The automatic yes
A worksheet on people-pleasing, through Ferenczi, Winnicott and Gestalt.
Or go through it here. Nothing you write is sent anywhere — not to me, not to anyone. It isn’t saved either, unless you choose to keep it on this device; at the end you can print it or save it as a PDF.
A yes that arrives before you do
Some yeses are chosen: you know what you want, you weigh it, you agree. Others arrive first — before you have checked with yourself, sometimes before the other person has finished asking. This worksheet is about the second kind.
It looks at that yes through three lenses from one lineage, then asks you to meet it: slowly on paper, and once in real life.
- Time
- About forty minutes in one sitting, or one part a day.
- You need
- One recent yes you would like to look at more closely — and a pen, if you print it.
- Answers
- Write what is true today. There is nothing to get right.
- Care
- If something surfaces with more force than you can hold, stop. Feel your feet on the floor and name five things you can see. Some of this is better explored with a counsellor or therapist than alone.
Three lenses, one lineage
Catch one yes
Start with something recent and ordinary: a favour, a plan, an extra task, a “sure” that came out before you had thought about it. Stay with the details. They carry the information.
The radar
…subordinate themselves like automata to the will of the aggressor, to divine each one of his desires and to gratify these; completely oblivious of themselves…
Ferenczi was describing children overwhelmed by adults they could not refuse. For them, reading the adult closely was the most intelligent response available: it kept the bond intact, even when the bond was also where the danger came from. A 2025 paper in the Journal of Trauma & Dissociation returns to his work and describes this adaptation as what lets an overwhelmed child keep “a bond of tenderness” with the adult.
Your own history may be much quieter. An adult’s temper, fragility, exhaustion or grief can call for the same skill.
The caretaker
Only the True Self can be creative and only the True Self can feel real.
When a baby’s spontaneous gestures keep being met with the adult’s own instead, Winnicott observed, the baby learns to comply — and compliance slowly becomes a self. He called it the False Self; one of his patients called hers the “Caretaker Self”. Its job, he wrote, is “to hide and protect the True Self, whatever that may be.” Compliance in itself is not the problem: “the ability to compromise is an achievement.” The difficulty begins when the caretaker is the only one who ever answers the door.
Chew the rule
Ferenczi gave psychoanalysis the word introjection in 1909. Fritz and Laura Perls carried it into Gestalt therapy with a bodily image: an introject is something swallowed whole — a rule taken in before it could be tasted, chewed, and then kept or refused. The automatic yes often rests on one or two of them.
For instance, “Keep the peace” might become: “I care about peace, and I can live through some friction on the way to a real one.”
Change occurs when one becomes what he is, not when he tries to become what he is not.
So what follows does not ask you to stop saying yes. It asks you to be there when you say it.
A yes you are present for is already a different yes.
A pause at the boundary
Gestalt has a name for what the yes once was: a creative adjustment — the best response available in a situation that needed it. The situation has changed; the response stayed. What moves it is contact: being there with your body and your want, while the other person is there too.
Feel the pull.
Notice where it lands — perhaps the place you marked in part one. Say to yourself: there’s the pull.
Buy a breath.
Pick a sentence that makes room, or write your own:
Find your part.
What do I want here, even a little? What am I willing to give — all of it, some of it, none of it? Answer from there:
A small experiment
Choose one low-stakes moment this week, with someone where a little friction is survivable. The first solution was right for a bond that could not hold a no. The experiment finds out whether this one can.
If a no has ever been met with threats, punishment or harm in a relationship, the old solution may still be protecting you there. That belongs with support, not with an experiment.
What happened
Fill this in after the experiment, while it is still fresh.
What stays with you
- Something I noticed
- A rule I’m chewing
- The next experiment
A longer letter, once a month
What doesn’t fit into a video: one question about feelings and relationships, thought through slowly.
The True Self comes from the aliveness of the body tissues and the working of body-functions, including the heart’s action and breathing.
Sessions online, in English and Russian.
Sources
- Beisser, A. (1970). The paradoxical theory of change. In J. Fagan & I. L. Shepherd (Eds.), Gestalt Therapy Now. Palo Alto: Science and Behavior Books.
- Ferenczi, S. (1909). Introjection and transference. In First Contributions to Psycho-Analysis (1952). London: Hogarth Press.
- Ferenczi, S. (1949). Confusion of tongues between the adults and the child: The language of tenderness and of passion. International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 30(4), 225–230. Read at Wiesbaden, 1932.
- Frankel, J. (2002). Exploring Ferenczi’s concept of identification with the aggressor: Its role in trauma, everyday life, and the therapeutic relationship. Psychoanalytic Dialogues, 12(1), 101–139.
- Howell, E. F. (2026). The buried, but recently unearthed treasure of Sandor Ferenczi’s work: Its relevance to current practice and sociocultural life. Journal of Trauma & Dissociation, 27(1), 50–62. Published online November 2025.
- Perls, F. S. (1947). Ego, Hunger and Aggression. London: Allen & Unwin.
- Perls, F., Hefferline, R., & Goodman, P. (1951). Gestalt Therapy: Excitement and Growth in the Human Personality. New York: Julian Press.
- Winnicott, D. W. (1965). Ego distortion in terms of true and false self (1960). In The Maturational Processes and the Facilitating Environment (pp. 140–152). London: Hogarth Press.
For reflection and self-study. This worksheet is not counselling and does not replace it.