This Is Woman's Work with Nicole Kalil - The Fourth Trauma Response You’ve Never Heard Of (And How It’s Running Your Life) with Dr. Ingrid Clayton | 342

Episode Date: September 8, 2025

Sometimes being “nice” isn’t so nice—it’s self-abandonment in disguise. In this episode, we learn about the fourth trauma response from Dr. Ingrid Clayton, a licensed clinical psychologist, trauma recovery expert, and author of Fawning: Why the Need to Please Makes Us Lose Ourselves and How to Find Our Way Back. Ingrid brings over 20 years of clinical experience helping people break free from trauma responses that no longer serve them. Her Psychology Today blog, Emotional Sobriety, has reached over a million readers, and her work has become a lifeline for anyone ready to stop twisting themselves into knots just to feel safe, seen, or accepted. Together, we dig into the lesser-known trauma response of fawning—what it really looks like, how it shows up in women’s lives, and how it’s different from (but connected to) codependency and people-pleasing. More importantly, Ingrid shares how to start unfawning so you can reclaim your voice, your needs, and your full self. We cover: The difference between compassion and compulsion How fawning hides in plain sight as “being nice” or “helpful” Why women are especially conditioned to default to fawning How to notice when you’re fawning in real time Practical ways to build internal safety and stop outsourcing your worth Because survival mode kept you safe, but it will never help you thrive. Connect with Ingrid: Website: https://www.ingridclayton.com/  Book: https://www.amazon.com/Fawning-Need-Please-Makes-Ourselves/dp/B0DPZ3D78B IG: https://www.instagram.com/ingridclaytonphd/  Related Podcast Episodes: People-Pleasing & Being “Needy” with Mara Glatzel | 147 How To Practice Radical Self Care with Shelly Tygielski | 302 The Power of Enough with Elizabeth Husserl | 299 Share the Love: If you found this episode insightful, please share it with a friend, tag us on social media, and leave a review on your favorite podcast platform! 🔗 Subscribe & Review:Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Amazon Music Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Sometimes it's about unlearning and unmasking. And today might be all of those things. On this episode, we're talking about something you and I might be doing without even realizing it, something that might look like being nice, being helpful, being agreeable, but it's actually costing us far too much. Listen, we all know about fight or flight. We know about freeze, but there's a lesser-known fourth F in the trauma response lineup, and that's fawning. It's when we try to stay safe by staying small, by appeasing, pleasing, and shape-shifting ourselves into the version of us that will be most liked, or least threatening, or most useful to the people around us, especially the ones who've harmed us.

And it's not a flippant thing. It's not interchangeable with people-pleasing. It's not the same as just being nice. It's self-abandonment. And most of the time, we don't even know we're doing it, which scares the crap out of me because I come into this conversation thinking it's not something that I do all that often. And I'm prepared to find out otherwise. So how do we know when we're fawning?

How do we tell the difference between compassion and compulsion? And most importantly, how do we unfawn? Is that even a word, defawn? Does it matter? I don't know. How the hell do we stop doing it? Because let's be honest, the need to be liked, needed, accepted, or approved of has kept far too many of us stuck in bad relationships, bad jobs, and bad patterns. And friend, we're not doing that anymore. So joining us to help us is Dr. Ingrid Clayton, licensed clinical psychologist, trauma recovery expert, and author of

fawning, why the need to please makes us lose ourselves and how to find our way back. Her blog, Emotional Sobriety in Psychology Today, has reached over a million readers, and she's spent more than 20 years helping people break free from trauma responses that no longer serve them. Okay, Ingrid, thank you for being our guest. And let's start with the obvious. What is fawning? Wow, Nicole, I'm riveted by your introduction. Thank you so much for having me. You covered so many bases. I was just like, yes, yes, yes. Well, I got it from your book. So I cheated a little. Okay. Well, it tells you a little bit about my passion for the topic. I can't hear enough of it.

So, fawning, as you mentioned, is an extension of what we know about the fight, flight, or freeze responses. It's a relational trauma response. And it is context dependent. So it can look different depending on the context you're in. Sometimes it's appeasement, it's flirting, it's flattery, sometimes it's overdoing. It's overdoing. It's compulsive caretaking. It's leaning in and sort of loaning people your own resources in order to help them stand upright. Okay. So then for me, the next question is how to distinguish between the healthy version of that and the unhealthy version of that, because giving, caring, nurturing, these are things that are healthy and that we have been taught or told as women that

we gravitate more towards, how do we know we've gone to the dark side, basically? Yeah, it's such a great question. So first of all, you know, fawning is a genius adaptation. I believe it is a healthy, natural, normal response to threat or ongoing harm. We're not going to stop fawning altogether, right? But to your point, what can happen because fawning is so common with complex trauma, which is synonymous with relational trauma or childhood trauma, right? It means ongoing threats to safety, which encourage ongoing experiences of a trauma response. It becomes chronic. It becomes fixed. We think it's our personality. So many of my clients come in and they say, Ingrid, I thought I was just being nice. The distinction is they had no choice. The distinction is there was no

conscious agency. There wasn't a sense of, I can assert myself. I can have an opinion. It's where we see that people are stuck. They are hitting ceilings. They're repeating relationship patterns that do not serve and they cannot stop. Okay. So because this is a newer concept, at least to me, I've heard flight, flight, bazillion times, freeze a little more recently, but fawning, I think I maybe only heard of twice. So could you give us some examples or something that helps us differentiate between flight, flight, freeze, and fawn? And also, my big question there is, do we have all four? Is it normal to do all four? Do we have a default?

Do some of us do none of these things? Like, walk me through how this work. Okay, so fight, flight, freeze are based on the animal defenses, right? So you look at the animal kingdom and you can look at the lion, right? He's got a fight response, right? He can roar. He can yell back. He can set healthy boundaries, get out of my territory, so to speak.

There's also the flight response when you run, right? The body senses danger. it goes, I'm out of here, right? Freeze is that deer in headlights where there's a lot of activation in the body, the heart is pumping, but the energy is stuck. You cannot move. So, fawning is this hybrid trauma response where it's one part fight-flight or sympathetic activation in the nervous system and one part parasympathetic activation in the nervous system.

nervous system. So the part that's active is the part that's leaning into relationships, to manage the mood, right, to caretaker fix. The part that is downregulated, even depressed, or dissociated is a disconnection from ourselves. We cut off from our opinions, our values, our feelings, sometimes even knowing that we're facing relational harm at all, right? It's this convincing ourselves that, I mean, everything's okay. This isn't that bad. I've got it, right? So it becomes highly adaptive in situations where the body knows instinctively that fight, flight, or freeze would make things worse. Again, you go back to childhood. A kid cannot fight back, right? We live in all kinds of power structures. I often talk about the family system,

but let's be honest, we're talking about patriarchy, we're talking about corporate hierarchy, we're talking about class and race. The body intuitively knows that it's not a lion, right? It's not at the top of the food chain. It has to find another way. And so fawning is this other way. And to answer your other question, it's context dependent. So there are some circumstances that might feel safer where someone can have a voice, right, where they can engage in conflict. It doesn't feel like it's so terrifying, like the stakes are so high. So the body chooses the response that it believes has the greatest chance for safety and survival. It's in a nanosecond. This is not a conscious choice. This is deeply primitive, right? And what happens is, so the body

can turn towards different responses at different points in time, but the body remembers what worked. And if day in, day out, you're invalidated, you're not seen, you're silenced, the body gets it, right? It's not safe for me to be all of me. I need to tuck pieces of me away in order to exist in this equation. And it can become this chronic fixed response over time that we we don't think of as a trauma response at all. This is how we don't see it. Okay. So many questions.

First one is, does gender play a part at all? My brain thinks that women might default to fawn more and men might default to fight more. Is that accurate or am I just making shit up? You're not making it up. I think that's true, right? That although these are instinctual responses, we are also conditioned towards one response over another. And, you know, it's okay for boys to fight and wrestle and, oh, boys will be boys.

And girls are told to please and appease, right? Another name for the faunning trauma response is the please and appease response. So again, it's about the hierarchy. And for most of us living in patriarchy, we know that we are not at the top of that pyramid. And so instinctively we find, but also it's what we've been taught. It's what we've been taught. And it's generational trauma, right? It's generations of this response being passed down even in our DNA.

It is not safe. Stay small. Stay cute. Stay sexy, right? That there's also this aspect, you know, a lot of my clients have presented in this way where they were told, you know, you don't have. have any power. But the one place you have power is in your looks. And if you dress a certain way and if you appeal to others and how you smile or how you dress or how sexy you are, that's

your place of power. And so that then gets sort of co-opted by the fawning trauma response that intuitively knows, this is my safety and security is my sexuality. And this leads to what I call sexual fawning, right? Where we don't want to lead with our attractiveness or our sexuality. And yet, when you've been so disempowered for so long, and that's what the body is seeking to find safety, it's going to use whatever currency it can. I feel like you just described the bulk of my 20s. I can think of countless times. And the way you said this, it like hit my gut because it felt so wheel, but you tuck pieces of yourself away. I was tucking so many pieces of myself into corners. And I was getting the messaging everywhere I looked that so much of my value was in

how I looked at the time. And I can see, even in hindsight, like in professional environments where I am like, that didn't make any sense. Why was I doing that? And it was really just a default. It was like, I don't know how to be here is me. So I'm going to use the piece that I know I have some sort of power because I don't feel like I have it anywhere else. That's right. And so this is why you reference sort of defaunning, which I do call unfaunting.

This is why seeing ourselves through this trauma-informed lens allows us to make sense of ourselves, it drops the shame, right? I was a child growing up in a fond response with a stepfather who was quite frankly grooming and pursuing me. I had this felt sense in my body that I was almost prostituting myself. Let me stay in his good graces. I need to keep him liking me while I keep him hopefully at bay. And it becomes this very tricky balance, right? I didn't know that my body was doing everything it could to keep me safe in what was genuinely an unsafe environment. All I felt at the end of the day was, what's wrong with me? Why would I do that? Right? And so now I know and I can go, oh my gosh, I make sense. It makes sense that I did that. And maybe I don't have to live

in a chronic trauma response anymore. How can I start to build a new sense of internal safety now. Okay, so I want to talk about how to build that internal sense of safety. But before we do, you said our body chooses. And what I'm hearing is it's really hard to know when you're fawning. And so if our body is choosing defaulting based on what's worked in the past, but this is not a conscious, like, this is totally going to work in this situation or strategic, It's just a default response. We might not actually choose if we, you know, we're conscious to it. And we don't know we're doing it.

How do we become, how do we know? Well, I was going to say partially we start by doing exactly what you and I are doing now, which is naming the thing. And just as your body had this deep resonance, like I know what you're talking about. And I'll tell you right now, every woman that I've ever talked to about sexual fonding has that exact same response. they have their own personal experience with it. This is where it begins. We can't maybe see it in the moment, but we can see it in hindsight. We can start to see the patterns.

Oh, oh, I'm conflict avoidant. Oh, I'm terrified of having a voice. Oh, I'm the one who always says, you can decide. We're so agreeable. We're the ones who constantly raise our hand to volunteer. Oh, no, I'll stay late. No, I'll do it. I got it, right?

We're picking up all the pieces for all the people. in our lives. We often feel resentful. We're like, when's it my turn? When am I going to have a reciprocal relationship? When are they going to see my worth? When am I going to be validated, right? And a lot of these things that I'm talking about, you can start to see that our worth, our power, our safety have all resided outside of our own body. It's like you need to give me permission. You need to give me validation. And this is the piece that becomes so reflexive. We do it all the time. So one of the biggest pivots that we start to make, and we do this in safe places, like not in complicated relationships, you do it in the safety of your home,

in your therapist's office. We start to go, okay, I have a body. I'm here right now. What do I notice in me? Right. And I instinctively, as I'm talking about this, put my hand on my heart, which is this beautiful stance of self-compassion. It actually releases oxytocin, the feel-good bonding hormone, but we're releasing it by ourselves, for ourselves. In other words, we start to cultivate a different relationship to self. Maybe the question is, if I were allowed to feel a certain way about this thing, how might I feel? What do I notice when I think about X, Y, and Z. And instead of turning your body to turning towards what you think about a thing, right? Notice what you experience in your body. Oh my gosh, my stomach is clenched so tight or

I feel completely numb. Doesn't matter what you find there. What matters is that we turn our attention towards ourselves. We start to cultivate this sense of internal safety. And over time, we can start to bring that to the world. And then over time, we catch ourselves in the moment and we go, I was almost going to, you know, reflexively do this thing. But suddenly there's like half a second, a nanosecond where we go, there's a new choice. There's a new choice that was never there before. And this is why, you know, historically we've talked about fawning as people pleasing or codependency and yes, these things exist. I think these are actually symptoms of a chronic fawn response. But the problem with the way that we have talked about them is that we've

talked about them like conscious rational choices. So we've given practical conscious solutions like, well, Nicole, just raise your self-esteem. Have you tried some affirmations, right? Like just set healthy boundaries, things that make perfect sense. And then the fauner goes, what's wrong? with me? Why can't I do that? Well, you can't do it because you don't have a sense of internal safety in your own body. The stakes feel too high. It feels too threatening. You're never going to override that nervous system with whatever opinions your brain might have of like, well, come on, let me just do it differently. So by dropping all of this into the roots of the body, the nervous system where we always prioritize safety and survival over all else, we finally have an opportunity

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I wish I could spend all day with you instead. Uh, Dave, you're off mute. Hey, happens to the best of us. Enjoy some goldfish cheddar crackers. Goldfish have short memories. Be like goldfish. So much of what you're saying aligns with what I know to be true. about confidence. That's what I spend my energy researching and coaching. And it's this notion that

we have been taught in so many ways to outsource our confidence, right? Like that it's something external to us. Someone or something out there has our confidence and our job is to find it and get them to give it to us, right? As opposed to what I know to be true is that it's built internally first. It has external expressions, but it's about firm and bold trust and self, which for most of us means connecting to rebuilding, repairing trust that we've damaged within ourselves or that has been damaged and we've internalized it. So, and I'm so glad that you said it's not as simple as like do affirmations because for many of us, affirmations just feel like we're lying to ourselves, right? And you talked about a few

ways. I love that hand on heart. What are some, I mean, you said this, I want to reiterate therapist can be helpful, but what are some things that we can do to begin to rebuild or repair if needed the damage that's been done so that we can begin to have some outward expressions of it so that we can begin to set a boundary or start. stand up for ourselves or what have you or walk away from a relationship that's not serving us. Yes. I was just flooded with so many things I wanted to say. So we'll see what comes in what order. But, you know, I love your work about confidence and how it maps out over this process. And essentially what you were saying is from a trauma therapy lens, we would say it's a bottom up

process, not a top down process, which is why sometimes talk therapy alone as a top down process does not get us where we need to go. So because it's bottom up, it's in your body and your body is different from someone else's body. The process is probably going to look different. But some themes are, again, noticing, we don't use the language in trauma therapy of what do you think about that. We say, what are you experiencing right now? What are you noticing? And along those lines, I say, notice the nudges, notice the callings, notice what you're drawn to. Even if it's like, I'm jealous of that person. You go, well, what are you jealous about? Like, what's interesting over there? Could you let yourself sort of linger in that space of like, what is it about that

that feels important to me? Right. These are the seeds of building this new relationship to self, is noticing, pausing, being curious, and these are things that we all have available to us in this moment. From a nervous system perspective, we do have to start to build a different sense of regulation and safety in the world. One of the things that I give to just about every client is based on Peter Levine's work. He's the founder of somatic experiencing, a body-based trauma therapy. And it's called orienting. You know, animals, his work is all based on, you know, animals in the wild. Like, why aren't they walking around traumatized all the time? Well, in part, because they are oriented through their senses, which is the language of the nervous system,

all the time. So we go, when was the last time my feet touched the actual ground? Right. Can I spend more time in nature? But even if you're just sitting in your apartment, apartment with no windows. Can you orient with your senses? Look around slowly. Notice what you see. Most of us are on autopilot most of the time. We don't notice anything, right? That signals... Autopilot and numbed. Right? We've been numbed. We're on our phones. We're scrolling. Ding, so putting that down and just letting your senses put you in present time and place. Okay? So for the traumatized body that feels like it's going to happen again. I'm going to get in trouble. I don't want to make waves. Putting the body in present time and place, suddenly I go, oh my gosh, I'm a 50-year-old woman, right?

Like I can start to feel into the sense of right now. And oftentimes when you're just looking around, you'll see, oh, my eyes want to land on a particular thing. Maybe it's a light or a shadow. Let your gaze just linger. And you know what happens? 98% of the time, I see people take a spontaneous, deep breath. It means it's a real breath. They're not efforting like, I'm going to do some breath work right now. Their body is actually regulating and settling. They're cultivating more sense of safety in the moment. And you can do this with all of the senses. Some people have one they like more than the other. They like to close their eyes and just notice what they hear. You know, have a touchstone, something that you love.

love to kind of rub in your hands or keep in your pocket. It's the thing that just brings you back to center. So it's these types of practices that over time start to build a new sense of awareness and presence in the moment. And then there's things, tell people be curious, when do you feel like your most you? Oh, well, when I'm knitting quietly on the couch or when I'm listening to this music, it's my favorite music from childhood or whatever. notice what those things are and then notice how you feel when you're doing them. And when we do that, we can start to build and grow what might be these tiny actually moments in our day-to-day life. We start to build them so they can expand into more of like, this is who I am in the world.

Yeah. I think there is a part as you were talking of noticing to when you experience or feel, or know something new or true or real in your body. For me, I tear up. So as you were talking, my body knew it was hearing something that fell right and real and true and that it needed to hear. That's right. The way I know that is it's like instantly out my eyes, right?

Or I feel it in my gut. And so I think I'm asking if there's a part of this of paying attention to the experience you have when something feels right or even the experience you have when something feels forced or wrong and being able to distinguish the difference for yourself because we're inundated with information and feelings and all of that.

And I find for myself one of the more powerful things is to be able to distinguish in my body. Yes. I think that's the key. It's in my body, right? Because fawning is essentially, an override. It's an override. It's an adaptive override. I'm grateful for it. It's kept me safe a lot of times. But I don't want to live in override. In other words, I don't want to live in survival mode all

the time 24-7. So noticing the body, it's exactly what you're saying. I don't know who said it, but somewhere along the way, someone said, the body doesn't lie. And I go, oh, that's it. Right. So your spontaneous watery eyes, that gut check of like, oh, I know that's true, this is what happens a lot of time. We second guess it. We go, is it that true? Does it really matter? Maybe I'm being ridiculous. And when we slow things down, we can say, all right, maybe it is ridiculous.

Can I set that judgment aside for just a moment and return to that deep feeling? that resonance, that what ultimately is the building blocks for self-trust? Can I just trust it? What if I just trusted it, honored it? What if it were true? And continuing to come back to that feeling in the body. I'm telling you right now, if it's not true, the body will, in some way or another, ultimately reject it. If it is true, it will continue to grow and be nourished. And, And there's this sense of like when the body is getting the experience that it needs, right? Because the body wants to heal. The body doesn't want to live in survival mode.

So when it starts getting more of this inner attunement, it gets excited. It's like, yes, yes, this is right. So I know it's tricky to talk about because it's so abstract. But when you start to grow these seeds, people recognize it. They go, I feel more me. than I have ever felt, or I can't believe I'm holding on to myself in this way. It feels so good. Totally. Okay. So two thoughts. First, I love the phrase the body doesn't lie. We actually, I don't know the order of release, but we just recorded an episode called Your Brain is a Filthy

Liar. So those two things together. Your body doesn't lie, but your brain is a filthy liar, right? Like, and I just thought that it is funny because it feels true because our brain is what takes it into, you know, sometimes a dark place. But I want to go back to a word that you used several times I think is important. You said noticing. You also talked about curiosity. I think, especially as women, we have a tendency to replace noticing with judging. You're talking about noticing what's happening in your body or whatever. And I'm fearful that some people.

might do this and create a permission slip for them to judge what's happening in their body. Like, it's supposed to be, or what's wrong with me, or why don't I feel? Why am I numb? Why don't, like, why do I cry? Like, any advice about keeping it in curiosity and noticing versus judging and head traffic? Well, I would say maybe 100% of the time people will have that experience. And so for me, it's a reframing of the judgment as like, oh, here's my marching orders. And oh, wow, my judgment is a protector. My judgment is actually still trying to steer me away from these tucked away pieces because they're not safe in the world, right? Judgment comes in as like this last ditch effort to be like, don't go there. It wants to keep us in line to keep us safe. So what

rather than trying to avoid the judgment or judging our judgment, we go, oh, I see you. Thank you for trying to keep me safe. But I need you to give me a little bit of space right now. These are important things I need to feel. It's really necessary for me to notice this feeling and I can handle it. And I swear even as I'm saying this like made up scenario to you right now, I feel more space in my body to feel what I'm feeling and to be present to myself. When we stop shaming ourselves at every turn, right, you want to keep a fawn or fawning, tell them they're doing something wrong. So even in our relationship to ourself, when we get hooked in by that judgment, like,

oh, God, what's wrong with me? Here I go again. If we go, okay, thank you for trying to protect me. But I have more capacity now that maybe I've ever had before. I'm committed to growing it. So it's like just dropping in a little bit deeper. And even if all you notice is that you're judging yourself, I go, that's amazing. That's great information.

It's not something we're meant to avoid. If all you notices, Ingrid, I'm numb. I can't feel anything in my body. And your tendency is to think I'm doing it wrong. I go, you're noticing that you're numb. You are, feel the power of that. you're actually noticing that you're numb. You're not so numb that you can't even witness your experience.

You're actually witnessing it. So all of it is moving in a healthy, bold, and brave direction. And I say, hang out there. I love that. I love that. Okay, my last question is kind of a big one. I might be taking us down a rabbit hole. But how is fawning different or similar to codependency?

This is the best question. And to be honest, I want us to keep asking this question. I want this dialogue to be happening because in my experience and in my client's experience, they really see fawning as the gas for the codependency motor, right? It's sort of like codependency is the outward manifestation of this thing, but I think codependency has been so stigmatized and pathologized and sort of like, stop trying to control, what's wrong with you? You're just addicted to other people. The language around codependency, not just shames people. It blames them as though they and their faulty ways are the origins of this behavior. And for me, fawning places the origins of this behavior in necessity, in a system, right? So when you just look at codependency, you feel

dysfunctional. When you look at the roots of fawning, I think you go, oh my gosh, this was an adaptive response to a dysfunctional environment. That's been the piece that's missing for me. But there might be someone who comes along and says, well, here's an aspect of codependency that I don't think fits into this fawning lens and I'm 100% open to that. I haven't found it yet. I'll say that. I feel like so many light bulbs went off for me through the course of our conversation. I can't imagine I'm the only one. Thank you so much, Ingrid, for this conversation, for your very important work and for writing this incredible book so that we can all dive deeper. So listener, let me remind you, the book is called fawning. It's available on bookshop.org. Go to your local bookstore. Let's

keep them in business, wherever you get books. And if you want to learn more about Ingrid and her work, you can go to our website, ingridclayton.com. We'll put the links to everything and all the ways to find and follow Ingrid and show notes. Thank you again for being our guest. Thank you for having me. I loved this conversation. Me too. Oh my gosh. Okay. Friend, if you have ever apologized for something that wasn't your fault, have you ever walked on eggshells, stayed silent, bent over backwards, shrunk yourself down, or twisted yourself into a version of you that you don't even recognize anymore. This conversation wasn't just relevant. It was necessary. And I get it. Fawning helped us survive, but it will not help us thrive.

So maybe the real work, maybe woman's work, is not about proving how agreeable or acceptable or accommodating we can be. Maybe it's about showing up in our wholeness, being seen in our mess and in our power, and taking up space even when it feels risky. I hope you know this, but I'm going to say it just in case. Your needs matter just as much as anyone else's. Your voice matters even when it shakes. You don't need to earn your place. You already have one. This, all of this, is woman's work.