315: FAWNING: Why The Need To Please Makes Us Lose Ourselves Finding Brave podcast

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315: FAWNING: Why the Need to Please Makes Us Lose Ourselves

6d ago 41:22

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On the surface, you may look like the model employee, partner, or friend: always dependable, always agreeable. But beneath the surface, you may be carrying a lifetime of survival strategies that keep you invisible in your own life. This is the story Dr. Ingrid Clayton knows both personally and professionally, and it’s the story she helps so many of us begin to rewrite.

Dr. Ingrid Clayton is a licensed clinical psychologist with advanced degrees in transpersonal and clinical psychology. She has maintained a thriving private practice for more than fifteen years and writes the popular Psychology Today blog, Emotional Sobriety, which has been read by over a million people. Her latest book, FAWNING: Why the Need to Please Makes Us Lose Ourselves—and How to Find Our Way Back, unpacks the subtle but profound ways we abandon ourselves by prioritizing others’ approval.

In our conversation, Ingrid reflects on her own experience as a childhood trauma survivor and how it revealed the fawning response: the instinct to please and appease in order to stay safe. Unlike fight, flight, or freeze, fawning resembles caretaking, compliance, and endless yeses, but it often leaves us feeling resentful and disconnected from our own needs. She explains how this adaptation becomes ingrained in the nervous system, how it shapes our relationships and careers, and why breaking the cycle can feel like stepping into the firing line.

Yet within that discomfort lies the path to healing. Ingrid offers tangible practices for reclaiming your agency: pausing before you agree, noticing where resentment signals self-abandonment, and daring to let your voice be heard even when it shakes. Listen in to discover how to stop surviving on others’ terms and begin living on your own!

Key Highlights From This Episode:

An introduction to Dr. Ingrid Clayton and her new book on fawning. [02:17]
Ingrid’s personal story of childhood trauma and survival. [04:40]
Defining the fawning response and how it differs from fight, flight, or freeze. [06:19]
The spectrum of trauma responses and how conditioning reinforces fawning. [12:16]
Signs of an ongoing fawning trauma response and why conflict feels unsafe. [15:02]
How fawning embeds in the nervous system and what it takes to heal. [19:59]
What happens in the body during the fawning trauma response. [22:22]
Fawning behaviors and skills, where they originate, and why they’re so common. [26:43]
Practical grounding tools to restore safety through your body, senses, and curiosity. [32:05]
How to get in touch with a psychologist in your area and find Dr. Clayton online. [37:50]

For More Information:

Dr. Ingrid Clayton

Dr. Ingrid Clayton on Instagram

Dr. Ingrid Clayton on Facebook

Dr. Ingrid Clayton on YouTube

Dr. Ingrid Clayton on TikTok

Links Mentioned in Today’s Episode:

Check out Dr. Ingrid Clayton’s new book FAWNING: Why the Need to Please Makes Us Lose Ourselves—and How to Find Our Way Back, and her Emotional Sobriety blog. Explore Dr. Clayton’s other titles, Believing Me: Healing from Narcissistic Abuse and Complex Trauma, and Recovering Spirituality: Achieving Emotional Sobriety in Your Spiritual Practice. Listen to Kathy’s interview with Andre Sólo, Being Highly Sensitive Is a Superpower — Embrace and Leverage it.

Read more about trauma and the nervous system in The Body Keeps the Score. Find a psychologist in your area with Psychology Today’s nationwide directory

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Quotes:

“A lot of what I call fawners, the people [who] have this long-term experience of a chronic fawning response. — We don't really know where fawning ends and where we begin. We don't really have conscious agency around our caretaking or appeasing. It just happens so reflexively all the time.” — Dr. Ingrid Clayton [0:07:38]

“Even though [the fawn response is] a genius adaptation, even though it keeps us safe, even though I'm grateful for it, it causes us to self-abandon at the same time. Because, — we’re having to privilege and prioritize our external environment over who we are.” — Dr. Ingrid Clayton [0:08:07]

“I was repeating these dynamics over and over, not knowing that one part of that is the fact that I was living in survival mode in a chronic fawn response, and that leads to trauma reenactment.” — Dr. Ingrid Clayton [0:09:11]

“This is some of the hardest, bravest work I've ever had to do, and I've ever invited my clients to do.” — Dr. Ingrid Clayton [0:18:01]

“If you think about childhood, we need our caregivers longer than any other species, and it truly is life or death. You cannot essentially believe that your caregiver is a monster — so you have to find a way to stay alive in this system, which means [that], ultimately, the child goes ‘It must be me.’” — Dr. Ingrid Clayton [0:27:52]

“I'm definitely not trying to pathologize us for having a trauma response, or living [for] there long past when we needed to. This is normal. This is healthy. This is what it means to have a body, AND we don't want to live 24/7 in survival mode.” — Dr. Ingrid Clayton [0:31:26]

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