefties, because lefties pay them attention. It works beautifully at the start. Then you can watch the pattern play out in the messages.
How it played out
The man she’d been seeing was building his own business. He knew where to put his time. At the start he gave her a lot of attention. He saw her, and she felt valuable.
So she gave him more. More attention than she was giving herself, because being valued by him felt so good. That’s the people pleasing. It’s a strategy a two-year-old came up with to stay valuable, and it was running the show.
When they were together, he was all in. Between meetings, his messages got less frequent. Drier.
A righty can partition. When he’s working, he gives his attention to the work. She still matters to him. He just switches her off while he builds. A lefty can’t do that, so she reads the drop in attention as a verdict on her worth.
She felt ignored. Then she ignored him back. He sent her a message, she put a heart on it and didn’t reply. The next day he was on FaceTime. Righties can’t tolerate being ignored.
She told him how she felt. He said he’d do better. The next week was the same. So she ended it.
She’d wondered whether she’d set a healthy boundary or just run away. This is classic lefty behaviour, and it’s still inside the wheel. Look at the mechanics. You’re not valuing me, so I’ll make myself valuable by walking away. It’s the same move as the heart emoji, just bigger.
Then she said something I loved, because she saw it on her own. In the beginning, she said, they’re the ones chasing. She just matches the attention. And that’s exactly when something in her starts getting ready to be ignored.
Being valued scares the program, because anything she’s given can be taken away. That fear has roots.
Why worthless feels safe
We write every program like this before we’re five. A baby needs full love, connection, belonging and safety. It’s on or off. You can’t get it 75%. If there’s a disconnect with mum or dad, the baby experiences it as abandonment. Dad might just have been working long hours. The baby doesn’t know that.
I explained it to her using what was on my desk. “I’ve got a photo here. I keep it. It’s very valuable to me and I’d never throw it away. Then there’s this glasses cleaner. It does the job, but it’s got no real value to me. I could chuck it tomorrow. I could abandon it, because it’s not worth anything to me.”
We abandon things that are worthless. So when a baby feels abandoned, it records itself as worthless.
From there, the little girl works out a strategy. I’ll be valuable by paying attention to everyone else. I’ll be good. I’ll please. She told me she took it “to the highest degree” in her marriage. I told her we could have a fight over who did it more. I’ve run this one my whole life.
A program she built to avoid being ignored always ends with her ignored. Ignored and worthless is the place the program knows. It hurts, but it’s familiar. Being valued is lovely, and someone can take it away. So the program sabotages it before anyone else gets the chance.
She put it perfectly. “I kind of run before I give them a chance to leave.” A beat later she added, “But then I’m alone and sad.”
She knows alone and sad well. She’s been going back there since she was tiny.
The trap of “but what do I do?”
Every time I pointed her towards watching the pattern, she came back with the same question. Rob, but what do I do right now? What do I say to him?
That question is the wheel. It’s the mind hunting for the most valuable, correct response so nothing gets ignored. Not him, not herself, not the opportunity.
She read me the reply she’d drafted. The gist was that friends was never really on the table, better to remember it as it was, and he deserved to be happy. She called it ultimate protection. Then she said she was so sad, because she didn’t mean a word of it.
So she’d ignore her own feelings to make herself valuable by leaving first. And the alternative, softening and staying friends, felt like ignoring herself too. She saw it straight away. “To not people please feels also like a control.”
She’s right. People pleasing is a control mechanism. If the same program does the stopping, she’s still controlling. Whichever side she picks, she’s on the wheel, and no message she writes from there will be the right one.
So the useful move isn’t a better reply. It’s learning to see the habit.
What actually works
I used to drink tea with my little finger sticking out. No idea where I picked it up. Someone pointed it out and I was mortified. I didn’t fight it. I just started noticing. Oh, I’m doing it again. After a while the finger stayed down on its own.
The ballerinas I’ve worked with spend hours in front of mirrors for the same reason. You can’t change a habit you can’t see.
This pattern is a habit. A very old one. So the work is seeing it.
I gave her an exercise I call fishing. You think about someone and catch the first thought that comes up. Then you ask which bucket it belongs in. We did it live.
The man: “I want him to feel the same way… I’m, like, rejected.” Rejected is ignored. Bucket.
Her mum: resentment, because her mum ignores herself. Bucket.
One of her daughters: strong-willed, pays attention to herself. Bucket. The other: ignores herself. Bucket.
Four different people, and the same program sorted every one of them.
The second part I took from listening to Gabor Maté. The program isn’t you. It’s little you, the two-year-old who wrote it. When the thought fires, that’s her crying.
So I asked her what she’d do if little her was sitting next to her, hurt. She said she’d talk to her. Tell her it would be okay.
Picking her up didn’t come to her. When I suggested it, she said it felt almost like a weakness. Then she noticed she finds it hard to simply hold her own kids, rather than protect and manage them.
A child who wasn’t picked up doesn’t know how to pick up. And you can’t reason with a two-year-old. You pick them up, they cry, and they let go. That’s all the spinning is. An adult trying to explain things to a toddler.
So the homework was simple. Sit for an hour. Think about him. Catch each thought. If it’s the wheel, pick up little her and let it go. Keep going until the thoughts about him stop landing in that bucket. Don’t reply yet. If something’s needed, “I’ll get back to you” is plenty.
When the program goes quiet, she’ll know what to do. Nothing will be left jamming the signal.
Why this matters beyond dating
She’s a mum. She told me she sometimes pulls back from her girls because she doesn’t want them to see her pain. Their needs before her own. Ignoring herself to protect them. Then she said, quietly, “I think I’m creating it.”
I built this work for my own daughters. If you want to stop your kids inheriting a program, dissolve it in yourself. They change when you do.
People pleasing is a scared child trying to earn her place. Saying no more often leaves her just as scared. So this week, when the wheel fires, notice it and pick her up.
If you want to know which wheel you’re running, take the Hamster Wheel Quiz at https://www.robbrinded.com/quiz/.