People-Pleasing, Power, and the Expert Trap: What No One Wants to Say

People-pleasing isn’t just about being nice. It’s not a personality trait, or a quirk. It’s a relational strategy—one that often masks self-abandonment, fear, and control.

Sometimes it’s obedience: “If I make myself agreeable, maybe I won’t be punished or rejected.”
Sometimes it’s unconscious manipulation: “If I take care of your needs, maybe you’ll take care of mine.”
Sometimes it’s a survival style so baked in that we don’t even notice we’re doing it—we just keep shape-shifting to avoid rupture.

But at its core, people-pleasing is about safety.
And the question that separates discernment from self-erasure is this:

Am I abandoning a part of myself to stay connected?

That’s the line.
And we cross it more often than we realize.

What People-Pleasing Really Is (And What It Isn’t)

Let’s drop the jargon.
People-pleasing is not just chronic agreeableness. It’s often a reflex, a defense, and a power move all at once.

It’s how many of us learned to navigate early relationships where love was conditional or emotional volatility ruled the room. We kept the peace to survive. Or we performed care in order to secure our place in someone else’s world.
That doesn’t make us manipulative—it makes us human. But it does mean we need to be honest about what’s actually happening beneath the surface.

Sometimes people-pleasing is about anxiety.
Sometimes it’s about approval.
Sometimes it’s about power, shame, or unfinished attachment wounds.
And sometimes it’s about keeping people close enough to protect us, while never asking directly for what we need.

This isn’t just a therapy problem.
It’s a human problem.
It shows up in leaders, parents, lovers, therapists, CEOs. It’s how unmet needs get masked as helpfulness. It’s how control gets disguised as kindness. It’s how powerlessness gets repackaged as virtue.

If we don’t know those parts of ourselves—if we can’t name when we’re pleasing to avoid rupture, rejection, or abandonment—we’ll keep calling it emotional intelligence.
But it’s not.
It’s self-erasure.

When the Therapist Can’t Let Go

Let’s talk about a quieter form of people-pleasing: the therapist who never ends therapy.

On the surface, it looks like deep care:

“I just want to make sure you’re supported.”
“Let’s keep exploring this.”
“It’s not about outcomes—it’s about the process.”

But underneath, it’s often something else.
Sometimes it’s an unconscious need to be needed.
Sometimes it’s an inability to tolerate a client’s autonomy.
Sometimes it’s fear of irrelevance.
And sometimes it’s just control.

Let’s name it:

Therapists can have people-pleasing parts too.
They can also have anxious attachment. Narcissism. Savior complexes. Countertransference.

When a therapist keeps a client in therapy indefinitely—long past the point of insight, integration, or genuine movement—it becomes less about the client’s growth and more about the therapist’s comfort.

This is where therapy becomes a container for unspoken power dynamics:

Where the therapist becomes the authority figure

Where growth becomes codependence

Where reflection becomes a loop with no exit

It’s easy to say "therapy is a lifelong process."
What’s harder is to ask:

"Is this still healing, or has this become maintenance of a dynamic no one wants to name?"

Outsourced Authority and Chronic Dependency

There’s a difference between needing support and outsourcing your inner authority to someone else indefinitely.

Therapy, at its best, helps you build the capacity to lead yourself. But in some circles, it becomes the opposite. It becomes a way to delegate decision-making, delay movement, and feel like you’re evolving without actually doing anything differently.

We don’t like to talk about this.

Because in many therapy circles, being in therapy forever is seen as a virtue. It’s framed as commitment. Depth. Intellectual integrity. But often, it’s a form of stuckness disguised as introspection.

"I'm in therapy" becomes shorthand for I'm self-aware. I'm doing the work.
But if you’ve been doing the work for fifteen years and you’re still walking the same loops—is it work or ritual?

There are people who have never learned to regulate their emotions, make decisions without processing it with someone else, or feel real without being mirrored. That’s not healing—that’s dependency.

When therapy is used to substitute internal structure, it becomes a form of outsourced agency. And when that’s reinforced over years, it’s not care. It’s complicity.

When It’s Time to End Therapy (And What We're Not Really Talking About)

Some people need to be in therapy for a long time. Sometimes even a lifetime.
Not because they’re doing something wrong—but because they never had the kind of relational foundation therapy can provide.

For people with chronic trauma, attachment ruptures, or deep emotional fragmentation, therapy can be a lifeline.

It can serve as scaffolding for a developing self—a structure strong enough to hold what was never held before.

That’s not dependency. That’s repair.
But containment is not the same as control. And safety shouldn’t come at the cost of stagnation.

We have to discern the difference between being held—and being kept.

It’s about making conscious what sometimes becomes habitual.

Therapy is a tool. And like any tool, it can be used, misused, or outgrown.
The question isn’t how long someone stays.
The question is whether the work is still in service of their becoming.  

How do you know when it’s time to end therapy—or at least redefine your relationship to it?

If you:

No longer feel activated by what brought you in

Have insight but aren’t moving

Are afraid to leave, not because you need the work, but because you fear who you’ll be without the container

Then maybe it’s time to check in.

Because therapy isn’t supposed to become a lifestyle subscription.
It’s supposed to help you return to yourself.

Real Growth Is Messy—but It Moves

Therapy isn’t meant to keep you circling your life.
It’s meant to help you step into it.

Real growth doesn’t mean everything’s integrated. It means you’re moving anyway.

There’s a point in therapy where insight becomes a form of hiding. Where language replaces action. Where understanding replaces choice.

That’s not healing.
It’s looping.

To grow is to risk.
To apply what you’ve learned.
To navigate real life without weekly permission slips.

Discernment isn’t avoidance.
It’s agency.

The Expert Trap: Power, Dogma, and the Echo-Chambers of Endless Work

There’s a trap that no one warns you about. It’s the one where therapy becomes a sanctioned place to repeat the very power dynamics that broke you.

You sit week after week in front of someone who may not challenge you, who may not know how to release you, and who may—if they’re honest—need you to stay in order to feel like they matter.

That’s not therapy. That’s a spiritual hostage situation.

It’s what happens when:

Control is disguised as care

Dependency is mistaken for depth

Insight becomes dogma

And when clients want to pull back or move forward, the system doesn’t say, “Good.”
It says, “You’re avoiding.”
It pathologizes discernment as resistance.

You can’t heal your way into wholeness if the structure you’re in depends on you staying fractured.

This is why stories like The Shrink Next Door matter.

Because they show what happens when the therapeutic frame becomes fused with identity, and the therapist's need to be central goes unchecked.

While that story is extreme, the core dynamic—emotional fusion masked as care—isn’t rare. It happens subtly, in respected practices, behind intellectual language, with therapists who never examine their own role in the dependency they help maintain.

What We Actually Need

We need more discernment about therapy.
More conversations about when it’s working—and when it’s not.

We need therapists who can:

Let go when it’s time

Name their own attachment to the process 

Tolerate a client’s autonomy without subtly punishing it

We need spaces that don’t confuse endless reflection with growth, or emotional dependence with depth.

Because what we’re really after isn’t endless healing.
It’s integration.
It’s movement.
It’s the moment when the work lives inside you, not across from you in a chair.

Therapy Is a Tool—Not a Destination

Therapy, when it’s done well, can change everything.
But it is not the destination.

The work is to bring that awareness back into the world—into our leadership, our choices, our relationships, our decisions. Therapy is a space to build the structure that allows us to move through the world with less self-abandonment and more clarity.

This isn’t an anti-therapy stance. It’s a pro-agency stance. A pro-truth stance. A reminder that the real work is what you do when the room goes quiet, and you’re left with your own voice.

That’s what this piece is about.
That’s what I care about.
And that’s what I bring—personally and professionally—into every conversation about growth, power, and how we move through the world.

Author’s Note
This piece is not a takedown of therapy. It’s a reflection on how power, identity, and people-pleasing dynamics can quietly shape our relationships to authority—even in the most well-intentioned spaces.

I’ve spent years reflecting, integrating, unlearning, and doing the work of becoming. And like everyone, I still have more to uncover. That’s not failure—that’s the nature of being human.

I wrote this as someone who believes in therapy, but who also believes we must name the places where insight becomes dogma, and containment becomes control.

This piece is a glimpse into how I think about growth and the systems that shape it.

If this resonates, I see you. If it doesn’t, that’s okay too. We’re all somewhere in the process.