Home - Caring Without Collapsing: Beyond People-Pleasing and in Relationship-Based Work. Online registration by Cvent

Are you a current or recovering people-pleaser? Have you ever said “yes” when everything in you screams “NO!”? Or maybe you don’t identify as a people-pleaser, but you supervise, consult with, or support someone who does. Either way, this conversation is for you!

Building on the conversation introduced at the Annual Symposium, this full-day workshop creates space to go deeper, while welcoming both those who joined us at the Symposium and those exploring this topic for the first time.

Infant and Early Childhood Mental Health Consultants work within emotionally complex systems that require attunement, flexibility, empathy, and strong relational skills. While these strengths are essential, they can also increase vulnerability to patterns such as over-accommodation, overextending, difficulty setting boundaries, conflict avoidance, over-reliance on validation, and internalizing responsibility for others’ emotions. Over time, these patterns can contribute to burnout, emotional exhaustion, difficulty expressing authentic thoughts, blurred boundaries, and resentment. No judgment, but it happens.

This interactive workshop explores people-pleasing not as a personal deficit, but as an adaptive survival strategy often shaped by early relational experiences and reinforced within helping-profession cultures. Participants will examine common people-pleasing patterns, their emotional and relational costs, and how people-pleasing functions as a non-malicious, survival-based attempt to manage others’ responses, preserve connection, avoid conflict, or create emotional safety.

Moving beyond the experience of the people-pleaser, the workshop will also explore what happens when we supervise, consult with, or support those who are people-pleasers. Participants who do not identify as people-pleasers will consider how to recognize behaviors such as excessive agreement, over commitment, difficulty expressing disagreement, or reluctance to set limits, while examining how power, expectations, and our responses to boundaries can unintentionally reinforce them.

Using a reflective, trauma-informed lens, participants will practice strategies for supporting healthier boundaries, authentic professional voice, relational accountability, and sustainable helping relationships without reinforcing the pattern.