By dymond phillips
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December 1, 2025
As a recovering people pleaser, I’m finally learning what it means to say what I mean and why honesty scared me for so long. The deeper I get into therapy, the more I realize how much my people pleasing hurt more than it helped. One of the biggest effects was how hard it was for me to speak my mind. Let me be honest: this is still something I struggle with daily. But what pushed me to start being honest was asking myself why I wasn’t doing it in the first place. And when I talk about being honest, I don’t mean lying on purpose. Honesty is also about telling the whole truth, not shrinking your voice, and not hiding what you really feel. Why I Struggled With Speaking My Mind I hate the word no. It doesn’t feel good, and it brings up all kinds of emotions. Because of that, I projected my discomfort onto others and avoided saying no at all costs. I said yes to everything because I didn’t want others to feel what I felt when I heard no. But here’s what I had to learn: When you ask someone something, they have the right to say yes or no. You cannot take their no personally. In therapy, I told my therapist that no is a “negative word.” She asked why. I said, “Because it’s not what I want to hear.” She gently reminded me that just because it’s not what I want doesn’t make it negative. I even said, “But Jesus said yes to people when He didn’t feel like it.” And she quickly corrected me: Jesus had boundaries. He was not a yes man then, and He’s not a yes man now. Jesus has no problem telling me no and not carrying the weight of my feelings about it. No is a complete sentence. You don’t have to over explain it.
