Name: Jonah Hill & Sarah Brady: When Control meets People Pleasing
Uploaded: 2025-11-28T16:51:24.000Z
Duration: 9 min 3 s
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I want to talk about the Jonah Hill and Sarah Brady incident.

And in addition to pointing out how and why Jonah Hill's behavior is wrong, I want to also discuss how Sarah's people pleasing tendencies are a teachable moment for all of us.

Reflexive pronouns

Now, in case you're not familiar with the situation, last month Sarah Brady shared text messages between herself and her ex boyfriend Jonah Hill, accusing him of emotional abuse during their year long ish relationship.

Now there is some important context to note here.

Sarah's a professional surfer and Jonah knew this when he entered into a romantic relationship with her.

According to Sarah, he even liked various social media posts of hers and responded to these posts prior to them being together.

Now, the release text messages consisted of Jonah setting a lot of ultimatums that were masquerading as boundaries.

He said she should no longer take on male clients or surf with men, that she limit her friendships to women he deemed stable, that she not have inappropriate boundaryless friendships with men at all, that she can't post photos of herself in a bathing suit or post sexual pictures, and

Basically, he was saying in order to continue to be in a relationship, she had to change all of this behavior that was directly related to her professional and personal identity, one that predated him and one that he was fully aware of when they got together.

Now, article after article have come out about Jonah Hill's weaponization of therapy speak, particularly his misuse of this term boundaries.

Now a great definition of boundaries comes from therapist and social worker Nedra Glover Tawab.

Boundaries are expectations and needs that help you feel safe in all your relationships.

They are directly related to protecting your integrity, health and safety and are beyond just, just mere preferences.

A good example of a boundary is I won't respond to you if you're yelling at me or if you start name calling, I am leaving.

Boundaries dictate our own behavior in response to a situation.

They don't dictate someone else's behavior.

So in Jonah's case, he's not setting boundaries, he's setting rules.

He's saying you need to change all of these behaviors of yours, otherwise we can't be in our relationship anymore.

Now, honestly, if Jonah had laid out any of these expectations to Sarah up front, I don't think there would be a problem with that.

Like people are allowed to have the kinds of romance relationships that they want.

But he entered into a partnership already aware of her profession, her passion and her lifestyle, and

then retroactively made all these demands that she change fundamental parts of her identity to appease his insecurities, which is fucked.

He also utilized therapy speak to set rules to try to control her without any accountability that these rules were coming from his own deep seated insecurity and internalized misogyny.

I think if Jonah was actually being as self aware and vulnerable as he claims to be, he could have said something like, listen my love, I'm having a lot of insecurity come up for me and I'm noticing that it's manifesting as trust issues that are unfairly projecting onto you.

Could we have a conversation where you just give me some reassurance about your loyalty in this relationship?

Or he could have self reflected and told her, given that I slid into your DMs because of your surfing photos, I'm noticing like a lot of intrusive thoughts and being worried that other men are going to do that too.

Could we talk about that and explore that?

He could have taken accountability for the fact that this is major projection and simply requested that she validate her love for him as he worked on his issues in therapy.

Because it's an essential part of our very human relationships, right?

It's gonna bring up our stuff and that's okay, but

it's how we choose to handle our stuff that matters.

And Jonah didn't keep his stuff on his side of the street.

Instead, he kept insisting that Sarah had to rearrange hers.

Now there's a lot of articles and videos and content dissecting Jonah's behavior.

So I don't feel like I have anything more to add there because I agree with everything that's kind of out.

I also think there's been a fair amount of content discussing how clinical terms like gaslighting, trauma, narcissist, and

boundary setting have entered our social lexicon and gone mainstream.

And even though it's done a lot of good, like increasing awareness and encouraging introspection, a major consequence of this has been that complex nuanced terms are being misused, appropriated, or even weaponized.

And I'll go deeper into that in a video next week.

But a lot of non experts are taking therapy and basically blunting the nuances of very clinical terms to mask their unhealthy behaviors behind legitimate sounding language.

It reminds me of like we told men to go to therapy, so they did, and

now some of them are using it as a cheat code to get women or just manipulate them more effectively.

When I was thinking about what can I add to this existing conversation that hasn't yet been discussed, I realized that it would be Helpful to point out for those of us like Sarah that our work, our side of the street is to address our people pleasing tendencies.

I want to be 100% clear, this is not victim blaming.

Sarah did not deserve to have a partner who made her turn down work opportunities, gaslit her, manipulated her, and

But the reason I want to look at this through this lens is because Sarah herself posted these texts with the message, this is a warning to all girls.

If your partner is talking to you like this, make an exit plan.

She has reflected on her relationship and realized that Jonah's boundaries were unrealistic, rigid, and quite frankly, ridiculous.

A piece of the conversation that has been missing that I want to address is the other half of this very common relational dynamic.

If we want to learn from this situation and grow, it's important to take account that the other half to a controlling and insecure partner is one who often people pleases to the point of their own detriment.

A lot of us tend to be like this, myself included.

But what helped me get out of that was to reflect and own my part in these dynamics so that I became aware enough to not participate in them anymore and to be able to disengage the moment I noticed, oh shit, I'm in one.

And though this isn't gender specific, like anyone can be a people pleaser.

I would say, like, generally, women in society are conditioned to accommodate everyone else in their lives, right?

Their partners, their families, their friends.

Like, how often have we seen a girl morph into the guy she's dating or give up friends and hobbies and passions?

So when I look at Jonah Hill and Sarah Brady, I have two takeaways.

One, Jonah needs to communicate his insecurities without setting rules or trying to control his partners.

He needs to take accountability for his manipulation and work on showing up in a more vulnerable, open way.

He also needs to deeply examine and untangle his misogyny because men who often push for wardrobe changes or police their partner's social media are upholding problematic societal structures in their interpersonal relationships.

The second takeaway is, I hope Sarah and any one of us who is like Sarah looks into her people pleasing tendencies so that in future relationships she can prioritize protecting her values and what's important to her.

We can't control how our partners are going to act, right?

We don't know if they're going to attempt to manipulate us.

But what is in our control is standing in our truth and setting our own boundary.

We can learn to walk away if a partner tries to weaponize our incompatibility.

We can learn to say, hey, if you're going to keep giving me demands and rules and ultimatums, then yeah, I don't want to be in this relationship.

If you're going to try to change the very thing that made you attracted to me, a very fundamental part of myself, then you're not my person.

If you're not going to take accountability for your behavior and how these inflexible demands are coming from your insecurity, then I don't think this is going to work.

Again, we're not victim blaming in this situation, right?

She didn't deserve manipulation, gaslighting and control tactics.

And I myself, I've stayed in many relationships for far too long with partners who are exhibiting behaviors just like this.

So this is an encouragement for all of us who have been in abusive relationships to work on our stuff, whatever it is within us that drives us to sort of pretzel ourselves to make our partners happy.

Whether it's an intense fear of abandonment, learned helplessness, or a lack of boundaries, we can learn how to choose ourselves, prioritize ourselves, stand up for ourselves so that we can make sure we're in relationships that are healthy, supportive and empowering and disconnect from the ones that aren't.

Thank you to hey June for being a part of today's video.

Thank you to the patrons who supported today's episode and to today's sponsor, BetterHelp.

Now, therapy has helped me so much with learning how to identify incompatibilities in my relational dynamics, how to strengthen my self worth and my self esteem, and

just develop an overall healthier approach to relationships of all kinds.

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