CALLING HOME with Whitney Goodman, LMFT - How the Fawn Response Outsmarts Danger with Dr. Ingrid Clayton

Episode Date: September 16, 2025

Whitney Goodman interviews Dr. Ingrid Clayton about her new book "Fawning: Why the Need to Please Makes Us Lose Ourselves and How to Find Our Way Back." They explore fawning as the fourth trauma response, how it differs from people-pleasing and codependency, why children and marginalized people develop this survival strategy, and how it can masquerade as success while leading to complete self-abandonment. Fawning: Why the Need to Please Makes Us Lose Ourselves-and How to Find Our Way Backhttps://www.ingridclayton.com/ Whitney Goodman is a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist (LMFT) and the founder of Calling Home, a membership community that helps people navigate complex family dynamics and break harmful cycles. Join the Family Cyclebreakers Club⁠⁠ Follow Whitney on Instagram | sitwithwhit Follow Whitney on YouTube | @whitneygoodmanlmft ⁠⁠Order Whitney’s book, Toxic Positivity⁠⁠ This podcast is for informational purposes only and is not a substitute  for professional mental health advice. 00:00 Dr. Clayton's Discovery of Fawning Through Her Own Trauma 04:26 Why Fawning Isn't About Shame - It's About Survival 09:00 How to Recognize Fawning in Your Own Life 12:16 The Connection Between Fawning and Family Estrangement 19:49 Fawning vs. People-Pleasing vs. Codependency 22:13 When Fawning Looks Like Success 27:46 Growing Out of the Fawning Response Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hello and welcome back to the calling on podcast. I am your host, Whitney Goodman. So excited today because we have a guest. Dr. Ingrid Clayton is here on the show today to talk about her new book, Fawning. Why the need to please makes us lose ourselves and how to find our way back. I had an amazing conversation with Dr. Clayton about what fawning is, how some women are trained to do this, how it helps us survive and how you can grow out of the fawning response and not have a need for it anymore. I cannot wait for you to hear this episode and to get Dr. Clayton's book. We will link fawning in the show notes. The book is officially out now wherever books are sold.

Let's go ahead and get into the episode. I want to start off with a story that you tell at the beginning of the book of you as a young child. And you, for people who haven't read the book yet, you know, it's a story about an interaction that you had with your stepfather as a young child. And you talk about this feeling of like knowing that it was wrong, but not really being sure of why or what you could do about it and how that kind of led you to understand, you're wanting to learn about this response of fawning. And I'm wondering if we could start there on just how you, you looked back at that memory and kind of had this discovery. Yes, well, you know, I'm someone who

I never forgot what happened in my childhood. I have sat on a million therapists' couches over the years. I have three degrees in psychology. I have a private practice as a clinical psychologist and I eventually became a trauma therapist. And yet, Whitney, I was still one of those people who was like, my experience wasn't really traumatic, right? It was sort of, we all have this measuring stick, it seems, to sort of compare to other people. And you can always find someone who has it sort of, quote unquote, worse than you. And so nothing had ever really helped me to process what I now know was absolutely complex trauma. And essentially, what happened is my stepdad, the person that you're mentioning, he died. And when,

he died, my body felt safer in the world than it had ever felt. And I was flooded with memories just like this one in the hot tub with him when I was 13 years old and many, many more throughout my life. And I felt this deep, deep calling to write it all down. And it was only from this adult place in my life where I could look back at my own story through a trauma therapist's eyes and go, this is what this is. Right. And through that process of essentially five years of writing what became my memoir, I learned of the fawning trauma response. And it was the first really lens in language on anything related to codependency or people pleasing or even attachment styles that sort of really felt like it fit. There was, it was just a perfect fit. There was

nothing that felt shaming. It allowed me to make sense to myself. It put my experiences back in the body in this unconscious, reflexive, life-saving way. It wasn't about shame and why don't you just, right? And so when I recognized that I had all this information and yet I couldn't see my own story that clearly and really as a field were sort of behind in terms of complex trauma and education and certainly on the fawn response, I felt like I want to bring this lens and language to everyone who needs it. So they can make sense to themselves the way I finally do and find more freedom from living in what I now know was a chronic fawning trauma response for most of my life. Yeah. It's so interesting that you say like when you conceptualized what was

happening and realized that it was fawning that it felt sort of liberating for you or or less shaming because I find that for people who have been in situations where they didn't fight back. Yeah. There's a lot of shame, right? Like I know I was thinking about my own life when I was reading your book that I had an incident in my early 20s where someone tried to get into a bed with me and I woke up and I froze. And I think I almost was like, I don't know who this is. I'm going to just like go along with it. I wear contacts. I couldn't see the person. I was sleeping in a room with other people. And the person ended up getting off of me and leaving me there. And I beat myself up for many years for not screaming or kicking or doing something.

Right. And I think like fawning or or trying to please someone that's holding you captive in some way, is look down upon in some ways. Like, we sort of put people who fight back on a pedestal. That's right. Yes. And so, again, if we look at fight, fight, fight, freeze, and then Fawn, I think this idea that why didn't you scream or fight back? And first of all, I'm so sorry that that happened to you. And it's, you know, unbelievably heartbreaking how many people share a similar story. And similarly, we almost feel worse about our response than we feel about the situation that we were put in, right? And so that just doubles down on the shame that we're carrying. But if you look at all of these trauma responses, these defenses, they're taken directly from

the animal kingdom, right? And if you look at the lion, the king of the jungle, well, sure, he's got a healthy fight response, right? Can set boundaries and have a voice. But we, we act as human beings as though all of us, just if you have a human body, that you're on that similar playing field. And the truth is, you know, I was probably more like a little bunny rabbit or even a rodent. It's sort of my body did not have those responses available. In fact, what's also true, and it was true for me, when I did attempt to fight back, in other words, asking for help, giving a voice to what was going on, right? I organized an interoperative prevention with the help of the school psychologist for my family. And Whitney, it made things so much

worse, right? So here's the bind that the body is in. Either a fight or flight response is not available, again, childhood, where are we going to run, right? You're going to be brought right back to the scene of the crime. Or it makes it worse. And so when you look at it from that perspective or when I do, I go, oh my gosh, my body was so genius. It was adapting to the very environment it had to survive in. And of course, this became a primary mover in my life because it wasn't a single incident event one and done. It was morning till night every single day that my brain and body were developing.

Yeah. Yeah. I think it's so important to make that distinction, especially about things that happened to you in childhood in your own home, right? That like, who are you going to fight? What are you going to do? You know, if these are the people that keep a roof over your head and are your only source of food and safety, even if they're the ones hurting you, how, what recourse do you have?

I think saying that to yourself in adulthood can can give you like a lot of relief. 100%. and that no one chooses to appease or make themselves small or kind of shape shift in these ways. Nobody would, right? I get so offended at this notion that we have a self-esteem problem or we just need to learn to love ourselves. I know that I have always really loved myself. And in fact, my body turning to a fond response was the most loving thing it could do for me at the time. So when we reduce the shame, we finally have a shot. at taking care of ourselves differently at leaning into the agency that everyone's been telling

us just to go and have. Right. So it's so crucial for me to understand and for my clients to understand the why of these behaviors. And it's been missing from the conversation for so long. If this is someone's first time hearing about fawning, how would they know if that's something that they're doing. It's such a good question. It's, you know, it's tricky because in a way fawning hides in plain sight. It's not as obvious as a fight or flight response, particularly in terms of responding in a way, like you said, yelling or or running or saying stop, asking for help, because we're leaning into the very relationships that are causing us harm, right? We look like we are going along to get along. And sometimes we've even convinced ourselves that it's not that big of a

deal. And, you know, like I said, other people have it worse. So it is this trauma response that looks like a choice. And it looks like we're content in these relationships that we're actually just surviving. So depending on the relationship, it can present really differently. And I sort of outline this in fawning by sharing my personal experience with my stepfather who was grooming me, right, sort of coming for me, closing in. The fawn response looks like that sort of appeasement. It could be flirting or flattering, right? I feel terror. I feel overwhelmed. I do not like him. I need him to like me, right? That's that aspect of fawning. But on the other hand, hand was my mother who called me a liar, said I was making it up, was not available, right?

Was was actively addicted and and numb in her own way. And so fawning for me then is sort of like loaning her, my internal resources as though I could help her to stand so that she could finally help me, privileging her wounds over my own, really seeing her pain and what she was navigating and sort of giving her this hall pass. for what was decades. So it's the more caretaking aspect of things. But in both of these situations, you're managing the gap, right? The space between you and the people that you need in order to be, you know, even remotely safe.

But you can see how it looks really differently, depending on the context. And, of course, extend this out to all marginalized people navigating all kinds of systems of power, right? Communities. we need to affiliate, like our entire lives, not just family systems, but larger systems generally contain the fabric of our entire lives and pushing back on that is such a huge and devastating loss that the body goes, well, I'm in a bind here, right? So I'm going to choose affiliation over authenticity. Yeah.

Something's really clicking for me as you're talking. you know, I work a lot with adult child and parent estrangement. And I hear a lot of parents say everything was fine until yesterday, you know, and then our relationship sort of just blew up, right? Yeah. And it's making me wonder if fawning is at the core of a lot of those relationships. If perhaps the adult child really has been appeasing the parent, acting as if everything is fine, it does look fine on the surface and when they decide to no longer like employ that survival strategy or they don't have to anymore because they're safe um if if that's actually what they're feeling is now gone i don't know if that's something you've seen as well in your work

i think it's very common i think you named it very concretely and another thing that we know about fawning is that the thread under all of the signs and symptoms ultimately is self abandonment. And again, no one chooses self abandonment, but here's what happens. If I need you, these external forces in my life to like me or give me validation or give me permission, all of my energy, all of my focus, all of my safety is found external to me, right? There is an immediate bypass of what do I need? How do I feel? What would I do if I could? We don't even see it. So when all of our gaze is focused externally, you can see there's the self-abandonment. And what starts to happen, I think through adulthood or through some trauma healing,

is we start to finally inhabit the self, maybe for the first time. We start to grow this new internal sense of safety. And it can feel like all of a sudden things come online in a way where we go, I can see all of the things that these parts of me were not ready, or didn't have the capacity to fully understand. It's like we drop into our body for the first time. And it changes our relationships, right? Because once the blinders come off, they don't go back on that easily.

Yeah, it's so true. Yeah. Can you describe how fawning might be done as a way for people to feel safe or to seek some type of safety in their lives. Yeah, I mean, if you go back even to that, to the story where I began fawning, I'm 13 years old. I'm like out in the hot tub looking at the stars in the sky, kind of minding my own business. And when my stepdad joins me, he's, I now know he was grooming me and emotionally manipulating me. But because emotional manipulation is so effective, right, gas lighting is so effective. It was also very confusing. I was like,

well, he's saying nothing is going on, right? He's saying nothing is wrong. But I knew, right? My body knew on some level that I was not safe. And so similar to you, I didn't say, you know, back the hell off or what are you talking about? I smiled and I kept my voice very neutral. And there was this aspect of performance, right? I think often in fawning it looks like a performance.

It looks like a curation. We're picking up on these external cues and the body goes, oh, okay, those are my marching orders. And I knew that if I could keep him happy enough, maybe I could sort of sneak out of the hot tub and hold on to a sense of myself, which is essentially what I did. So I'm not sure if I answered the exact question, but it brought me down that. No, you did. And it's reminding me of in the book, you talk about that. movie Woman of the Hour, which I also have seen. And I had a similar reaction to yours while watching it of, I believe it's, you can probably describe it better than me. There's a scene where

the woman is, she escapes being killed by the guy. Do you know what I'm talking about? And she says like, don't tell anyone. I'd be so embarrassed. Well, yeah, she's a young girl. And she was literally just raped and beaten and basically left for dead. But she did not die. But she did not die. and she comes to, and she's lying next to the man that stole her away and did this to her. And she sees him crying. And so she turns to him and she says, baby, right? She calls him baby. She says, oh, please, please don't tell anyone.

I would be so embarrassed. So this is also an aspect of fawning. We soak up all the shame for the entire system, right? You can't be bad because if you're bad, then you're going to feel a sense of threat. and I'm in even more danger. So let me take that off your plate. I'm going to hold it for you. So I can feel like I'm a little bit more on an equal playing field.

And again, this is happening in a nanosecond. The body goes, we got to lean in. And she leaned in hard. And it was one of the most profound experiences I've seen of the fawn response. That whole film for people who want to understand fawning every character, every female character in particular in woman of the hour. it's on Netflix, Anna Kendrick's film is living in some level of a fawn response, whether it was appeasing their jerk of a boss or placating someone, you know, who's coming after

them. But that scene in particular was so powerful. And guess what? She survived. This is based on a true story. She did, in fact, get away by getting back in his car. And again, we go, why would she do that? Well, because she had no other choice.

Fawning is often the last house on the block, you know? But if it's the last, it's the only house, I'm going to take it every time. I'm grateful for it. When I saw that moment in that movie, I feel like I immediately clock that is like, oh my gosh, she's doing this to survive, right? And some of that is probably because, and you talk about this as well in your book, like as women, we are taught to fawn in so many situations, right? And sometimes you can really be risk if you don't. That's right. There are real risks. Not only is fawning taught and expected and applauded, right? It's so deeply reinforced. But there are real consequences when we don't. And most people

can readily think of examples of that, right? Whether it's at their job or with their family, It's like, whew, it was my life story, essentially. When I stopped fawning, it made things worse. And my body learned, oh, I will never do that again. I'm never going to make that mistake again of coming out of a fawn response. And then I lived there for decades, not knowing it. Yeah. Yeah.

It's so unfortunate how many stories, I mean, that I see of like a young girl rejects a boy at school. And the next day he comes to school and harms her, you know, situations. like this where I think we are groomed in a lot of ways. Like you said, to make sure you let people down easy, be kind with their feelings, the act like you're a little bit interested. You know, if someone approaches you out at night, they could hurt you if you don't act the right way. And it just becomes like a reflexive, I think. It is. Absolutely. Yeah. We're meant to be perpetually grateful for all attention that's coming our way. Like shouldn't we consider it all just. flattering. Yeah. No. They're like smile more and all that, of course. Yeah. Can you talk about

the difference between fawning, codependency, and people pleasing? I feel like people could mix these different things up a bit. Yes. You know, from my perspective, I feel like both people pleasing and codependency are essentially symptoms of a chronic fawn response. So I think the problem for me with those labels, at least historically, is that they really placed the blame and the shame in the individual. And it robbed them of two things. One, a nervous system, a nervous system that kept them safe. And two, the context, right, of their actual lives of like, oh, well, there was a reason that I had to lean in for connection in this particular way. So I think that while some people find resonance,

and I do too to a degree in both of those terms, people pleasing and codependency, a lot of my clients felt deeply missed. They were saying, Ingrid, my intention was not to please, right? My intention was to stay safe. And codependency was never about control similarly, right? It was the only option. Again, the last sort of house on the block.

So being blamed and shamed without acknowledging the inherent genius of this response to me, it's one of the great heartbreaks, I think, of what we've done to people in the mental health field. And so I see it as a yes and. Fawning isn't just swapping out these terms. I think it's really enlarging them on both ends of the spectrum to say there's so much more to the story, right? Like, we have so much more information now about trauma. And these terms were not trauma informed. Yeah. Yeah. It's what you said about people pleasing makes a lot of sense to me. Like almost as if if you say someone was people pleasing when they were actually fawning. It's like they were considering the other person's needs in order to please them and make them happy, not doing it as a. form of self protection. That's right. It doesn't feel that way, at least, which can can really

make it sit differently. Exactly. Yes. And you talk some about how fawning can actually look like success or can be a strategy to achieve success. Can you talk a little bit more about what that looks like? Yes. I mean, ultimately, if our desire is to win someone over and, And it's someone who's maybe invalidating us or neglectful. They're just wholly not available. But our bodies are still attuned to like, what else can I do, right? To make you see, I talk a lot about complex trauma. Essentially, our self-worth is the wound, right?

So we try to compensate for this by being more and more worthy. And oftentimes my clients come in having amassed all kinds of success. And often that is the engine, right? it's sort of like I never got the validation here, so I'm going to go and I'm going to achieve and pursue in this realm. I will also say not everybody, right? Sometimes they hit these ceilings because they go, I can't be too big. Being too big or too successful would put a target on my back. So it's safer to be small, again, not conscious choices, but just to say there's again different presentations. But, you know, in terms of the success piece, one of the first clients

I present in Fawning is my client, Anthony, who is a partner at a major global powerhouse law firm. You know, he has the house. He had the marriage. He had all the things. And basically, he came to me and was like, Ingrid, what hobbies? What interests? What else would I do on the weekends? There's no me in my own life, ultimately, to even being able to say, I don't like my job. I don't care about my job. We're taking this all way too seriously. He's not even invested. He'd left so much of himself. He'd left so much of himself behind, that now in his mid to late 50s, it's sort of this catch-up period of like, who am I, right? I often talk about Pinocchio and Pinocchio going, oh my gosh, I'm a real live boy. Like, I see my clients doing that. It's sort of coming into, you mean I'm here? I'm a whole

person. And this is again where we see fawning as it's a performance. It's a curation. He went and did all the things, the Ivy League schools and he got married and he had a child. But it was not, I guess that's the best way to say it. There was no him in his own life. And now that he's pivoted, his life looks radically different. He has so many interesting, creative interests and endeavors that he does. He has this very, very rich full life that is so full of him that the old Anthony isn't there anymore. Yeah. He's transformed.

When I was reading that my husband used to work in big law and I was like, oh my gosh, this is so true. It is so much. That type of stuff doesn't come naturally to me. Like I'm not very good at just like fawning over someone, which is why I've always kind of like to work alone and like do my own thing. And I remember I would watch him and the people that he worked with. And it was so much of that.

Like just looking at the people above you and sort of making them like gods. And that was how you got ahead. You had to get really good at that skill. And some people are already trained for that in their own childhoods. Right. But I was reading that. I was like, oh, gosh, this is spot on. Yes.

For sure. Yeah. And you do get ahead when you're good at that. That's right. Founders are very quick to say, I'll volunteer and I'll still, I'll stay late, right? Even to say like, I won't, I don't want to be a burden. I don't want to ask for credit or for, you know, a raise that that's another aspect where they can sort of get stuck in a career path in particular. But ultimately, they're hungry for more validation. And so again, that becomes this engine, right, for almost devouring any opportunity for it. totally yeah i think it's so hard when the thing that's holding you back a lot in life is also the thing that gives you a lot of opportunity and access and i feel like this is one of those

things bonding that is it can be both 100% i mean i want to say all of the time right that there is a need that is being met that's real and it's why healing i think is so hard because you're not only, you know, uninvesting from the way in which you had this very vital need met, which feels painful, but now you're pivoting into more behaviors that probably made things worse, right? Even having a voice or setting a boundary. We talk about these things like they're just so simple and so easy. Just Whitney just, you know, set a boundary. And it's like, well, my body gets flooded with terror. Okay. And so this is what I'm inviting people to step into so you look at both sides of the coin like stop doing the thing that kept you safe and lean into

something terrifying this is actually what we're asking people to do and that's why this work tends to be slow it's why it tends to and why being gentle and reducing the shame why all of that is so important that's a perfect segue into the last thing I wanted to talk to you about which is the idea of being able to grow out of your fawning and sort of move past this response, can you talk a little bit about how someone would do that? I just love the way you framed the question, that it's much less of a stop doing this, this and this, right? Because you probably can't. If you could have, you would have already. At least that was my experience, right? But we are essentially taking,

this external gaze of my safety relies outside of my body, and we're just getting curious. What do I notice and experience in my own body? Just this curiosity and question, our direct relationship with ourselves is foundational, but it's like this is where the magic can start to happen because we start to grow a new internal sense of safety, maybe for, the first time in our whole lives, right? This is where we start to go, what is this feeling? And instead of going, that's ridiculous or just get over it and let it go, whatever it is, we go, wait a second, I'm going to trust that this is here for a reason. Can I linger just a little bit longer? And again, be curious, like, what is for me in this sensation, this feeling, this memory? And I promise people that

ultimately one step will lead to the next, to the next, to the next. And the more that we grow this internal sense of self, the better we are able to carry out these things that people have been telling us to carry out forever, right? Yeah. It's an extension of growing our capacity, not about hitting ourselves on the head for having done it wrong. Totally. And I love this idea too about like that you may not need to engage in this practice of fawning this self-protective mechanism anymore when you are in different circumstances. And I think that's something I talk about so much on this show is like stepping into your true adult self, like that actually is able to say, look, look around. I'm not in danger anymore. I don't have to do this thing with these

people because these people aren't the ones that hurt me. They're not the ones that that we're doing this to me. And I think that can be so difficult to like get to that place of realizing like, oh, I can let this go. That's right. Yes, because for so many of us, particularly when it stems from childhood trauma, fawning just becomes our personality, right? We think that we're just being nice and we're just being empathic and I'm being a good girl, a good daughter, you know, fill in the blank. And so, yeah, to start to be able to go, wait a second, you mean I have some conscious choice here? And if I could choose, what would I choose? If I had permission to feel all of my feelings, what would I notice? What are the ones that have gone missing? Right. And again,

it's sort of cobbling together this new sense of a self where suddenly I am now a 50 year old woman and I can look at my hands and go, yeah, for sure, look at my hair. No question. I I am a 50-year-old woman. I am a mom, right? This is my present tense life. But this is what a lot of us are robbed with the history of complex trauma is the present tense moment and our ability to find ourselves in it, which is also why things like somatic healing and even just orienting with your senses, connecting with now, taking off your shoes and feeling your feet on the actual ground. These things may seem small and like really, Ingrid, is it going to move the needle? And I want to say yes yes listen to your favorite music do you have favorite music get curious what

kind of music you like these are the types of things that start to restore our sense of self and it's major i want to go back to something i think so important that you just said about it being your personality that so many people feel like this is just who i am i am this way and you don't realize how much of like who you are, for those of you listening, I'm doing your quotes, is like just safety mechanisms that have been installed in you over time. And that's also terrifying, right, to not actually know what's your personality and what is just something you've been doing all the time. It's so true. Let's be real. I am a therapist in large part because safety was found in helping other people, right? Even this idea that no, no, no, no, no, it's not about me.

Let's focus on you. Like, I have, I love my role as a therapist. I don't sort of regret any of that. But I've also had to really look at, can there be more of me in my own life even as a therapist? And how can I bring myself to this work in an even more authentic way, right, and not keep myself on the outside of the door and it's only about my clients. Of course, the work is about them, but I get to exist in the equation in a new way over time. And quite frankly, that's been more helpful for my clients too. But that's just one example of how I didn't know that I chose this profession in part because I was literally living in a chronic fond response. But that's happened. Yeah. It's so funny that you say that because even on like my worst day,

is I, when I've had to see clients and I've had something insane going on in my life, I've thought like, oh, I am so grateful that I get to just focus on this person and not think about myself. And it is like one of the best coping mechanisms to be like, I have to do this for them. And I'm not going to worry about me. And there's a place for that, right? So it's also we're not moving into another sort of binary where it's like you either fawn and you show up for others or you don't.

it's about finding more flexibility and conscious choice. And that's the thing that I think we've been robbed of. Totally. Well, Ingrid, thank you so much for being here with us today. I am so excited for people to get their hands on your book fawning. I have an early copy here, so I know it won't look exactly like that. We'll definitely link to your book in the show notes. Is there anything else that you want people to know where they can find you?

I mean, ingridclayton.com is my website and all the links are there. But yeah, all the social media places come, come find me and join the conversation. Awesome. Thank you so much. Thank you, Whitney. The Calling Home podcast is not engaged in providing therapy services, mental health advice, or other medical advice or services. It is not a substitute for advice from a qualified health care provider and does not create any therapist, patient, or other treatment relationship between you and Collin Colm or Whitney Goodman. For more information on this, see Collingholm's terms of service linked in the show notes below.