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A woman I’ll call Rachel rarely complains. She remembers everyone’s birthday, notices when someone is having a difficult week, and somehow always seems to know what others need before anyone has to ask. She adapts easily, doesn’t ask for much, and is often described as “easy to be around.”
She once told me she couldn’t remember the last time she’d chosen the restaurant when she went out with others. She could tell, in detail, what she liked and didn’t, and knew how to recognize whether she craved something specific. But when the moment comes to actually give an option, something in her simply defers, and as she explains it, “the craving doesn’t seem to be there.” It’s like a reflex that fires before she has a chance to notice there’s something she could want. Instead, she agrees, or passes the choice to the others.
If you’ve ever met someone like this, you probably assumed they were generous. Or maybe you saw it as a deficit and called them pleasers, insecure, shy, doormats, or some other name you learned applied to that profile.
I have a tendency to avoid pathologizing human behavior, so I’d be the one thinking the person may simply be connected to their altruistic nature. Over the years, though, I began noticing there was a particular group of people who didn’t quite fit in either category. Many of them came to therapy exhausted, describing feeling lost, invisible, or strangely disconnected from themselves, and either disliking themselves, disliking the results of always coming last, or both.
We know that people-pleasers may know what they want but have learned to suppress it to avoid conflict or disappointment. Rachel was not like that. Once, I asked her what would make her life easier. After thinking it through, she responded, “Nothing, really. Except maybe, being considered.” Then, she continued: “I don’t think my life is difficult, especially if you think about what others go through, I enjoy seeing people happy. I guess I don’t have too many needs.”
After a lot of research, I realized that what Rachel had was a kind of internal wiring in which her own needs, preferences, and reactions weren’t registering as relevant information at the moment decisions were forming, because whoever she was with registered as more important. Her preferences were never on the heavier side of the scale. It was as if the scale had been rigged before anything was placed on it, so that one side won automatically, no matter what actually sat in the other pan. This is not modesty, and it’s not a personality trait.
We assume people learn to put others first in order to be loved, or because they feel undeserving. For this specific group of people, that wasn’t the whole story. Putting someone else first implies a choice: your own wishes were present, and then set aside because someone else was involved. What I saw in Rachel, and in clients like her, was different. She knew what she liked well enough. But the moment another person’s preference entered the room, hers simply stopped competing. Not weighed and set aside. Outweighed before the weighing ever happened. And somewhere underneath that pattern, unacknowledged for years, was a quiet craving to be the one considered for once.
There is a neuroscientific explanation for this that I’ll save in more detail for another piece, but the shape of it is worth mentioning here. Somewhere in the brain, there’s a system whose job is to flag what’s urgent enough to act on right now, in this moment, before we’ve had time to think about it. That system doesn’t come preloaded. It adjusts itself through repetition, based on what reliably got a response in early life. When a child’s own signals, hunger, distress, preference, were consistently met with attention, the system learns to keep flagging those signals as worth acting on into adulthood. When they weren’t, or when registering your own needs actually came with a cost, the system learns something else: to flag other people’s needs as imperative, and to let your own quietly drop below the threshold of things worth acting on. Not gone. Just never taught to matter enough to trigger action.
This is also why insight so rarely fixes it on its own. A person can understand, with complete clarity, that they habitually make themselves irrelevant. They can trace it to childhood, describe the pattern in detail, and still go home and do it again that night: “Yes, let’s order pizza if that’s what you want.” That’s not a failure of motivation. It’s a sign that the problem sits earlier than insight can reach, in the moment a decision is forming, before there’s anything left to reflect on afterward.
I think this matters beyond the therapy room. We are quick to assign motives to people who seem endlessly accommodating: they’re insecure, they’re avoidant, they need to work on their boundaries. Sometimes that’s accurate. But sometimes what looks like a choice was never a choice at all. Before we decide why someone keeps disappearing into other people’s needs, it may be worth asking a different question first: has this person actually learned that their own reality is something worth including?
If the answer is no, the way forward isn’t a lecture about self-care or boundaries. It’s slower and less dramatic than that. The good news, and it is good news, is that this isn’t structural damage. It’s more like an underused muscle than a severed one. It looks like practicing, in small and low-stakes moments, the intentional act of noticing a preference and letting it stand: picking the restaurant, naming the weekend plan, sitting with the discomfort of saying what would actually make space for what they want, out loud, before checking whether it’s allowed. Over time, in the same way any pathway strengthens with use, the noticing gets a little faster, and the deferring gets a little less automatic.
None of this happens quickly, and it rarely happens through willpower alone. But the capacity isn’t gone. It’s underbuilt. And what’s underbuilt can still be built.
