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Pod 9: Breaking Free from People Pleasing and Codependency: the why behind the words

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If anyone ever told you you’re a people pleaser or codependent — a therapist, a friend, or a Cosmo article with a ten-question checklist — that’s the “diagnosis.” It tells you what you do, not why you do it. And that missing “why” is the whole story. You don’t wake up one day and decide, Hey, I’ll erase myself and become addicted to approval, that sounds fun. Fuck, no. Something inside you made that decision long before you were old enough to call it survival.  

“Codependent.” “People pleaser.” These labels are like neon signs pointing at your behaviour. You over-give. You over-apologize. You can’t stand conflict. You say yes when your entire chest is screaming no. But here’s the part no one bothers to tell you: you didn’t learn this in adulthood. You didn’t pick it up from Instagram self-help reels. You learned it as a survival reflex. It was etched into your nervous system back when your safety, love, and belonging were on the line. The behaviour is the smoke. The fire is underneath.

Big T Trauma vs. little t trauma:

When I say, “I have childhood trauma,” people hear the word trauma and picture horror scenes. War. Rape. Assault. Car crashes. Fires. Netflix documentaries.  They think trauma means one catastrophic event — something undeniable, visible, headline-worthy. That’s what psychologists call Big T Trauma. And yes, that exists. One blow can shatter your sense of safety forever. 

But here’s the one no one talks about enough: little t trauma. The subtle kind. The daily kind. The death-by-a-thousand-cuts kind.

The parent who said they loved you,but rolled their eyes when you cried or told you “they will give you something to cry about” thats the emotional dismissal.

The teacher who laughed at you in front of the class when you were too curious or too loud.

The friend who ghosted you in silence and never explained why.

The sibling rivalry no one ever mediated, leaving you convinced you were unworthy.

The mother who fed you and clothed you but dismissed your feelings with, “You’re too sensitive.”

The father who provided but was never really present.

The boy who expresses his feeling and is told he is a “pussy” or “walk it off” or “suck it up”.

Each cut looks small on its own. But stack them? They rewire your nervous system. They whisper the same message over and over until you believe it with your whole body:  The world is not safe for me. My needs are too much. My feelings are wrong. Love is conditional. That’s what little t trauma does. It’s not the explosion. It’s the slow leak of gas you can’t smell until you’re choking on it. It’s the death of your inner child by a thousand cuts — cuts that didn’t just wound you, but taught you that being fully yourself was dangerous.

I’ll give my own example. When my sister, at 54, shared with our mother she was in therapy working through childhood issues, our mother’s response was: “Well, it’s not like I burnt you children with cigarettes.” That’s exactly the point. That comment is the trauma. Not because it was the worst thing imaginable, but because it minimized and dismissed her pain. That’s why we need to define our own experiences — not for others, not against someone else’s scale of suffering, but for ourselves.

Most people know about PTSD. That’s the aftermath of a single traumatic event. Flashbacks. Nightmares. Hypervigilance. The body stays stuck in fight-or-flight, replaying the catastrophe.  But CPTSD — Complex Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder — is a different beast. It doesn’t come from one headline moment. It comes from a climate. A whole childhood environment. A slow-drip exposure to instability, neglect, invalidation, abuse, or conditional love. Not one scream, but a home where every silence was a loaded gun.  Not one shove, but a lifetime of being told, “You’re imagining things.” Not one abandonment, but years of being invisible in your own family.

And here’s the insult on top of injury: CPTSD isn’t even recognized in the DSM-5 (the diagnosis Bible). You’re more likely to be told you’re anxious, depressed, maybe “borderline,” maybe “codependent.” All technically true, but none of them get to the marrow.  Because the marrow is this: your entire nervous system was shaped in an unsafe environment.

This is the part that changes everything: trauma isn’t the thing that happened. Trauma is what happened inside you because of it.  Two kids can live through the same event. One walks away. The other walks away fractured. The difference isn’t the event itself — it’s the nervous system’s response. Trauma is the scar tissue your body grows around a wound it never got to heal. 

And here’s the kicker: not all nervous systems respond with fight, flight, or freeze. Some of us responded with fawn. Fight, Flight, Freeze … and Fawn You already know the first three survival responses.

Fight: Attack the threat.

Flight: Escape the threat.

Freeze: Go still, play dead, wait it out.

But there’s a fourth: Fawn.

Fawning, coined by Pete Wlaker, is survival by self-abandonment. It says: “If I erase myself, if I make myself small – I won’t be an inconvenience, if I keep you happy, if I make myself indispensable to you — maybe you won’t hurt me. Maybe you’ll keep me. Maybe I’ll be safe.” So you smile when you want to scream. You say yes when every cell of your body is screaming no. You predict moods like a fucking talented psychic and bend yourself into a compliant pretzel to prevent conflict before it even arrives.

And over time, you forget where the performance ends and you begin. If you’re wondering whether this is you, don’t look for flashbacks of war. Look for these quieter symptoms:

Chronic people-pleasing. You agree to things before you even feel your own wants.

Shame loops. You wake up already apologizing for existing.

Hyper-attunement. You can read every shift in tone and body language, but you couldn’t name your own emotions if asked.

Identity amnesia. Ask you what you like, what you want, what you dream of — and you freeze. You’ve outsourced yourself.

Attachment chaos. You either cling too hard or shut down completely.

Self-erasure. You’re an expert at disappearing in plain sight. Making yourself small.

Sound familiar? That’s not weakness. That’s the nervous system you built in a childhood where you learned: I survive by becoming what others need me to be. So when someone calls you “codependent” or “a people pleaser,” don’t stop at the dressed up diagnosis. Those words describe the surface. They don’t tell you why the hell you ended up that way.

Because the why is this: Your system decided early on, Erasing myself is safer than being myself. That’s not a flaw. That’s strategy. A strategy that worked. A strategy that kept you alive. A strategy that, over time, became your personality. Healing doesn’t start when you “just stop people pleasing.” Healing starts when you understand that people pleasing was your survival.

When you stop shaming yourself for what you had to do. It’s not about eradicating the fawn. It’s about retraining the body. Teaching your nervous system something it didn’t know back then: You are safe now. You can say no. You can exist. You don’t have to vanish to be loved. The wounds of childhood showed you a world where being yourself was dangerous. Where love was conditional. Where safety meant disappearing.

But here’s the truth your body is still learning: survival is not the same as living.  You don’t heal by killing the part of you that wants connection, kindness, intimacy. You heal by reclaiming it. By making it yours again. By separating authentic care from compulsive fawning. 

Because the truth is: you were never broken. You were adaptive. The chameleon in chaos – Brilliantly, exhaustingly adaptive. And now it’s time for something beyond adaptation. And survival did its job. Now it’s your turn to do yours. To teach your body that safety doesn’t require self-erasure. To teach your nervous system that love doesn’t mean abandonment. To teach your inner child that the world can hold them, not cut them. Because you are allowed to exist. Fully. Loudly. Messily. You don’t have to disappear to be loved.

To quasi-quote the immortal words of Eminiem – “Would the real YOU, please stand up”

Pod 8: Self-Sabotage — Tying Your Own Laces Together

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You don’t need enemies. You’ve got yourself. Not in a self-deprecating, sarcastic way.
In the very real sense that some of the deepest damage in your life wasn’t done to you — it was done by you. And you probably didn’t even realize you were doing it. Because self-sabotage doesn’t show up with a warning label. It doesn’t announce itself like, “Hey, I’m here to ruin your goals and derail your relationships.” It’s sneakier than that. It’s you tying your own laces together and then sprinting full-speed into life, wondering why you keep face-planting.


It’s cancelling the date you were excited for. It’s ghosting the person who actually sees you. It’s starting the thing you said you’ve always wanted and then procrastinating until it withers in your hands. It’s snapping at the person who’s closest to you, just so you can feel alone and “right” about it. It’s choosing chaos because calm feels unfamiliar. It’s drinking, scrolling, isolating, numbing — not because it feels good, but because it feels known.
And here’s the wild part: none of that means you’re broken. It means your programming is working. A little too well.
Because about 90–95% of what you do every day is unconscious. That’s not philosophy. That’s neuroscience. You are mostly on autopilot. Living out a script written by a much younger, more frightened version of you — someone who didn’t have choices, just coping mechanisms. You learned early that love has rules. That being yourself came at a cost. That softness was unsafe. That being seen meant being judged. That being too happy meant something bad was coming. So you adapted. You edited. You shape-shifted. You played small. You became the version of you that could survive. But survival has side effects. You don’t even realize it, but you’re still following the old blueprint. You say you want something new, but your nervous system is still guarding the gate.
And most of the time, you don’t notice. Because you’ve rehearsed it. That’s the terrifying beauty of the brain: it remembers the pattern even if you forget the reason.
The wildest example of this is Peter Porco – a man attacked in his sleep with an axe, sustained massive head trauma. His brain was severely damaged — yet after the attack, he got out of bed, walked downstairs, made breakfast, and even fetched the newspaper before collapsing. He died doing his routine. That’s how ingrained it was. Neurologists called it automatism. When the thinking brain shuts off, but the body keeps repeating familiar routines.
We live like that more often than we care to admit. Not with trauma as extreme, but with habits just as powerful. Emotional automatism. We go silent when someone’s tone sharpens. We over-apologize when we’re not even wrong. We say yes while our insides scream no. We chase people who can’t love us, because being ignored feels like home. We shut down the moment someone gets too close. Not because we want to ruin it — but because closeness once meant danger. And we pick the same kinds of partners over and over — even when we swear we’re done with that type. Why?
Because something in them feels familiar. Something in them hits the same nerve your primary caregiver once hit. Not because they are your mother, your father, or whoever you first loved and feared — but because they speak the same emotional language. The unpredictability. The distance. The criticism dressed as “care.” The way you were made to feel responsible for other people’s moods. You don’t fall for people randomly. You fall for the ones who activate your oldest wound and light up your nervous system like a Christmas tree. You call it chemistry. Your therapist calls it reenactment. Your body calls it home.
And if you’re not conscious, you’ll choose them again and again. Not because it’s good. Because it’s known. And the known is seductive — even when it hurts. Your body doesn’t want what’s healthy. It wants what’s predictable. And that’s the cruel logic of self-sabotage. You don’t destroy things because you hate yourself. You destroy things because you’re scared. Not of failure — but of change.
Because change means doing the opposite of what once kept you alive. Change means setting a boundary and living through the discomfort. It means letting someone love you and not flinching. It means not proving your worth, just existing in it. And that feels like jumping out of a moving car with no seatbelt and no guarantee. So you stick with the familiar. Even when it hurts. Because that’s what your nervous system trusts. And unless you stop and interrupt the pattern — unless you untie the damn laces — you’ll keep falling, and calling it fate.
That’s what no one tells you about self-sabotage. It’s not laziness. It’s not weakness. It’s loyalty. You are loyal to who you had to be. But that version of you — the one who kept the peace, kept the secret, kept the smile on — she doesn’t have to keep running the show. You can thank her. Love her. Let her rest. And then choose differently.
But how? How do you actually become more conscious?
Not in a performative, incense-and-crystals kind of way — unless that speaks to you — but in a practical, day-to-day, life-altering kind of way. You start by watching. You notice. Not later. Not once you’ve spiraled and apologized and overthought it to death. In the moment, if you can. Or afterwards, with radical honesty.
You ask weird questions.
What did I just feel in my chest? What was I actually reacting to? What was I afraid of in that second? Who does this remind me of? When was the first time I felt this? What younger version of me just showed up here? You don’t try to fix it all. You don’t perform emotional surgery in the middle of your workday. You just see it. You pause. And that pause is the crack where the light gets in. Because the moment you notice, you’re not completely trapped inside the pattern anymore. You’re holding the thread. And that’s everything. You realize you didn’t want the snack. You wanted comfort. You weren’t angry. You were scared. You weren’t cold. You were ashamed.
You didn’t “overreact.” You over-remembered. Becoming conscious means you start catching the script while it’s playing. And eventually, you change the lines.
It’s not magic. It’s muscle. And it builds slowly. One choice at a time.
You stop saying “sorry” when you mean “ouch.” You stop disappearing to feel safe. You stay. You speak. You breathe through the discomfort instead of trying to outpace it. You stop assuming every silence means rejection. You stop assuming every mistake means you’ve ruined everything. You stop solving for ghosts. You choose something new — and yes, it’ll feel awkward. That’s how you know it’s working. You don’t have to be perfect. Just present. You don’t have to change your whole life today. Just be willing to see what’s true.
Because the goal isn’t to fix yourself. The goal is to meet yourself. Not the polished version. The real one. The messy, wounded, brilliant, brave one who’s been trying to protect you this whole time. And once you see her — really see her — you can say what no one ever said: Let’s do it differently now. Let’s untie the laces.

Pod 7: The Bullshit of “Self-love”

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I am just going to start writing about stuff that hits my radar. I was chatting to my spiritual mentor the other day about self-love and the concept of it, which has prompted this post. Everywhere you look, people are preaching it like gospel: “Just love yourself.” They say it like it’s brushing your teeth. Simple. Daily. Hygienic. Except it isn’t.

Because your subconscious isn’t stupid. It’s got the receipts—every fuckup, every cruel word, every silence that cut deeper than a scream, every time you betrayed yourself or someone else. Your subconscious is an elephant; it never forgets. So when you stand in front of the mirror chanting I love myself with a sticky note mantra and a shaky smile, that inner mammoth smirks. “Really? After all that? You expect me to buy it?”

Self-love gets tossed around like it’s a bath bomb. Bubble baths, face masks, journaling with a lavender candle—don’t get me wrong, those things are beautiful. But that’s not self-love. That’s self-comfort. And comfort without courage becomes sedation.

This is why the whole self-love gospel feels hollow. Because love, in its truest form, can’t be forced. You don’t get to leapfrog over your shadow, plaster lavender affirmations over old wounds, and call it healing. You can’t bully yourself into love. And you don’t need to. What you need is grittier, harder, and infinitely more freeing: self-acceptance.

Self-acceptance is not glamorous. It doesn’t come with rose quartz rituals or Instagram-worthy mantras. It’s not a spa day. It’s standing in front of the jury of your own mind, facing the evidence, and saying: Yes. I did that. I screwed up. I hurt people. I failed. And I’m still here. I still get to exist. Acceptance doesn’t erase the record. It doesn’t pretend the darkness never happened. It does something braver: it allows the shadow to live alongside the light.

That’s the part no one wants to tell you. Self-love is a feeling, and feelings shift. One day you’ll feel unstoppable; the next, you’ll feel like human garbage. If your worth depends on whether you feel love for yourself in that moment, you’re screwed. But acceptance doesn’t care how you feel. It just holds the line: You are allowed to exist, even on your worst day.

Think of it like this: you don’t always love your friends or your partner. Some days they drive you insane. But the bond stays, because you’ve chosen not to abandon them. That’s loyalty. That’s what self-acceptance is—choosing not to abandon yourself when you’re at your worst.

The self-love industry skips that part because it doesn’t sell well. It’s hard to market “accept your shame and failures” on a pastel journal cover. What sells are slogans: “Be your own soulmate.” “Radiate positivity.” “Fall in love with yourself first.” But here’s the thing—your subconscious hears those words and laughs. Because it still remembers when you ghosted that friend, cheated on that test, swallowed your truth, or hurt someone who trusted you. It remembers the nights you couldn’t face the world and spent days doomscrolling in sadness, silently judging you from the inside out. Your subconscious is not buying the Hallmark version. You can’t romance yourself into wholeness. You can’t manifest amnesia.

But you can sit with the wreckage. You can pull up a chair in your own ruins and say: “I’m not leaving.” That’s not sexy. That’s not Instagram-worthy. But it’s real.

When you live this way long enough—when you stop clawing at yourself, when you quit the war—you sometimes stumble into love. Not the manufactured kind, but real tenderness. A flicker of sunlight breaking through a boarded-up window. It comes in moments: forgiving the teenage you who only knew how to survive, softening toward the body you once called ugly, catching yourself mid-criticism and replacing it with a breath. Tiny mercies. That’s love sneaking in through the cracks.

But you don’t chase it. You don’t need to. Because the point was never love. The point is to stop abandoning yourself.

And maybe that’s the only kind of love that’s ever real—the kind that grows accidentally out of loyalty. Not a fireworks display, not a constant high, but a steady hand that doesn’t let go when you fall apart.

So forget the bath bombs. Forget the slogans. If you want the real deal, practice the courage to accept the whole archive—every shame, every failure, every fuckup—without flinching, without erasing, without running. Look at yourself and say: You’re still mine.

Self-love might be the myth, but self-acceptance is the miracle. Not sexy. Not marketable. But real. And real is enough. MORE than enough.

Pod 3: Trigger-nometry — Mapping the Shitstorm

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You were somewhere else. Sarcasm flew out of your mouth. You screamed the harsh words. You shut your partner out. You shut yourself down. You disappeared into silence, or you lit the whole room on fire. And then you told yourself some lie about why (“Y”).

But let’s be honest. It was bullshit.  It happens more than you care to admit. And then when you gaze across your life, you see the damage.   That was activation. That was your nervous system lighting up like a Christmas tree at 3 a.m., screaming a story it memorized before you even had words for it.

This is what we call Trigger-nometry. The sacred, sweaty math of reactivity. It’s not woo. It’s not vibes. It’s a war map. It’s trauma trigonometry. Let’s solve for Y (Why?)

The Formula: T = P + R + S. Your trigger is a sum. A precise equation running the background programming the ‘sum’ of your reactions and your body.

  • P = the Past (the wound that never closed)
  • R = the Response (your chosen panic style: fawn, fight, flight, freeze)
  • S = the Story (the meaning you assign to the moment)

Your boss calls a surprise meeting. Past says: “You’re about to be ambushed.”
Response: Freeze. Fight. Numb. Story: “I must have messed up. I’m in trouble. I am going to get fired.” Your body didn’t react to your boss. It reacted to your pattern.

The trigger wasn’t about now. It was a flare sent up by a younger you who remembers everything.

Here’s an example: The Text That Took Too Long. Let’s get personal. This used to be my narrative in my friendships and early relationships. You send a text. Minutes pass. No reply. It’s been read. The person goes offline. You feel a tightening in your chest. A wave of hot shame behind your ribs. A quiet little voice whispers: “They’re ignoring me. I said too much. I’m too much.” Your brain tells you it’s no big deal. They’re probably driving. But your nervous system doesn’t care.

Your trigger math looks like this:

  • P (What happened in the past) = You were ignored as a kid. Maybe more than once. You were told to go to your room when you were “too much”.
  • R (Your learned response — what response best succeeded in the past) = Fawn. Apologize. Or spiral. Or go cold.
  • S (The story you are telling yourself) = “I am always too much. I should’ve known better. I misread this – we aren’t friends. And my internal dialogue begins – Why would they want to hang out with you or even talk to you? You are so needy. You are so stupid.”

Actual threat: zero. Emotional math: lethal. Because this isn’t just about a text. It’s about every time silence meant punishment. Every time love got withheld like air. And you learned to hold your breath.

Projection: The Subconscious Slide Projector

You ever hate someone fast? Like instant rage, instant repulsion —
and they haven’t even done anything yet? Someone once told me – if you meet someone and you really dislike them (for no apparent reason) instantly, pay attention: that’s the thing about yourself you refuse to accept. And I couldn’t get it. Everyone I met who I unreasonably did not like – my thoughts were “arrogant wanker.”  But how could that be what I refused to accept about myself? Was I arrogant? I couldn’t see how this could possibly be true. I had to be drunk to say boo to a goose.. Only later did I realise – projections don’t have to be literal. No, I wasn’t an arrogant wanker – but there was the clue to what was an issue- I was jealous as fuck about anyone who has confidence, because I desire that. I want it so much. To feel like I can own my space because I never have. To feel like I can have a voice, which deserves to be heard.
That’s projection. That’s your shadow slapping their name tag on one of your own disowned traits. You’re not just annoyed. We will get more into Projection and how to spot it in Pod 4.

Emotional Geometry: Trace the Angles

Let’s get surgical. You’re in the car park crying and you don’t know why?
Cool. Trace it like a forensic pathologist.

This is your five-step Trigger Blueprint:

  1. Sensory Input — what set you off.
  2. Body Alarm — what physical alert went off.
  3. Emotional Flashback — what it reminds you of.
  4. Protective Response — what you did to survive.
  5. Meaning-Making — what story filled the silence.

Map it. This isn’t a healing crystal. It’s a crime scene. Get your gloves on and start collecting data. There’s no cheat sheet to healing. No three-day challenge to ‘trigger-proof’ your soul. Healing is slow math. It’s unsexy. It’s work. It’s repetition. Sometimes it looks like rage-writing and ripping the page out. Sometimes it’s texting “I need a minute” instead of vanishing for three days. Sometimes it’s recognizing the moment you almost spiralled — and choosing not to. I once said to a friend of mine – You know what’s awful really. When you train for a marathon, it’s a long hard slog. Day in, day out training – even in shitty weather when you rather wouldn’t. But in the end, you cross the line and post a photo, and you get hundreds of Facebook likes etc. And there’s external validation. It’s really not the same with healing. It’s lonely and so personal. When you break a pattern, it’s a bigger win than finishing a marathon. And there will be no applause, no “likes,” no amazement at the feat of accomplishment. But that moment? It will change the trajectory of every decision you make. That’s mastery. That’s revolution. That’s the boring, beautiful backbone of healing.

You don’t need to be less triggered. You need to be less unconscious. You don’t need to explain yourself to strangers. You need to understand your own fucking math. Because here’s the truth about triggers: They are precise. Surgical. Exact. They don’t stab you randomly.
They know where your wound is. So, it’s time to meet them with equal clarity. Map the system. Interrupt the pattern.
And for the love of your own future — stop solving for ghosts. You already have the numbers. Now, do the math.

Neen, out.

PS Pod 4 will be Projection – The Optical Illusion of the Psyche