From People Pleasing to Self-Trust: Breaking the Cycle of Fawning with Ingrid Clayton

oh man, I don't maybe feel like I have a choice. What if I can't set a boundary, right? Some of the hallmarks of really chronic fawning is like boundaries don't just feel hard. They feel literally impossible. The stakes feel so high in our bodies. It feels like life or death. Welcome to The One You Feed. Throughout time, great thinkers have recognized the importance of the thoughts we have. Quotes like garbage in, garbage out, or you are what you think ring true. And yet for many of us, our thoughts don't strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self-pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don't have instead of what we do. We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it's not just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their good wolf. How many times have you said it's fine when it wasn't? For me, only about a hundred thousand times. Not because I wanted to be dishonest, but because somewhere in my nervous system, honesty felt unsafe. Today I'm talking with Dr. Ingrid Clayton about fawning. The trauma response that can look like people pleasing on the outside, but on the inside is really a strategy for staying safe, especially when fight, flight, and freeze are not options. She shares a personal story that makes fawning unmistakable. We unpack why it can be so hard to even see you're doing it, and we talk about why the goal isn't becoming tougher or more independent. It's becoming more connected to your own body, your own truth, and your own choices. I'm Eric Zimmer, and this is The One You Feed. We are conducting a survey to find out what you want. Look, you know this, I know this. There's ads on this podcast. It's how the podcast stays alive and feeds those of us who devote ourselves to it. But I'd love to improve that ad experience for you. And in order to do that, though, I need to know a little bit more about you. The survey is quick, it's easy, and it is really important to us right now. It takes two minutes to do and really would be a huge help. Go to oneufeed.net slash survey. Again, that's oneufeed.net slash survey. Thank you so much. Hi, Ingrid. Welcome to the show. Hi, Eric. Thanks for having me. I'm happy to have you on and we're going to be discussing your book, which is called Fawning, Why the Need to Please Makes Us Lose Ourselves and How to Find Our Way Back. But before we get into that, we'll start in the way that we always do, which is with the parable. And in the parable, there's a grandparent who's talking with their grandchild and they say, in life, there are two wolves inside of us that are always at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love. And the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandchild stops, and they think about it for a second. They look up at their grandparent and they say, well, which one wins? And the grandparent says, the one you feed. So I'd like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in the work that you do. Oh, it's such a great question. And to be honest, I have kind of a tricky relationship with this parable. You know, you've read the book, so you'll see I'm not a real fan of anything that reduces stuff to the binary as in good or bad. So right out of the gates, I'm going, oh, so my fear is bad. Well, in my experience, I spent a lot of time on therapist couches and various recovery groups at workshops, you name it, reading the books, trying to get rid of everything that I deemed as bad, right? And ultimately, what that led to was more of the same, right? Because repression leads to anxiety, anxiety leads to more coping. Quite frankly, a lot of these things led to a fawning trauma response with this notion that I could sort of weed out all of all of the bad and sort of override the uncomfortable feelings and sort of focus on the shinier side of things. And honestly, if that worked, I'd be like, fantastic. But in my personal experience, I think from a lens of complex trauma and sort of the need to integrate all of the parts of self in order to be whole, I think I've had to really look at things like resentments and fear and say, you're welcome here. You're welcome here. And I can hold the complexity. It doesn't mean that it overrides the rest of my experience. So I'm sure there's lots of nuanced views about the parable, but at first glance, sort of that's what it inspires in me is that kind of human tendency to think that we can or wish that we could sort of override all the tough stuff. And I think that can lead to spiritual bypassing and toxic positivity and all kinds of things that kept me stuck. Yeah. Yeah. One of the things I did appreciate about your book a lot is nuance. And despite the fact that I start the show with a binary parable, I would say if you were going to give me a brand, my brand would be nuance. It's odd that I'm that way and yet I start with this binary parable. But we've been doing it for a long time and it's just a lovely jumping off point. I want to dig into what you just said there a little bit more because there are sort of two skills that I see in call it healing or living a good life or whatever. And one is everything that you're talking about there, which is learning to recognize why we're the way we are, why we respond, not castigating parts of ourselves as bad, integrating everything in. and then there's also a part of us that is cultivating different healthier states of mind and I think a lot about like when are you doing which and I'm not really looking for an answer from you but I'm curious when I bring that up kind of how that fits in or how you think about that in your overall approach so the direction that I tend to want to go from there is out of the analysis which keeps me in my head and into my body, right? So as a trauma therapist, I'm mostly interested in questions like, what are you experiencing now, right? What do you notice coming from more of a somatic perspective? And that's just partially me. It's my greatest coping is my analysis. It's one of the reasons I probably became a therapist, right? This idea that I can sort of dissect and figure out. But oftentimes, no matter what my aim is, I keep myself stuck on the hamster wheel by the thinking, thinking, overthinking. So often I can arrest that by just taking a breath. Even as I was about to say, what am I noticing now? I wanted to take a spontaneous, deep breath, right? And so in terms of this trauma therapy sort of framework, that leads me to more of a regulated nervous system. More of a regulated nervous system means I'm probably not up in that spiral loop, loop, loop in my head. So when you ask what direction, that's what comes to mind. It's sort of the rest of it feels like moving furniture around, right? I can have the couch over here, the couch over there, but ultimately what do I want to be experiencing in this moment. Wonderful. Okay, let's go into the book itself and just start with the basics. What is fawning? Fawning is a relational trauma response where you either appease or you caretake in order to lessen the relational harm. And so, you know, we've long talked about fight, flight, and freeze. Most people are familiar with those terms, but fawning tends to happen when those responses are either unavailable or they would make things worse. And so examples of that, we see it often with childhood. You know, if you're with your caregivers and they hold all the power and they're twice your size and we need our caregivers longer than any other species, fighting back is probably not available. Even this idea of sort of having a voice and setting a boundary, things we all talk about as though it's like available to everyone. It's really not available for children. Similarly, the flight response, where are you going to go? Right? You're probably going to be brought right back. So fawning is this response that comes online. When you have to continue to navigate what feels like an unsafe environment, it appears different than these other responses in that it has us leaning into the very relationships that are causing us harm. And I think for that reason, how it presents so differently, right, it looks like conscious choice. It looks like agency. It looks different than a typical trauma response that your body is saying, I don't want this thing to happen, right? I think that's one of the reasons that it's gone missing in terms of the discourse for a really long time. So in the book, you give a really good example of the fawning response in talking about being in a hot tub with your stepfather. I'm wondering if you could tell that story as a way of giving people listening a real life example of what fawning can look like. Sure. Yeah. I start the book with my own personal experience in that way, where I now know, and this is after decades of trying to unpack this thing that I could never really understand, that my stepfather, I was not only living in an actively alcoholic family, so lots of instability, a narcissistic family system, so lots of rage. And he was also grooming me, right? So 13 years old, I'm sitting out in the hot tub by myself and I'm used to him sort of raging and feeling afraid when he gets home from the bar, like what's his behavior going to be like? But this night he was seemingly kind and curious about me. It was like he was extending this olive branch and it was a welcomed moment. It was like I could relax. Like, oh, thank goodness. But in that moment, I also experienced the first time I felt just as unsafe with him when he was seemingly being kind, right? So come and sit on my lap and I'm so glad we can be this close and you don't seem to mind. And I thought, why is he saying that? Why would I mind? I probably should mind. And it was this sort of cascade of experiences in my body and in my thought process. But what happened reflexively, right, because fawning is not a conscious choice. All of our trauma responses come online in a nanosecond. The body chooses the one that it thinks will get us through unscathed, right? And so I find myself not pushing back and being like, what are you talking about? Or get away from me, you asshole. I don't leap out of the hot tub. My body knows all of those things are going to embarrass him or make him mad. And then I'm going to be in a whole lot of trouble. And so I stay sort of sweet and I keep my voice sort of neutral, if nothing else. Well, why would you say that? And no, this is perfectly fine. And I want to run, right? I do not like him at all, but every fiber of my being knows I need him to like me. And so I stayed long enough until I felt like it wouldn't be obvious that I was, you know, dying to get out. And then I sort of get out in this very controlled way. It felt like slow motion, to be honest. I can still recall it to this day, many, many decades later. And it was the first moment of what felt like became this pattern throughout not only how I had to navigate my home life, but many subsequent relationships after I left, which is in order for me to be okay, I have to prioritize your wants, your needs. And it includes this feeling of true self-abandonment, right? It's like I wanted to leave. I wanted to yell. But because that's not available to me, I'm essentially abandoning myself, prioritizing you. But again, it's the body always prioritizes survival. It's not interested in like my self-esteem in that moment. I want to ask another question about fawning. So in general, what we're saying is fawning is when I go along with the situation that I'm in or the person that I'm in in order to protect myself. Yes, that's one presentation of it. And I think that was clearest in the relationship with my stepfather. But the other side of that coin is I had a mom who was absent. I saw her really disappear into this relationship once this man came into our life. And so fawning in that sense, when you're being neglected or abandoned, the people that you need are not showing up for you for whatever reason. Fawning can also present as caretaking. It's sort of running circles around the other people in our lives, doing all their emotional work for them. Again, it's with this hope that like, if I can get you to stand upright, maybe then you'll really take care of me. So it has these different presentations. In the example in the hot tub, you're conscious of the fact that you really don't want to be there. Right. And yet there's this automatic response that's happening that's overriding all that because it's a safety and protection mechanism. Yeah. You also, at other points in the book, talk about how when this response is embedded enough, we might not even be conscious that that's what's happening. That's right. Talk a little bit more about that. Well, there's a couple of things. One, again, if you think about childhood trauma, just out of the gates, we need our caregivers. And so when there's chaos happening, abuse or neglect happening, the body goes, oh, I cannot make my caregivers wholly bad or wrong. I need them to survive. So this is just a reflex that happens right out of the gates. It's sort of a hallmark of relational trauma, really, is my body's going to soak up all the shame, right? There's a part of me that has to go, maybe it's me, maybe it's my fault, this sort of idea that if I broke it, I can fix it. But say a little bit more about your question again, because I feel like I'm missing a piece that I want to get back to. It's the when we know that we really don't want to be in a situation and we fawn versus when the fawning response is so built in, we don't even really recognize that we're doing it at all. Yes. So you don't recognize it. In other words, if the body has to choose, I need you to be good so I can still rely on you, then I'm going to be bad and it must be me. And maybe I'm, I mean, I did this with my stepdad. There was a big part of me that was like maybe I overreacting Maybe it no big deal I mean I literally lived in that sort of self gaslighting place for decades and decades And quite frankly a lot of us are also told you're being selfish, you're being ridiculous, that didn't really happen, right? So that kind of feeds into this inability to see what we're doing. But also, and I have different experiences throughout my life, there are moments where I might have a conscious sense that I do not like what's happening. And I see my body sort of leaning in to manage the fallout anyway. But I have just as many moments where I don't ever clock it, maybe until years, decades later, it's when I go back and go, oh, my gosh, that's what that was. But in the moment, I might just be thinking, no, everything is fine, right? And I think for a lot of us that lived in sort of chaotic environments, let's face it, it is just the air that you breathe every single day, you lose this differentiation, there is no contrast to say like, oh, this is a healthy attachment. And this is one, you know, with a lot of rupture and no repair, the body just starts to accommodate, accommodate, accommodate. And I think particularly with childhood, you know, I say that I left that house, I drove first hundreds of miles, and then ultimately moved thousands of miles away, but I took this blueprint with me, right? So that my only sense of real relational safety in the world was built day in, day out on a response that meant my entire sense of safety resides outside of my body. Okay. So it's this hypervigilant presentation of, am I doing it right? Do you like me? Do you validate me? Can you give me permission? And of course, then this perpetuates some of those same types of relationships where I'm like, why am I dating someone else who's cheating on me or exploiting me or is unavailable, right? It was like, that was the patterning in my body where my coping said, I know how to respond to this. It's where my skill set was formed. It ultimately almost felt like my power or currency that my body was like, I know how to navigate these situations. And that's deeply confusing when it starts to just feel like it's your chemistry and you don't have any sense of what healthy chemistry is, right? Yeah, I agree. And I find this a really challenging part of all of these things is separating out when some of these coping mechanisms or ways of relating have become entirely embedded in the way I am almost. And trying to be like, okay, is this the way I am? So for example, I mentioned to you before the show, fawning, I recognize this in myself, right? In a minute, we're going to get to two other terms that you use and differentiate from fawning, but people pleasing, codependency, right? Like I recognize that. Yeah. I recognize the ways it's been problematic. I also recognize that some of the actual aspects of me, I think they're aspects of me are like kind of laid back, not real strong preferences. And one of my highest values is kindness. And one of my highest values is not making everything about me and about caring about other people. And all of that gets put into this soup. It can be very difficult to disentangle some of the time. And I think I've gotten a lot better at it by doing some of what you described, which is I can feel into what's happening inside me. What's the urgency factor on what I'm doing? You know, how frantic might it feel? How tense might it feel? Like, I think there's ways to ferret that out a little bit more. Yeah. But I think it's still really confusing. It's very confusing. And to your point, I think this is almost the definition of fawning is that it attaches itself to anything that is maybe an innate quality that we have, like these assets, our generosity, our kindness, even our financial resources, our sexuality, all kinds of things. fawning can attach itself to that if it feels like this is going to be beneficial to the other person, and then it's going to be better for me in the long run. But what I've seen with my personal experience and my clients is that as we sort of unfawn, as we heal, and we become more of ourselves and less of a perpetual trauma response, we don't lose any of our inherent goodness or assets or generosity. It's like, on one hand, I can say, listen, did I become a clinical psychologist because I was in one giant fawn response my whole life? Like, yeah, probably, right? It makes a whole lot of sense that I'd be sitting in an office where my world is dedicated to helping somebody else, right? But at the same time, I've always been deeply empathic and curious, Like from, you know, the tiniest child, I have memories of wanting to sort of understand. And both of these things are true. Where we start to discern is not just in this body-based way that you're talking about, which is profound, but also in terms of like, do I feel like I have conscious choice and agency? What if I don't want to be this generous right now? What if I don't have capacity to show up for your stuff again? and I really need to go fill my own cup. This is where we tend to feel the rub. It's like, oh man, I don't maybe feel like I have a choice. What if I can't set a boundary, right? Some of the hallmarks of really chronic fawning is like boundaries don't just feel hard. They feel literally impossible. The stakes feel so high in our bodies. It feels like life or death, right? That's where we are definitely meant to have more flexibility, right? And it's always going to be, in my view, this is going to be a lifelong endeavor. It's not like we reach some finish line where we go, whew, have it all figured out, right? Like, I know where I end and where fawning begins. It's like, no, probably not. I will always have a body. I will always have these primitive responses that come online. And I think that in a way, knowing that is part of what helped reduce so much shame that I've been carrying for so long. It's like I didn't fawn because I was doing anything wrong. I fawned because my body was doing everything right because my body knew instinctively these other responses are not available, right? It was a very loving response. And it's like, again, there's the yes and. Yes and none of us are meant to live in survival mode all the time. Right. And I think it's similar. I mean, you have an addiction history. I do too, right? I mean, my addiction was a perfectly, seems like for a while, it was a very good and effective coping strategy. There's a reason that I did it again and again and again, because it served a need that I had. That's right. And so that's part of the way of taking shame out of addiction for me is like, okay, it's not that I, you know, I wanted to be bad. It's that I was trying to cope with something I didn't have any tools to cope with. And this is how I did it. And it served me well until all of a sudden it really didn't, you know. And I think these trauma responses fall into the same category. Like it may have saved your life, right? That's right. It may have saved your life. If they certainly made something that was very difficult to get through, you got through it. And when the situation isn't there, you don't want to be stuck to these coping mechanisms that at this point in life are causing probably more harm than good. That's right. Yeah. You talk about this nuanced message. I just want to read something you wrote because I love this. And I often feel like this myself. You say, I'm afraid I'm often the buzzkill therapist with a very unsexy message. Get in touch with all your pain, your wounds, the shameful ways you feel like you've coped with them, and then you'll get better. But you'll never attain the best case scenario, at least not 100% of the time. Yes. But I love that because it's so honest. I've joked that if I was to be completely straightforward in the way that, like, I talk about, like, what help I give people, I'd be like, I think I can teach you not to make things worse. Yeah. Yeah. Well, is that really – but when you realize the ways we can make things worse, that's a big improvement. I know. It's so true. And so I love that about you too because I think that we have to be honest about what those people who are responding to some form of adverse childhood effects, trauma, whatever the word you want to use, what healing actually really does look like. Yeah. And recognizing there's no perfection, there's no end line, there's no, you don't have to wait to get to a certain point before life can be better. There's a lot of things to know about the process. And I think you speak to that really well. Thank you. I appreciate that. It's really important to me. I think especially in this age of not just authors and podcasters, but all this, you know, the mental health content we have online and how many people are providing it. On one hand, it's this incredible resource. I go, oh my gosh, I wish I had this when I was growing up. But I think we have to be really careful as people that are providing the content that I don't, in this effort to like be a good marketer, that I can't sort of put this best face forward all the time that makes it look like, well, I've got it all figured out, right? I think it's a sexy marketing message. It's sort of like, I have the 10-step program that's going to, you know, fix it for you. And again, here's the problem is that I did all of those 10-step programs or what have you, and then I still felt like me at the end, only now I'm feeling more broken and more ashamed. And when I talk about fawning in particular, whether it's working with my clients directly or creating content online, I do not want to perpetuate their fawn response. In other words, they now believe that I have all the answers. I'm still just externalizing their sense of safety and agency. It's like, well, now come run it through my nervous system because I'm more healed than you are. And I'm keeping them disconnected from their own body, from their own wisdom. And I think we're doing more harm in that way. So it's why I not only lead with my personal story to show, listen, I'm walking through this just like you, but I really make a conscious effort to pull the mask on my own process so that we're not trying to achieve something that doesn't even exist. Yeah. Yeah. Beautifully said. I mean, you say at one point, we're the only ones who know how to heal ourselves. And I think that is so valuable. Like we can follow people who are further along in certain journeys, but we're still going to have to integrate this for ourselves. And I think about this a lot. I think all about the marketing things that you talked about. I also think about the nature of, and I think about this in 12-step programs, like a lot of 12-step programs, there's a testimony, right? Which is where basically people are saying like, I worked these 12 steps and all of a sudden I was all better or I did this and I was all better. The last several years, I've thought a lot more about the people who are sitting there who are like, I tried those things and I'm not better. Meditation is another one, right? I tried to meditate and I don't feel any better. Right. It's this recognition that we are all starting from different places with different levels of challenge and we will respond to different things. And so that's why your point about we are the only ones who know how to heal ourselves is so valuable and true. I think it's so important. And I, you know, I talked a little bit about this in the book, but since we're bringing up the recovery piece that, yeah, I'm 30 years sober and much of my life would not be what it is today if it wasn't for that foundation. So I'm incredibly, incredibly grateful. But I will also say, again, there's another sort of yes, and is that there were even aspects of me sort of being a good girl, working a good program, kind of being of compulsive service and always looking in my inventory to see where I was to blame and only focus on my side of the street. And there's a lot of that that I think, first of all, is there's a lot of patriarchy that's sort of embedded in there. And fawning, you know, just to say is not a gendered response. It's an equal opportunity defender. But I would say I don't think I've met a woman yet who hasn't had some experience of it. And yet a lot of boys or men are conditioned more towards a fight response. Like you're allowed to kind of, we say man up. I hate that term. And so if you think about the founders even of the program sort of originating this experience, it makes sense to me that if they were more geared towards a fight response, also white men, right? So you think about other forms of power and marginalization, that it being suggested that they go be of service and get out of themselves was a useful approach. But for someone like myself or for many women or marginalized people, we are not in ourselves to begin with, right? So this idea of like, how do I grow a self first before I can start to differentiate, like when I need to sort of get over myself a bit and be back in a community minded space. These things are tricky and there's no panacea. There's no one right way. Again, I love the community aspect of 12 step recovery. It's like all my best friends and the most important people of my life I've met in those rooms. but it's like a yes and, and this piece kept me stuck from healing my trauma for a long time. So can we just have all of the nuanced, complicated conversations so that each of us can run these ideas through our own body, through our own systems and go, oh, you know what, just like we do in recovery, it's sort of like you can see what feels true for you when you hear someone else say it. And so let's have the fuller conversation. Eight years ago, I was completely overwhelmed. My life was full with good things, a challenging career, two teenage boys, a growing podcast, and a mother who needed care. but I had a persistent feeling of I can't keep doing this. But I valued everything I was doing and I wasn't willing to let any of them go. And the advice to do less only made me more overwhelmed. That's when I stumbled into something I now call the still point method. A way of using small moments throughout my day to change not how much I had to do, but how I felt while I was doing it. And so I wanted to build something I wish I'd had eight years ago so you don't have to stumble towards an answer. That something is now here and it's called Overwhelm is Optional, Tools for When You Can't Do Less. It's an email course that fits into moments you already have taking less than 10 minutes total a day. It isn't about doing less. It's about relating differently to what you do. I think it's the most useful tool we've ever built. The launch price is $29. If life is too full, but you still need relief from overwhelm, check out overwhelm is optional. Go to one you feed dot net slash overwhelm. That's one you feed dot net slash overwhelm. There's that phrase in recovery, take what you want and leave the rest, right? Which I think is really just it a valuable way to approach it And I agree I think that the early years of my recovery saved my life And they use the phrase gave me a blueprint for living Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I needed to go and do some deeper healing around why I was the way that I was, right? And I think, like you said, it's all nuance. Yes. I want to hit a couple other things before we move into the healing part of this. Talk to me about people-pleasing and codependency. You talk about fawning and those that they're all in the same family tree, but make some distinctions for me. Well, I think the biggest distinction, you know, we've used these terms for a long time, so they're familiar to most people. But codependency in particular, you know, came about as a response really to addiction, to the, you know, the addicted family system. And it similarly carries this disease model. And it's really based on, to me, what feels like pretty antiquated notions of your disease of control or your need to control. And similarly with these approaches that are like, well, just go and raise your self-esteem and take care of yourself. And why would you care what anyone thinks of you and stay on your side of the street? All of these things, of course, made sense to me. It's like, well, I don't want to care what people think of me. I don't want to be enabling other people. But none of these things spoke to the origins of the behaviors for me. I never intended to control. I never intended really to please. My deep intentions were to stay safe. And again, these were not conscious choices. So applying these seemingly conscious solutions, which basically uses a part of the brain that's offline when the fawn response is online, it's like you're speaking two different languages. And then I would try to do it differently. And when it wasn't available to me again, I'm like, oh, my gosh, now I'm really broken. So what I love about the language of the Fawn response in this context is that it puts these behaviors that we've talked about for a long time, it kind of enlarges it in two directions. It puts it into the body, into the nervous system, where I go, oh my gosh, I make sense. There was a reason for these behaviors. It honors the origins of the thing. But secondly, it also moves it back into the context, the relationships that necessitated a fawn response. And I think that's missing in codependency. It kind of put all of these maladaptive behaviors into a person's body as though they're just dysfunctional. And it's like, wait a second, I'm not dysfunctional, but I did adapt to a dysfunctional environment, right? And so, again, this reduces the shame, but it also gives us a different way in to work on these things from a trauma body-based perspective. perspective. And everything I said, I think similarly applies to people pleasing. It sounds like it's a conscious choice. You can just decide to do it differently. And you can't decide to do it differently when what you're feeling in your body is utter terror. So we have to address that piece first. That terror is there for a reason. You're not meant to just override it. In fact, asking people to do that is re-traumatizing them. It's doing more harm. Yeah. I think the other thing that your approach takes into consideration and that we know use the word antiquated is I feel like for a long time. And again, I'm not a I'm not a psychologist, but I've been around this kind of stuff for a long time in the recovery movement in a lot of what the Buddha's stuff I was reading was and even a lot of psychology. you, there was this idea for a while that we should just be these independent creatures that are self-sufficient unto ourselves and that to need anything from anyone else is a failure. That's right. I think that's profoundly misguided. Yes. We are hardwired for relationships, right? I have mirror neurons. It's like my body only knows that it exists in the world when people are mirroring back to me as a tiny baby like, I see you, right? So to your point, we really end up pathologizing what is healthy dependency, what is healthy caregiving. Again, you know, the women as the caretakers for, you know, history, I think we've also pathologized them. We've kind of put this burden on their shoulders, like you are the ones that are meant to sort of keep the show running. And yet, why don't you go put yourself first, right? You hand them this double bind, and then you blame them for it. And so, yeah, I think I don't have the answers to all of these things, but it feels important to me to let's name how complicated this really is. It's another way where we go, oh my gosh, it makes sense that I'm having this experience. And again, I think if we can reduce the shame, you're like halfway there to having a remarkably different experience. Staying with this theme of nuance, you said something that I thought a lot about, which is for Fauner's line isn't about moral failure, but about survival. I thought about that with myself, like how many times have I lied about primarily how I feel inside, right? That's where the primary lies are. Oh, I'm fine. It's okay. Don't worry about it. It's all that. And looking at it as a lie, it feels like I've done something wrong. Whereas when I look at it from a survival lens, it's like, well, of course I was doing that. That's right. Yes. There was so much of my stuff that I had to keep hidden because I learned the hard way that when I didn't, which is the other thing I think we need to name, even in my own personal experience as a child, I had an intervention for my parents when I was 16 years old. I tried to do all the things that all of us are told to do our whole lives, which is set a healthy boundary, have a voice. Like I asked for help. I brought in all of the right people. And you know what happened is that it literally made it worse. It made it so much worse because now I had this stepfather who was grooming me and hated me. But now I didn't even exist in my own home. And I had a mom who told me out loud, I don't believe you, right? You're being selfish. You made it all up. And so we also go, of course, there's stuff that we're shape-shifting to kind of be what the environment needs us to be. That's an aspect of lying. We're withholding because I absolutely know this relationship or this community cannot hold my truth or I'm going to be steamrolled as a result. And so it's uncomfortable, you know, maybe to look at some of these things. I think we think it's easier to kind of place it again in these sort of a lie is a bad thing, this good or bad notion. But it's like, well, wait a second. Like, what was the intention here? What were you keeping safe? And even that question alone, it's so much more interesting to me, first of all. But it reveals something that now I can be in relationship to and I can work with. I go, this really important part of me, I was trying to keep safe. I don't get to access any of that if I just go, oh, I'm a liar, I'm a loser, I'm bad. It all kind of gets kicked under the rug. And who does that help, right? That doesn't get me any more free. It gets me even more stuck. It's another layer of like, you can't be real. You can't be a whole self. Go along to get along. Yep. So let's turn our attention to the second half of the book, which starts to outline some strategies for fawning less. Chapter five, where this all sort of turns and starts is called The Magic of Trusting Yourself. Say more about that and what's in that chapter. I think that idea even of self-trust is so foundational to this whole process. Because like I said, all of my safety was found in self-abandonment. All of my safety was residing outside of my own body. So unfawning then starts with taking that hypervigilant external focus and being curious about me, right? It's, again, that question of what am I noticing? What am I experiencing? It's sort of building maybe for a lot of us an internal sense of safety or a compass for the very first time. Again, a million different ways in to doing that. But I think even if you think about the senses being the language of the nervous system, just being mindful and curious about looking around your own environment and noticing what you see? What do you hear? People love maybe touch sense. So they have a touchstone that they tap into that brings them into the present moment when we're orienting with our senses. These things sound small, but I'm telling you they are mighty in terms of coming into the body, coming into reality. I'm not in my patterned conditioning when I'm using my senses to look around and notice what I see. In fact, I'm coming out of autopilot. And so all of these things as a practice sort of over time start to create more connective tissue between me and my own body, what my body is telling me. It brings me back to the gut, which is our second brain, right? That can sort of alert us to these gut feelings, among other things, our instincts, our inspirations, our callings. And even as I say all of that right now, what I was about to say was it feels like magic. And I go, oh, yeah, that's why I called it the magic of trusting yourself. A question I have posed to people on this show a lot and I've thought a lot about is this idea of self-trust, intuition, gut feeling. Yeah. The problem that I see with that is that for people who have experienced a lot of trauma, it's really hard to know what is the trauma response and what is me, right? So, for example, I may feel a great deal – we'll use the classic trauma scenario, a soldier, right? A soldier may feel a great deal of fear when a car backfires. They're not actually in danger in that moment. That's right. Right? And so if we extrapolate that out to complex trauma, we can have all sorts of gut feelings, intuitions that feel like gut feelings or intuitions that are trauma responses. And how do you teach people to start to even delineate those things? Oh, it's such an important thing that you're naming. And so, you know, going back to what you read about me saying I'm kind of the buzzkill therapist is this is a part of that journey is that if I'm ever to discern in the moment between is this discomfort or is this actually danger to your point if you have a history of trauma the body is going to signal danger every time right it's why our trauma responses and fawning for me was like five steps ahead of wherever I went even in environments that may have been perfectly safe my body goes, I ain't going to risk it. You know what I mean? Like I'm going to lead with the Fawn response first. So part of coming back into self then is two things came into mind. This is also why I don't start the healing work relationally with other people because the body's going to signal danger every time. You're going to get stuck. It's going to feel frustrating. You're going to go, see, I knew this wasn't possible. Okay. But when we start with this internal sense in the safest place that you can find, maybe it's in nature. I feel safest in nature. It's sort of my church going on private walks where I just, even in my city neighborhood, just notice the green, notice the trees, connecting me to self, connecting me to self. this is where I might actually notice some anxiety or some fear. And this is why I also said I have a tricky relationship with that parable, because when I start to notice that my body wants to go, oh, avoid it or fix it or change it or make it nice, make it good, override it. And the work actually is to go, oh, I am afraid right now. Can I linger there? even just a moment longer. And I talk about doing this in lots of different ways and different modalities and trauma therapies in the book. But the real shorthand of it is, as I start to grow my capacity for things that don't feel good, right? Oh, I'm feeling my fear. I'm feeling the overwhelm and I'm responding to it differently. I'm not checking out. I'm not overriding it. And the body starts to go, oh, we can tolerate this kind of upset now. This is what grows our capacity over time to where we're in the moment. And instead of being triggered and being like, oh, alarm bells, it's dangerous. We can actually know, is this danger? And I mean, from a body base, not like a analysis perspective. We start to be able to respond more and more in the moment to, this may not feel good. I may not like this. I may have been a people pleaser, if you call it that, my whole life. And in this moment, I recognize you are not pleased, but it's not making me go, oh, I'm full of shame. I did it wrong. I'm so guilty. Let me fix it. I can sort of stand in my truth, in my self-trust and go, it's okay that we see things differently. I really trust myself and I'm hearing what you're saying and it's valid, but I'm valid too, right? So this is work that tends to take some time. It tends to be slow moving. That's by design. Anytime we move too quickly, the body can go right back into that overwhelm. And so the biggest thing I can say for folks is to carry your curiosity and your patience and then just continue to notice and trust, notice and trust. You describe several trauma therapy modalities in the book, internal family systems, somatic experiencing, EMDR, and how you've had powerful healing experiences from all of those things. Mm-hmm. If somebody's just starting to begin their unfawning journey, how might they know what approach would work best for them and what should they be looking for in a therapist? There's a lot of different ways to go here. That's right. Ideally, they would find someone who is trauma-trained, not just trauma-informed. Trauma-informed is good. Trauma-trained is better. And yes, I have worked with those three modalities as a client and therapist, and they tend to be some of the more popular modalities. So you're probably going to be able to find someone that works with one or all three of those. But anyone that you call as a potential client, you should be able to say, do you work with complex trauma? What therapy modalities do you use? You could give them a little bullet point about what you working on and say how does what you do in particular how will it help me with that And if you decide to meet with them these conversations don end just because you decided to give them a try Within one or two, maybe three sessions, you should absolutely be having another conversation. Like, how is this feeling for me now? Do I feel like this is useful? Do I feel like it's moving in the right direction. Here's the very tricky thing. If you identify with the fawn response, we are fawning for our therapists. We want our therapists to like us. We want them to know how earnest and hardworking we are and how compliant and what a good client is. We want to be their favorite. We have got to try to set all that stuff aside or maybe even say, listen, here's my history. I want my therapist to like me. I want you to know all these things about me. And I really want to have a different experience of myself in the world. And so can you help me check in with me so that we can even decide together, does this feel like it's going in the right direction? Is it safe for me to push back in here? Is it safe for me to continue to ask questions, right? I think I talk about this in the book, but there were many times throughout my life where I recall a therapist offering me their thoughts on something or suggesting that I try something in the room. And I would be like, oh, okay. And then I would sit there and basically what I'm thinking is, how long do I have to sit here for them to think that I tried or them to think that, you know. And really what my body is saying is this does not work for me. This does not work for me. But I didn't think I could say that. I didn't want to hurt their feelings. So as a trauma therapist, I want people to know you are not hurting our feelings. If you say this doesn't work for me, you are giving me powerful and important feedback. Listen, I can have one tool that works really well for me. And I offer it to one client and they're like, Oh my God, this is my favorite. It's amazing. The next person I see, they're like, eh, it does nothing, right? It's not that there's anything wrong with them. It's the wrong tool for the job in their body. So that's why I say trauma trained and like sort of the more tools in their tool belt, the better, because that means they can go, oh, I can see that you're responding to this and maybe not this. But mostly what you need to know is it's okay to say, I'm confused. I'm overwhelmed. You lost me 10 minutes ago, right? This isn't working for me? Can we try something else? And if your therapist basically responds with, well, maybe you need to try harder. I'm going to give you permission in advance. That's the wrong therapist. Yeah. Yeah. There's so many things you said in there that I relate to, certainly wanting to be the ideal client. I've had this history of like, I'm happy to be very vulnerable. Yeah. As long as it's already a problem that I've solved and I can tell you how I solved it. Like, I was really feeling sad and scared, but then I did X, Y, and Z, and A, B, and C, and now I'm okay. Like, that seems like vulnerability, but it's not for me. For me is I'm right in the middle of feeling it right this second. I don't know what to do. And it's taken me a long time to get to that place where I can do that. my deepest vulnerability now in therapy is when I can tell my therapist, Holly, I think you just checked out. You're not paying attention. When I call her out, I go, oh, I feel like you left again. Right. And it's not even that she left, but my perception is that she left. And listen, we're talking about relational trauma. You don't think I'm going to have issues that are going to come up in my relationship with my therapist. So if she were to get really defensive and be like, what are you talking about? But she doesn't. She's like, oh, interesting. Do you remember exactly when you felt that feeling that I popped out? And she'll check in with herself. And sometimes she might even say, oh, maybe I did get distracted because I was thinking of this thing. But it's so soothing for my nervous system because she's going to be in this deep reality with me. And I don't have to worry that I'm going to hurt her feelings and she's going to leave. Yep. I love what you say about starting with yourself before you move out to try and be relational. You also then go on to say, at some point, this is a relational problem. You're going to have to bring it into your relationships. And you've got a really lovely section about assertiveness and finding your voice. And I think that we just think that we should all of a sudden be able to do it. Right. Right. Like all of a sudden I should just be able to have that conversation. Right. There's a lot of steps that can prepare us to get to that point. And I would, I just love to walk through some of them with you because I think it's a really helpful way to think about like, I don't have to go all the way to Z. I can do A, B, then I can do C, then I can do D, you know? And so how do we go about preparing ourselves to eventually get to the point where we can say the things that we feel like we might need to say? Yeah. Well, there's so many ways in, I feel like my brain was just flooded with a lot of them, but I'll tell you what came to the top of mind. So first of all, I think I talk about in the sort of individual process of reattuning to yourself. One thing that tends to be really helpful is taking space, right? So taking space from your relationships initially or particularly the relationships that trigger you, even if it's like taking five minutes in the car by yourself before you walk in the door. But things like a journaling where you sort of say at the top, like, if I was allowed to feel how I really feel, what would I say, right? Creating space and permission to be in touch with what your body knows, but your mind might still be going, no, no, no, no, no. So first you have to be able to sort of own it and recognize it before you can do it differently. But then once you do own it and recognize it, how do you, again, respond to it differently, not with shame, but with curiosity, with self-compassion? So we're already changing our relationship to the thing itself before we bring it forward. And then I say, you know, what tends to happen for most of us initially is we do this work in hindsight because you're not gonna catch it in real time or certainly in advance. So maybe you leave a lunch with a friend or a conversation and you realize you kind of have that like anxious feeling and you don't feel good about yourself and you go, you know what, I did it again. I wanted to maybe bring something forward and I didn't do it. It felt too intense in the moment. I wish I would have done it differently. then I would say, does it feel like that's a safe relationship, first of all? And would you be willing to go back and say, you know what? I'm not feeling great. I really wanted to bring more of myself into this conversation. And I just sort of freaked out and I left and I didn't say the hard thing. I'm wondering if I can do it now. And particularly for people that are recognizing that these tendencies have been so pervasive, I might even say, go to those relationships, to your partners, to your best friends and say, I'm realizing I've been living in a chronic fawn response and I'm going to be doing things differently. Even if it's silly, like maybe I would have always said, I don't care where we go or I don't care what we do. I'm going to make a conscious effort to think about what I want and to ask if we can do it differently. Or if I disagree, I'm going to be trying to say it. And sort of laying the groundwork in advance with these safer relationships, it does two things. I think it lets the body know it's a little bit safer when it comes time for game time, when you want to do it in the moment. But it's also an opportunity for both people to go, you know what? It's time for us to kind of renegotiate how we show up here. And if I'm basically saying, I want more intimacy, I want you to know more of me. And at the end of the day, what I ultimately really want is I want to know more of you too. I'm wondering, are there parts of you that you want to bring in that maybe you haven't been able to? So now we're creating not just this personal safety, but more of a collective safety. We're saying, hey, we're in this together. You know, you talked about the lying thing. And back when I got sober in my early 20s, I realized I was so used to lying. I lied about everything with like zero stakes. It was just, if I really thought that you thought a better answer of what I had for lunch was spaghetti and meatballs, when I had a PB&J, I would tell you I had spaghetti and meatballs. But I had a friend that I was getting sober with and she did the same thing. And so we made a pact together. We're like, oh my gosh, we don't want to keep doing it. And I'm telling you, night after night, we would have this long conversation and get off the phone and one of us would call the other one back and we'd be like, okay, I just lied. I just lied. I did it again. Here's what really happened. And it was this ability to go back to a safe place and kind of have a do-over that created more and more and more of a sense of safety, where maybe then the next time we got on the phone, we might even say like, well, I want to tell you I did this, but the truth is, you know, I did this instead. And I think the same is true with fawning as it becomes more conscious, this reflexive, like, what do you need? Who do you need me to be? How can I take care of you? We start to notice more and more in the moment where there are opportunities to hold on to ourselves. Yeah, it's amazing. So many of my relationships in the past, fawning made sense. Because to be direct and straightforward or to say what I want brought about a whole lot of conflict and strife. Yes, yes, yes. But I'm in a relationship now and have been for a decade now or so where that's not the case. And yet, and yet I find myself wanting to do what you're saying. Like I can't, I can't think of an example right now, but wanting to tell a small mistruth about something completely inconsequential because it would go over better. Right. There's this persistent sense. It's one of the things I've had to work on a lot is like, you're not going to be in trouble. Oh boy, that lives in my body so deeply. You're not going to be in trouble. Yeah. Which I just constantly think, well, to say I constantly think, I'm over-exaggerating, my habituated response when I'm not being more conscious is I'm going to be in trouble for all sorts of silly things that my current partner would never care about. It's this conscious choice or it's about being more conscious about my choice, I should say. There's a couple other things you had in that section that I thought were really helpful. And one of them was helpful to write a script of what you'd say. Yeah. Right. Because a lot of times I think we expect we can go into these conversations, but when we go into the conversation, it's for many of us, it's going to be stressful. It's going to cause anxiety for good reason. And we also know that When we're anxious, we don't think very well. Totally, yeah. And so for me, knowing exactly what I want to say, having like actually scripted out, and you say this too, imagine yourself saying it. Play out the conversation. Are all these things we can do to get us? And then you have another great one, which is called bookending your actions. What do you mean by that? It means before you go into the lion's den or something that feels really hard, You do something in advance that connects you to yourself, that feels really regulating, that reminds you of your intentions, right? You're sort of basically getting in your right mind. But you don't just do it before. You make a commitment to also do it right after. And in my experience, this allows us to stay more grounded throughout. But it also just drops you back into that regulation at the other end of a hard conversation. And, you know, one thing I didn't mention it in the book, but I'll mention it here in terms of the scripting. I don't recommend chat GPT as your therapist, but this is one area where my clients have been using chat GPT for the like, how do I say the thing that's clear and kind? and they'll bring back to me like, well, here are the options. And we're both kind of surprised. Like, well, that, yeah, that sounds pretty good. Right. So when you're anxious and you're worried and you don't want to come off mean, you can put all that stuff in the prompt and be like, I don't want to be mean, but I do. I have a hard time holding onto myself here. And oftentimes those, um, generated responses at least can give you the tone, the sense of the thing, and then you can make it your own. But I think that's really helpful, knowing what you wanna say, even sending it in writing. If you feel, I don't think there's anything wrong with that. If you go, every time I get in the room, I freeze, I can't do it. And then I hate myself again. Then I go, well, so what's stopping you from sending it in an email? You might even say in the email, I keep wanting to have this conversation. I do wanna have it, but I'm gonna send you this now as a placeholder, as a reminder, as a like, can we circle back and make sure that we attended this one thing because I don't want it to go missing. What a way to support yourself. How fantastic, right? Yeah. It makes me think of a previous marriage that did not work. I think nothing was really going to fix it. But something that was helpful was we would be minutes into any difficult conversation and we would both be flooded, right? It was just like there was no safety. It just didn't exist. Yeah. And so our therapist for a while was like, anything you guys want to communicate that's important or high stakes, you have to write it out, give it to the other person. That person has to have time to think about how they want to respond. Like it was that like hair trigger all the time. But that actually turned out to be helpful for us. Oh, I believe that. Yeah. Because, you know, each of us was able to think about how's the best version of me going to respond to this? Not what tends to be showing up in our dynamic, which is the worst version of me. Right, right, right. That's powerful. Okay. Pause here real quick. Do you have your book handy? I was going to ask you to read a section to end, but if you don't have it, then... I think I have one hiding. Oh, I do. Okay. So I thought the place we could end is having you read one of the later paragraphs in the book that really stood out to me. Oh, okay. Let me see if I can find it. It's the last paragraph before the story at the end about, I think, grace. Great. This will be an ongoing process. We will miss the mark. So will others. Unfawning is attempting to hold all the complexity, to enlarge our ability to engage in conflict, because conflict is a natural part of being in relationship. Unfawning means entering a complex world and knowing that we don't have all the answers in advance.