How Women’s Support Groups Help with Boundary Setting and People Pleasing

You said yes again. Maybe it was the extra shift, the committee nobody else wanted, or the weekend favor for a friend who never returns one. The word was out of your mouth before you had even checked with yourself. Now you are lying awake, annoyed at her, annoyed at yourself, and rehearsing the polite text you will never send.

If this sounds familiar, you are in good company. People pleasing is one of the most common struggles women bring to counseling, and it shows up often in women who work in healthcare, who are managers, and who work in the helping professions. You are good at reading what others need. You are less practiced at saying what you need.

Here is the frustrating part. You probably already know you need better boundaries. You may have read the books and saved the scripts. And still, in the moment, yes comes out. This is where a women's support group can do something that reading and willpower cannot.

Why People Pleasing Is So Hard to Stop

People pleasing is not a character flaw. It is a skill you learned, usually early, and usually because it worked! A defense mechanism that is now hurting you. Being agreeable kept the peace at home. Or being helpful earned praise at school. Or being the easy one at work got you labeled a team player. 

Over time, your nervous system linked two things: other people being happy with you, and you being safe. So when you think about saying no, your body reacts as though something is truly at risk. Your stomach tightens. Your heart speeds up. You start explaining before anyone has asked a question. Your body’s reactions are dictating your choices.

For women in caring professions, there is an extra layer. Your job rewards you for putting others first. Patients, clients and students really do need you. It gets hard to tell where professional compassion ends and automatic self sacrifice begins. And now it seems like you are lost inside of yourself.

A few signs that people pleasing may be running the show:

• You apologize when someone else bumps into you

• You agree to things and feel resentful later

• You give long explanations when a short no would do

• You feel responsible for other people's moods

• You often don't know what you want until you are alone

Why Knowing Better Isn't Enough

Boundary setting is less like learning a fact and more like learning to swim. You can understand every stroke on paper and still sink when you hit the water.

That is because the hard part of a boundary is not the sentence. The hard part is the thirty seconds after you say it, when the other person goes quiet or looks disappointed, and every part of you wants to take it back. Nobody can read their way through that feeling. You have to practice it with real people, in real time, and find out that you survive.

How a Women's Support Group Builds Boundary Setting Skills

A therapy or support group is a room full of relationships, and that is true on a screen too (if the group is virtual). Your relationship patterns show up there just as they do everywhere else. The difference is that in group, we can slow down and look at them together.

You see your patterns as they happen.

I think of a woman I'll call Dana, a blend of many women I have worked with. Dana was a physical therapist who described herself as "a people pleaser." In her first few weeks of group, every time she began to share something hard, she would stop after a minute and say, "Anyway, that's enough about me. Someone else go." Her nervousness about taking up time in group limited her sharing.

Eventually another member said, without judgement, "You do that every week. I actually want to hear the rest." Dana was stunned. She had no idea she was doing it. No book could have shown her that.

In a group, you can practice small boundaries where the stakes are low. A boundary might sound like "I'm not ready to talk about that yet," or "I would like more time today," or "I see that differently." These are tiny. They are also the exact muscles you need for bigger conversations with your supervisor, your mother or your partner. Each small rep makes the next one easier.

You find out what really happens when you say no. People pleasers carry a prediction: if I disappoint someone, they will pull away. Group lets you test this. You decline, you disagree, you ask for something. Then you look around and notice that everyone is still there. Often, the other group members will respect you more. Having that experience again and again is what slowly rewrites the old rule for yourself.

You get honest feedback from women with nothing to gain. Your coworkers benefit from your “yes”. So do some of your friends and family. The women in your group do not. When they tell you that your request sounds reasonable, or that your three paragraph apology was not needed, you can trust it.

You learn by watching. Sometimes the most powerful moment in group belongs to someone else. You watch another woman rehearse what she will say to her charge nurse, then come back the next week to report how it went. You hear the words she chose. You see that her world did not end. Something in you files that away as possible.

What to Do With the Guilt

Here is something that may be new for you. Feeling guilty after you set a boundary does not mean you did it wrong. It usually means you did something new.

Guilt is the alarm your old rule sets off, and it will be loud at first. A group gives you somewhere to bring that guilt, so you do not act on it by texting an apology and offering to cover the shift after all. When you say, "I told my sister no and I have felt sick about it for three days," and five women nod, the guilt loses some of its grip. Then someone asks what you did with your free Saturday, and you remember why you said no in the first place.

What Changes Outside the Group

The point of all this practice is your real life. Over time, women in group often describe changes like these:

• Pausing before answering with a simple "Let me get back to you"

• Saying no without a long list of reasons

• Noticing resentment early and treating it as information

• Asking for what they need before reaching a breaking point

• Letting someone be disappointed without rushing to fix it

None of this turns you into a cold or selfish person. That is the fear I hear most often, and I have never once seen it come true. What I see instead is women who are still warm, still generous, and no longer exhausted by it. Their “yes” means more because it is a choice.

How We Can Help

You do not have to keep working on boundary setting alone, one awkward conversation at a time. People pleasing was learned in relationships, and it changes fastest in relationships too.

If you are ready to try, the online Women's Support Group at Catalyss Counseling is a place to start. Reach out to our team to learn more and find out if the group is a good fit for you. You have spent years saying yes to everyone else. This is a chance to say yes to yourself.

Author Biography

Shannon Heers is a psychotherapist, approved clinical supervisor with Firelight Supervision, guest blogger, and the owner of a group psychotherapy practice in the Denver area. Shannon helps adults in professional careers manage anxiety, depression, work-life balance, and grief and loss. Follow Catalyss Counseling on LinkedIn, Facebook and Instagram.

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