The Solid SelfFive practices for the people-pleaser in pain

I have found it helpful, over the years, to draw on resources from beyond the psychology literature. Part of that comes from my own history: before I was a psychologist I spent years studying philosophy, and I have continued to draw on practical wisdom about human life that sits outside clinical contexts. Since 2022 I have been reading source material and commentary on the writings of René Girard. Luke Burgis is one of those practical thinkers who integrates Girard with his own reflections on life. He is not a psychologist. He follows Girard’s central thesis that human desires – the things we want – are mediated through our observations of what others want. In a sense our wants are more often than not borrowed from the people around us.

In his most recent book The One and the Ninety-Nine Burgis integrates Girard’s insights in a practical exploration of how our relations to groups shapes our sense of self: how overextension of group identification can produce a sense of self more concerned with how others perceive us than with our own deeper values. Burgis distinguishes between the pseudo-self and the solid self and articulates ways of identifying and cultivating the latter.

On reflection I find Burgis’ work is relevant for many people living with persistent pain. Here is why. In my clinical work, one of the most consistent features I see in people with chronic pain is people-pleasing. A high sense of responsibility. An attunement to everyone else’s needs that runs so deep it becomes automatic. I also find that people-pleasing tends to be a nervous-system strategy, usually learned early, for maintaining a sense of safety and connection. And underlying it is a fear of disconnection. Although a successful strategy, people-pleasing comes at a cost. When a person’s days run to the beat of other people’s desires and wishes, the body’s own physiology – its sense of soothing, of rest, of self-care – never quite gets its turn. It stays vigilant to the perceptions and actions of other people to secure connection and defend against its potential loss. Part of pain recovery, then, is learning to articulate boundaries: to differentiate one’s own voice from the group’s, so that the body can genuinely rest. And Burgis articulates five simple practices at the very end of his book that are exceptionally good for learning how to set healthy boundaries, and to develop and integrate values into practical actions.

These are Burgis’ five suggestions:

One: notice how you change

For one week, simply notice how you change when interacting with different groups. Pick three that matter in your life – your spouse, your family of origin, your coworkers, an online community – and just observe, in your day-to-day interactions, how you shift in response to who you are around. For the people-pleaser, this practice is often quietly startling: the voice changes, the posture changes, the opinions soften or disappear. Observed in this way, without any aim to fix or change anything, the practice opens up the capacity to see, perhaps for the first time, how much of the self gets adjusted to fit with others.

Two: run a hierarchy of importance

Burgis suggests noticing the decisions we make and inquiring into how we are making them. He brackets our decision-making into four categories. The first is subjectively pleasant things – the pull of the coffee, the scroll through Instagram, the video that draws you in. The second are the objectively good things – brushing your teeth, exercise, meditation. These things are not always immediately pleasant, but doing them accrues benefit over time. The third are the decisions made on the implicit guidelines of a group – the ones where, if you pause, the real question underneath is: what will they think of me? And lastly there are decisions made on what is good in itself – things one ought to do even when they carry a cost, even when the group would disagree, even when no one is looking.

Burgis recommends stopping three times per day, for one week, to notice the decisions you make. And observe where the decision best fits: subjectively pleasant, objectively good for you, made on the basis of group perception, or good-in-itself. For someone in pain, this hierarchy is diagnostic. When you sort a few days of choices into these four bins, you find out who has actually been steering – and perhaps how rarely the objectively good and the good-in-itself get priority over the group’s approval.

Three: notice the gossip

Notice when you are talking about someone who is not present. Burgis grounds this in Murray Bowen’s family systems therapy and the concept of triangulation: two people bonding by talking about a third. Most gossip is exactly that – a form of social glue. The practice is not to shame yourself out of it, but to notice it: what the content is, and what the talk is doing to the relational dynamics. Whether the bond between the two of you is being solidified at the expense of the person outside the room. For the people-pleaser, this one can illuminate the relational dynamics that might benefit from a change, because triangulated bonding is often the only way strong opinion ever gets expressed – sideways, safely, about someone who cannot hear it.

Four: practice a small disloyalty

Somewhere in your life there is an opinion you hold that runs contrary to a friend’s, or a group’s. The practice is to state it – outright, in the room, regardless of the outcome. And then to stand by it: no hedging, no laughing it off, no smoothing the moment over to placate the group. Small is the operative word; this is not a call to burn anything down. But for a nervous system trained to keep everyone comfortable, one plainly stated contrary opinion is a genuine physiological event – and surviving it, discovering that the world does not end, is precisely how the body learns that differentiation is safe.

Five: create a threshold

Finally, Burgis recommends distancing yourself from a group you are closely embedded in – an online community, a podcast you follow religiously, a show, a circle of friends – for a week, two weeks, perhaps a month. Then, and this is the important part, you cross back over the threshold and re-engage. His suggestion is to notice how your decisions and thoughts change when gaining distance – and then on re-entry how much influence the group exerts on you. How do you see the group differently with time away? How do you see yourself differently? It is one thing to be told our desires are shaped by our groups. It is another to feel it happening in real time.

Permission

What ties these five together, for the person with persistent pain, is that they are actionable. They do not ask you to feel differently; they ask you to notice, and then to act – in small, tolerable steps – toward differentiation. Over time, something accrues: the assertiveness to say no to certain group dynamics, to differentiate from parental figures and old roles, and to give permission for one’s own voice and one’s own agency. This is boundary work, and it is also nervous-system work – because a body that no longer has to monitor and please everyone in the room is a body that can finally begin to settle.

Sources

The five practices, the pseudo-self/solid-self distinction, and the four-category hierarchy of decision-making are Luke Burgis’s, from the closing chapter of The One and the Ninety-Nine. The triangulation concept comes to Burgis from Murray Bowen’s family systems theory. The application to chronic pain – people-pleasing as a nervous-system strategy, and differentiation as nervous-system work – is mine.

Burgis L. The One and the Ninety-Nine: Forging Identity in the Age of Social Contagion. St. Martin’s Press; 2026.