How Fawning Is a Hybrid Nervous-System Response

Fawning isn’t people-pleasing — it’s self-erasure in the name of survival. This episode dives into the hidden trauma response behind your need to stay small and what it takes to finally come home to yourself.

Dr. Ingrid Clayton is a licensed clinical psychologist specializing in complex trauma and the author of Fawning: Why the Need to Please Makes Us Lose Ourselves — and How to Find Our Way Back, a groundbreaking guide to the often-overlooked “fourth F” of trauma. In this conversation, she shares how fawning once defined her relationships, identity, and sense of safety — and how becoming a mother and confronting her own mother’s denial of abuse ultimately exposed what it costs to keep performing peace.

✨ What this episode explores:

▪️Fawning as a Hybrid Trauma Response — How it carries both fight-flight energy and freeze-collapse shutdown and becomes the body’s default for managing power, hierarchy, and perceived danger.

▪️When Fawning Means Too Much or Too Little of You — Why some survivors over-function and take up more space while others shrink to survive, and how both patterns stem from the same survival reflex.

▪️How Fawning Shows Up in Parenting — How your child’s emotions can trigger your own suppressed ones and why breaking cycles means tolerating your kid’s feelings and your own discomfort.

▪️Sexual Fawning — How early sexualization and powerlessness can wire the body to equate safety with desirability and what it takes to reclaim agency, pleasure, and self-trust.

▪️When Healing Requires Distance — What it means to stop performing safety with a parent who refuses accountability and how to grieve someone who’s still alive.

▪️Reclaiming the Self Beneath the Survival Strategy — How somatic and parts-based healing help you reconnect with the voice, truth, and body you had to abandon to stay safe.

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