Untying the Knot: Guilt, Perfectionism, People-Pleasing and the Pressure to Be Everything

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This month at The Mum Hub's Lighten the Load, we sat with the twisty knot of guilt, people pleasing and perfectionism, that shows up for a lot of working mothers I meet in the therapy room and in these groups.

"A Good Working Mother Should…"

We started, as we have done previously, with a sentence: "A good working mother should… The responses: always patient, endlessly available, never miss a deadline, keep the house tidy, be fully present the second you walk through the door, never say no, do it all without complaint highlighted something important.

What we noticed wasn't just how high these standards were. It was how many of them directly contradicted each other. Be endlessly available and ambitious. Be natural and instinctive and follow all the expert advice. Be selfless and look after yourself. So not only are these standards high, it is also impossible to meet both ends of the standard. You genuinely cannot do all of it, all the time; not because you're failing, but because the standard itself doesn't hold together.

That's an important place to start, because it changes a question I so often hear. Instead of "why am I not coping?", which can feel shameful, it becomes "was this ever a standard that anyone could actually meet?"

Is Guilt Always Telling the Truth?

Put simply, no, I don't think guilt is always telling the truth. Firstly, guilt is behaviour directed (I did something bad), whereas when we experience shame, we believe it says something about us as a person (I am bad). So, not only do these impossible standards cause us to feel guilt when we can’t achieve them behaviourally, but they also cause us feel shame that we are not coping or aren't good enough.

Secondly, we talked about guilt as a signal, and signals can be useful. From an evolutionary perspective, for us as a social species, guilt and shame developed to promote our survival. When we lived in big groups, guilt was a helpful signal that we'd done something wrong. Doing something wrong might have meant being ostracised from the group, which would have significantly lowered our chances of survival. Therefore, guilt was a helpful signal that kept our behaviour in check and us firmly within the group. This is a view supported by psychologist Paul Gilbert's work on the evolutionary and social origins of shame and guilt (Gilbert, 2009).

That is not to say that guilt was once useful and now in the modern day it is not, it is. "I feel guilty because I lost my temper" is guilt doing its job: it's pointing you toward a repair with your child, because their feelings and connection matter to you.

But guilt generated by an impossible or contradictory cultural standard isn't a moral compass. It's noise. And a lot of what gets carried around as maternal guilt is exactly that - noise dressed up as conscience.

Where Perfectionism and People-Pleasing Come In

We also looked at two patterns that often travel alongside guilt:

Perfectionism: high standards we put on ourselves, feeling pressure to achieve them, tying our self-worth to meeting them, however unrealistic, and being overly concerned with mistakes or perceived "failings".
People-pleasing: prioritising other people's comfort or approval over our own needs.

What if all three of these - guilt, perfectionism, and people-pleasing - aren't separate problems, but the same underlying system showing up in different ways?

The Same Threat System, Three Different Jobs

Whilst there is no research that links the three directly, we sat with the idea that all three come from the same part of us that's wired to detect and protect us from any threats to our social standing and sense of belonging, not just our physical safety. As we know, historically, being rejected by the group was genuinely dangerous, so we're built to detect and avoid that risk.

Seen through that lens:

Guilt is the alarm - it fires when we sense we might have let someone down, or acted out of line with our values, and so our belonging might be threatened.
Perfectionism is a prevention strategy - if I never make a mistake, the alarm never has a reason to go off.
People-pleasing is a relational strategy - if I keep everyone satisfied, I secure approval and avoid the risk of disconnection, judgement or rejection. This lines up with what's often called the "fawn response," a term coined by psychotherapist Pete Walker for appeasement as a survival strategy alongside fight, flight and freeze (Walker, 2013), and can be understood through the lens of Stephen Porges' Polyvagal Theory as a nervous-system-level safety response, not a conscious personality trait (Dana, 2021).

Put together: perfectionism and people-pleasing are often attempts to pre-empt and avoid guilt and/or shame before it even arrives, suggesting they are potentially fear-based strategies.

So, we gently brought a compassionate understanding to these strategies: It is not our fault that our brains and bodies were designed with a threat detection and protection system that fires when we've "done something" that might historically have got us kicked out of the gang. It’s just our old threat system doing its job in a modern context that asks contradictory things of us.

What do you think, does it change anything to think of these as safety strategies, rather than personal failings?

So, What Can We Do About It?

If guilt, perfectionism, and people-pleasing are threat responses, the goal isn't to judge ourselves for them - that just gives an already overworked threat system something else to deal with. The goal is to help the system feel safe enough to loosen its grip.

A few ways we talked about doing that:

Tolerate imperfection, on purpose.
- If perfectionism is a fear-based strategy, we need to increase our capacity to tolerate that fear. Try small, low-stakes experiments - sending the slightly-less-polished email, leaving the toys out overnight and notice that the feared consequence usually doesn't actually happen.
Practice self-compassion.
- Instead of criticising ourselves for being perfectionistic or people-pleasing, Kristin Neff's three components offer a practical structure: self-kindness instead of self-judgement, common humanity instead of isolation ("this is hard for other mothers too, not just me"), and mindfulness instead of getting swept up in the thought entirely (Neff, 2011). Research has modelled self-compassion as the mechanism that actually interrupts the pathway from perfectionism to burnout, rather than just softening how it feels (Yasar, Pirani & Ein Ali, 2024).
Choose repair over perfection.
- Children (and relationships more broadly) don't need flawless. Winnicott's idea of the "good enough" parent still holds: enough safety and warmth, and repair when things rupture, builds more security than never getting it wrong (Winnicott, 1953).
Challenge the standard itself.
- Before accepting the guilt a standard generates as valid, ask: is this even achievable, or is it structurally contradictory? Sometimes the most honest answer is that no one could meet it.
Reframe through values, not standards.
- Instead of asking "did I get this right?", try asking "did I act in a way that was in line with what matters to me?" It's a small shift in language that asks a much kinder, and often much more accurate, question.
Therapy
- One of the things we can work through in therapy is being curious about our different parts; reflecting on what we fear would happen if our perfectionism or people-pleasing part stopped doing its thing. Often that uncovers what the part is protecting us from and we compassionately work with that. If that sounds like it could be helpful, feel free to get in touch!

Over to You

We closed the session with a question: what is something you could try next week to help loosen the grip of guilt, perfectionism, or people-pleasing, even briefly?

If you'd like to explore any of this further, or would find it helpful to talk it through one to one, you're always welcome to get in touch.

I use AI to help organise my thoughts and drafts — but the ideas, experiences and final words here are my own.

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