Why People-Pleasing Isn’t Kindness: Healing The Fawn Response With Dr Ingrid Clayton

In this episode of How To Be In This Body, we explore the fawn response as an adaptive survival strategy (not a character flaw) and trace a gentle path from self-abandonment back to self-contact. Dr. Ingrid Clayton, clinical psychologist and author, brings together clinical insight, lived experience, and practical tools for building internal safety and reducing shame.

Together, Ailey and Ingrid unpack how fawning develops, why danger can feel familiar, and how our bodies learn to prioritize connection over selfhood. This conversation offers compassion, language, and embodied understanding for anyone who has learned to appease in order to survive and who is ready to begin coming home to themselves.

In this episode:

• 0:00 – Embodiment And Show Welcome
• 1:47 – Meet Dr Ingrid Clayton
• 8:16 – Agency, Validation And Reclaiming Story
• 16:28 – The Missing Discourse On Fawning
• 20:26 – Codependency Versus Trauma Response
• 23:27 – How Fawning Feels In The Body
• 28:34 – From Self-Abandonment To Self-Contact
• 34:57 – Fawning In The Therapy Room 
• 41:34 – Trust Your Body’s Unique Path
• 44:27 – Everyday Practices For Regulation

You can read the transcript here

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Transcript

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Embodiment And Show Welcome

Ailey Jolie 0:49

Welcome to In This Body a podcast where we dive deep into the power of embodiment. I'm your host, Ailey Jolie, a psychotherapist deeply passionate about living life fully from wisdom within your very own body. The podcast In This Body is a love letter to embodiment, a podcast dedicated to asking important questions like how does connecting to your body change your life? How does connecting to your body enhance your capacity to love more deeply and live more authentically? And how can collective embodiment alter the course of our terror world? Join me for consciously curated conversations with leading experts. Each episode is intended to support you in reconnecting to your very own body. This podcast will be available for free wherever you get your podcast, making it easy for you to stay connected to In This Body, the podcast with me, Ailey Jolie. Welcome back to How to Be in This Body. I'm your host, Aile Jolie, and today I'm so delighted to be in conversation with Dr. Ingrid Clayton. Ingrid is a clinical psychologist and the author of Fawning, Why the Need to Please Makes Us Lose Ourselves, and How to Find Our Way Back. She's also the author of Believe Me, where she vulnerably shares her own story of healing from narcissistic

Meet Dr Ingrid Clayton

Ailey Jolie 2:08

abuse and complex trauma. Through her writing, teaching, and online presence, Ingrid has given language to patterns many of us have lived but couldn't quite name, especially the fond response. That survival strategy where we sacrifice our own needs and authenticity in order to maintain connection. What I love about Ingrid's work is that she bridges the personal and the professional. She's not just speaking as the clinician, but as someone who's lived these truths in her own life and in her own body too. And she invites us in this conversation and in all of her work to consider how survival responses that once kept us safe can also keep us small, disconnected, and far away from our truest desires and authenticity. Today we'll explore what fawning really is, how it shows up in the body and our relationships, and what it looks like to reclaim selfhood. My hope is that this conversation feels like a mirror, helping you notice the places you've abandoned yourself and also helping you reminding you of the possibility of coming home to yourself too. For the listener who is meeting you for the first time, I would love if you could share a little bit about your story and what led you to writing your most recent book, Fawning, but also the book that came before, because I know the two of them actually go together.

Dr. Ingrid Clayton 3:34

They do. Thank you so much. So yeah, Fawning just came out, but I could not have written the book Fawning if I didn't write my memoir, which is believing me, it's a memoir on complex trauma, but through a trauma therapist's hand. And the truth is, you know, I'm in my 50s now, and I am a clinical psychologist. I'm a trauma therapist, and I did not know that I was mired in complex trauma. And that's not because I didn't try, right? It's not because I wasn't seeking help and support my entire life, getting degrees and becoming a psychotherapist, but also doing a lot of therapy and reading all the books and going to the workshops. And essentially what happened is that my stepdad died. And when he died, I felt safer in the world than I'd ever felt before. But around the same time I became a mother, I think all of these things kind of converged, right? And I had a true calling to write my story, not in a you should sit down and write a memoir on complex trauma kind of a way, but in a I was literally being woken up in the middle of the night and I had to come sit exactly where I am right now. And just these scenes from my life as though they'd happened yesterday. Some I was 13, some I was in my 20s. I mean, they were different fragments from my entire life. They were just pouring out of me. And it peers into this process, really, that I could finally look at my own experience on the page and see how all of these things were hanging together. It was traumatic events, it was, you know, what was unprocessed trauma, what my trauma responses were. And I thought, oh my word, if I have all this information and I couldn't see these things for myself, how many people are walking around with a similar experience? So I decided to publish, self-publish my memoir. And it was the most healing and helpful thing I'd ever done, absolutely profound and honestly profound that I self-published. Because of course, you know, I'm a bit of an overachiever and I tried knocking on all the doors for agents. And really what I now know I was doing was seeking, once again, external validation to prove, you know, that I'm okay or my story matters. And when none of that worked out, I just said, you know what? Even if no one ever reads it, if this is for me, that's why I called it believing me, right? It's like, this is my story, this was real, it happened, and it's worth publishing. And so I did. And, you know, a couple of years and thousands and thousands of copies sold later, I had this amazing opportunity with Penguin Random House to write this book on fawning. So, like I already said, I could not have written fawning without the memoir. It sort of like, it just brought me into the nooks and crannies of the fawn response in a way that nothing else had. And then, of course, in the years since, bringing that same lens to my clients' experience and sort of mining their lived experience, it just it all got to come onto the page in what I hope is a really comprehensive exploration, not just of what we know clinically, but of what this thing looks and feels like. And my whole life has led up to my ability to be able to write. Oh, it's a good question. I mean, there's probably layers there, right? But the first one that comes to mind is this validation that my story was so much about turning to the people that I thought were meant to help me as a child and saying, this isn't right, something's going on. And at the end of the day, you know, that essentially is a healthy fight response, right? Trying to set boundaries, asking for help. And it was completely ignored, if not just steamrolled, you know, and I was told, well, you're being ridiculous, you're making it all up, you're being selfish. So it really kept me stuck in this sense of invalidation, right? So common for complex trauma survivors. It's like we need the people that hurt us or that harmed us to validate our pain, and they are either incapable or, you know, it's an impossible task. And yet we feel like we can't heal without that. And what the writing did is it restored my sense of agency. And I say restore, but it's actually what's more true is that I was given a sense of agency in a larger way than I had ever experienced my entire life, right? Took back all of that power that I'd still been endowing these people with. And I think that's why it was so powerful when my stepdad died, because it was just the final grain of sand, you know, dropping in the hourglass that was like he's really never going to admit it, you know. He went to his grave with his version of the story. And so this powerful feeling of nobody else gets to define or decide what happened to me. I know I'm a reliable reporter and I can believe in myself.

Agency, Validation And Reclaiming Story

Dr. Ingrid Clayton 8:37

I can trust myself. I think that that was the biggest fundamental piece. But the other thing is that when I saw all of these stories sort of hanging side by side, the connective tissue of my life started to make more sense in terms of the decades of unhealthy relationships. And it's not just romantic relationships, but even friendships and mentors. Like I saw my trauma reenactment more clearly than I had ever seen before, which was another aspect of me making sense to myself. Because if I could ground my experience in the lens and language of trauma, suddenly it's not just this behavioral problem or this cognitive problem. Not that I was even oriented that way as a therapist, but I think so much of what we get even in self-help is, you know, well, why wouldn't you just set a boundary or take care of yourself on these strategies that are geared towards behavioral change or cognitive understanding? And none of those things ever helped. So now I felt even more stuck. When I could see all of that connective tissue, it was like, of course I landed in all of those relationships and couldn't leave and couldn't break up with anyone and was left, you know, hoping and helping and waiting. It just really returned me to a sense of everything about me makes sense. I was never broken, right? That that thing that so many of us feel as complex trauma survivors. It's like I must be fundamentally broken. In what was a dysfunctional environment, right? I adapted to this dysfunctional environment. And it's such a, oh, it just, it honestly just makes me so mad that then we turn to trauma survivors and we make them the dysfunctional one.

Ailey Jolie 10:24

One of the things that's really stood out to me that I deeply appreciated as both a clinician, but just also as a human who's experienced trauma, has lived with complex VTSD. I did my little research on you. Actually speak about how people with complex post-traumatic stress disorder or people who've had interpersonal violence are likely to befriend the most dangerous person in the room, or to miss those cues, or want to have affinity to people that are harmful. And I would love to hear from you a little bit more about that phenomenon from a clinical lens, from a trauma therapist lens, because how I heard you articulate it was so different and so unique, but also so compassionate. And I think that it it has that compassionate angle because it's been a part of your own story in some ways and and and reconciling, like I'm not broken. This is actually a really adaptive response. And it's actually been really helpful. And I would love for you to just explore that for the listener because I think the more awareness that we can have around it, then we can kind of remove some of the shame and and bring more people into that place of deeply understanding, like even that is a deeply adaptive response.

Dr. Ingrid Clayton 11:34

Yes. Well, I will try to do it justice. Now I'm like, oh gosh, what did I say? Can I say it again? You know, I know that we are just as human beings hardwired for relationships. That's the sort of foundation. And as human beings, we are dependent on our queer givers longer than any other species, right? You think about the prefrontal cortex of the brain, doesn't even finish developing until in our mid-20s, right? We need the people, the queer givers, our parents, um, literally to survive. Okay. And the body will always privilege safety and survival over all else, which is also why these ideas about like, well, why don't you just do it differently? Well, because my body doesn't care about my opinion on the thing, right? My body cares about staying as safe as possible in what was for me unsafe situations. If I'm a child and I don't have any say, and I'm literally dependent on these people who are harming me, first of all, the fight response, not available. It's gonna make things worse, right? The flight response, where are you gonna go? Free is a very common response. And yet, fawn, this fourth response that hasn't had nearly enough uh discourse, allows us to lean in and even to participate in the very life that we have to live, right? We have to get out of bed, we have to go to school, we have to navigate all these situations. And yet, part of our ability to do that is by looking at these unsight people. And when lack of safety, as we know, can present a lot of different ways. It could be abandonment or neglect. So someone literally isn't there. And in this case, my fond response is like, I need to help you, I need to endow you with all of these resources that you probably don't even possess, but I need to believe that you do or that you can, right? So that hopefully I can pull you back online and then maybe you can be there for me too. The other side is when the abuse is more overt and it's coming for you, and it's like you're about to be enrolled, and the body goes, Hi, remember me? I'm a person, right? We lean into like who do you need me to be so that I can hopefully lessen the harm just a little bit. But in both of these equations, here's what's happening. I'm literally leaving my body, and I'm so hyper attuned to your body and what you need, even though it looks very different, in the hope that in the end, uh, maybe I'll stay a little bit safer. So this is why the theme that is present in every sign and symptom of pawning, it's so heartbreaking, but it's true, is self-abandonment. Not that we want to self-abandon, but because all of our energy and agency and capacity has to go towards managing these other people in the hope that they will keep me safe. Okay, so think about it. These things are happening for me day in, day out in childhood, while my brain and body are developing. I don't know where I end and fawning begins. A lot of us go, this is just my personality, right? It's just the way that it's always been. Or we've been taught, we've been encouraged. Like fawning is absolutely applauded. It looks like success, it looks like the being a good girl, obviously that we're told to do. So we go out into the world then, and this was the interesting piece about seeing my story, the different aspects of it kind of hanging together. Because I would be like, well, then why was I always interested in these either unavailable or actively abusive partners? It made no sense to me. My entire sense of safety in the world developed within this blueprint, within this pattern. Okay, so in other words, I felt safest when I was being neglected or exploited. It was my body's only sense of safety. Safety is not theoretical, it's experiential. So when I go, oh my word, no wonder when I go out into the world and my body senses these building blocks to that same pattern, right? And it goes, I get a do-over, I'm gonna figure it out this time, right? Simple survival of the fittest. I jumped right in. Only all this time later, and reprocessing my trauma later, do I know that the do-over, so to speak, means I don't jump in, but I can now see the red flags for what they are, see the cues and go, oh, I need to walk away. Impossible before. It was utterly impossible.

Ailey Jolie 16:18

Why do you think or imagine or even know the the response of fawning has been so neglected in how we speak about trauma? My mind goes from a very gendered biased place of like it's kind of inherent in female socialization. And so, you know, my mind makes a story of like maybe that's why it's been so biased and and so absent. But I would love to hear from you because you have a whole book on fawning where you do explore some of this. Why you you know or you imagine it it

The Missing Discourse On Fawning

Ailey Jolie 16:49

hasn't made the it into the discourse and how we speak about trauma and trauma responses.

Dr. Ingrid Clayton 16:53

Yes. I think that patriarchy is a big one, and and we'll get to that. But I also think that it presents so differently from the other trauma responses. The other trauma responses is if you're fighting back, it's obvious that you don't want this situation, right? If you're running, it's like it's obvious. Fawning has us leaning in, it's hiding in plain sight as a trauma response. And here's the thing we don't just convince the other people, right, that we're on their side or whatever it is, if we're appeasing, that we're genuinely interested. And now I'm flirting with you, ha ha ha. I think you're disgusting, but I'm gonna flirt with you. We don't just convince that person that we're flirting with them. We sometimes convince ourselves, right? So talk about hiding in plain sight. This again is part of that self-abandonment thing that happened physiologically. There's a lot of reasons why hiding in plain sight, right? I might not even know, which was true. I didn't know that this was a part of my makeup. All my clients are like, Ingrid, I just thought I was being nice, right? Give them this lens and language, and suddenly they go, Oh, right, being nice means that I want to do these things, not that I don't have a choice. And so that's the physiological piece of it, the underpinnings. But on top of that, not only in patriarchy, but in a million other systems of power, fawning is taught and it's encouraged and it's expected. And, you know, you think about language like code switching, and you go, oh, well, I know why people do that, right? In different environments where they don't feel safe, they kind of morph into that shape-shifting thing that they need to be. Or you think about masking with the neurodivergent community, you go, well, yeah, that makes sense to me. Fawning is similar, and in fact, I think it encompasses a lot of that. But we've historically talked about these behaviors like people pleasing or codependency again. And we've talked about these things either in people pleasing or codependency as though we have more conscious agency over them. And it's kept from doing the trauma-focused work that enables you to tap into what's really going on physiologically. And the reality is, just like the rest of the responses, it's not like you're never going to fawn again. There are absolutely situations and systems where I'm grateful that I have a fawn response, right? If you're in a toxic workplace, but guess what? You need your paycheck to survive. Your body's probably gonna fawn to that boss, right? I think looking at the systems piece that went missing in the people-pleasing and codependency discourse for me anyway, it's another reason of the why fawning makes sense and how we could see that these things were not just applauded, but absolutely expected. You're just meeting expectations.

Ailey Jolie 20:01

Why do you think codependency has been framed as more of an autonomous choice and not framed in such an unconscious way? Like when we reference codependency, we often think of it as more of like this is how I'm choosing to relate or this is how I've been taught to relate, and less of an adaptive response that's held, like in kind of the sticky unconscious or in the implicit kind of realm of the body. And I would love to hear from you, and maybe this ties into the piece around patriarchy. But if you have any ideas as to why, why we do have that assumption.

Dr. Ingrid Clayton 20:32

Yeah. Well, first of all, I will say I know that some people have sort of grown up the term over time and they've applied their own trauma informed lens. But from where I was Sitting, you know, old school, codependent no more. None of that trickled

Codependency Versus Trauma Response

Dr. Ingrid Clayton 20:47

down to me. I think that if you look at even the period of time that the term itself, it was in response to chemical dependency and framed then in that the same disease model, right? And so this idea that you are sick, right? You are broken, and if you do things differently, you won't be anymore. These things were becoming illuminated sort of alongside the trauma movement, alongside, you know, Dr. Judith Herman and Janina Fisher and Becalisander Cook, all these people sort of trying to bring this attention, but they weren't in conversation. They weren't in direct conversation. So mostly I think that codependency was a great attempt to name something that was real, right? It's why that book sold whatever millions of copies. But at the same time, you know, I think it deeply shamed and stigmatized, to your point, from a patriarchal lens, it kind of shamed what is just actual caregiving that people are expecting, right? Carry the mental load, like you absolutely have to maintain and manage your family. But, you know, don't overdo it and don't over-identify with that role, but do all the things along the way, right? So, but it also couched them in these notions of control, which I just go, God, none of my clients have an addiction to the control. None of them were even aiming to please or caretake. They were all looking to stay safe. It's why people like the language of codependency. I go, Great, I'm not going to take it from you, but let's just add this fawning as the heartbeat, the engine underneath. And then I think you bail yourself of a lot of that literature, and it won't maybe be so shaming. But that's my take.

Ailey Jolie 22:35

I would love to hear from you about how fawning lives in the body, and meaning like in the posture or breath or some of the nervous system states. Because this piece often isn't spoken about and there isn't a lot of knowledge around it, but it does have a specific kind of embodied felt sense or presence when we are fawning. And I would love to hear from you a little bit more about that piece.

Dr. Ingrid Clayton 22:58

It's a hard question to answer for a couple of reasons. One is that fawning is so context dependent. I talked about the different sides of the coin. It can look really different. You know, also personality-wise, it can look really different. But what we do know at the heart of it is that fawning is this hybrid trauma response. And we spoke about this a little bit, but maybe it bears repeating that one side of the equation is that hyper-arousal. It's what shows up in fight or flight. It's that adrenalized heartbeat racing, right? But what this looks like for fauners is the hypervigilance, right? It's that over-attunement to the environment. We're scanning the horizon. And the interesting thing for me is that most fauners are very anxious for

How Fawning Feels In The Body

Dr. Ingrid Clayton 23:48

this reason, but we don't know we're anxious because we're so not in our own body. We're so attuned to yours, right? We can see if you're anxious, but we don't know how doing that makes us perpetually anxious, right? So one side is that fight-flight energy. The other side is the hypo arousal, the dissociation, the disconnection from self. So as I sort of see it, these two are constantly in play, these two sides, where sometimes someone is so wholly dissociated they actually believe, no, this person is the love of my life. There's no problem here at all. Sometimes it's like me with my stepdad, where I go, I know I do not like you at all, but I need you to like me. So there can be a bit more of a feeling of conscious awareness of the incongruence, anyway, of how bad it feels, right? There's this sense that I kind of know that I'm betraying my larger values and goals here. And yet I don't have a choice, right? We feel that line, which is also why there can be quite a bit of anxiety. But in terms of the presentations, I mean, I think one of the common signs is that we play small and that can look like being physically smaller, it's sort of like, or almost like you could disappear in an environment. I think that's a really common presentation because then everybody else's needs and opinions that it can matter more, right? But the other side of that is for some people, that it's not that they experience less of themselves, but there are parts of themselves, particularly the likable ones, the helpful ones, maybe the attractive ones. They get really big. I can run circles around whatever you give me. I'm gonna over-function, over-volunteer, I'm gonna have everyone in stitches, right? There's this need to sort of, there's a performance that's happening. And it might be related to genuine aspects of who they are, but it's like they're, you know, on steroids, kind of. And again, there's that feeling that it's not a choice. Like, what would happen if that person, the big person, sort of was less of themselves. In my mind, there's like a nervous feeling that comes up in my body that's like, oh no, no, no, you can't, you can't do that, right?

Ailey Jolie 26:05

You go really into the nuance there of how it can show up so differently, depending on the context and the relationship. But one thing that kept going through my mind was actually something you said earlier around, which is this piece of self-abandonment. Like we know we're in a fawning place when we have lost access to our body. Or that can be one of the first cues of like, am I actually still here? Am I am I actually in an interdependent relationship? Am I interpersonally connecting? Or am I in my adaptive response that I've learned through my history I need to do to stay safe? Or is just familiar to me? This is how I just kind of go about in connection because of my history. So that was the piece that really came to my mind was the piece around self-abandonment. And I would love to hear from you different ways. There are obviously many, so I won't get into all of them, but how does early relational trauma or even relational trauma later in life lead to self-abandonment or this response of fawning?

Dr. Ingrid Clayton 27:01

I think it's such a common response to relational trauma for all of the reasons that we've mentioned. And so, yes, in childhood, but also in any relationship where you're disempowered, right? So again, if you think about even the hierarchy of trauma responses, I think a lot of what we talk about in mental health has been this idea that we'll just have a voice. Like, why would you care what people think about you? All these ideas are based on privilege, as though all of us are at the top of the food chain, right? And so often I kind of put this back in the animal kingdom because it seems so obvious. Like the lion is the king of the jungle. He can have access to a fight response, right? He can yell, he can set boundaries, get off my territory, no problem. We're not all lions, okay? I'm probably more like a mere cat. And so my body knows that when I'm out in the world. And when it feels a sense of threat, it's not going to pretend to be a lion. I'm going to be very hurt if I do that. There's this experience in a nanosecond, the body decides the response that it feels is going to keep you safest in the moment. And then it remembers what worked before, right? And in my case, in in ongoing, prolonged situations of threat, the body goes, I'm never gonna let her go without this fawn response. I'm gonna be 10 steps ahead, even when no danger is present, just in case. And to me, this is the trickiest thing because yes, I want us all to have access to all our trauma responses. You know, they are life-saving, they are for our benefit. None of us are meant to live in a chronic trauma response 24-7. But this is what happens. This is what happens when you've experienced a prolonged experience of needing to stay defended, is the body goes, uh-uh-uh. And now it loses

From Self-Abandonment To Self-Contact

Dr. Ingrid Clayton 28:55

the ability to discern. I'm sure you get this in your practice all the time, but I hear this question that's related to like, but Ingrid, how do I know if I'm really in danger now or if this is just a trigger from my past? The way we start to know is by enlarging our capacity as we start to come back into self and we build this internal safety for the first time. Part of that means tolerating some discomfort that I've been avoiding. And only when we start to do that will I know experientially this is really uncomfortable, but it's not dangerous, right? Those alarm bells will stop going off at any slight hint of discomfort. And it's what can restore us to that sort of more flexible experience of moving in and out of stress response and back into a more regulated place. I think it's important, regardless of the tool, that you start with relationship to self, you start with eternal safety first. When we move into being relational too quickly with this work, the chances are it's not going to go perfect and your body's gonna go, see, I told you it wasn't safe. You will never do that again. We start really slow and not in your trickiest relationships or not even with conflict at all. You start with just what am I experiencing right now? In the maybe in the safety of my home, or as I'm walk taking a walk by myself down the street, as maybe I'm orienting with my senses to the environment and giving my body this experience of time and place. And I think some people are like really ingrid, it doesn't have the flashy magic wand kind of a feeling, but that's by design. Start small and we start slow so that the body can start to build. Oh, what am I noticing right now? And even if what you notice is I feel numb, I go, wow, what's it like to notice numb? Where do you notice it? Is it a global numb or is it mostly numb in your gut, right? Starting to turning it back towards yourself, taking this deep, deep empathy and curiosity that we've always brought to everyone else's life, turning that back on ourselves and getting curious and empathic, self-compassion, these are the building blocks. No matter I think what trauma or therapy you're in or what modality you're curious about. This to me is foundational work that really sparts for build from an experiential place what it feels like to be safe in your own skin, even if it's moment, moment, moment at time.

Ailey Jolie 31:34

I loved how you named how almost simple it is, but how challenging that simplicity can really, really be, especially when we're getting into contact with the body, and the body has been like a place that hasn't been safe, or we've had to abandon it to actually stay in relationship. And I know that some of these dynamics that we've spoken about in regards to fawning can play out in therapy. That I definitely have been a client in my own history who totally self-abandoned their own experience, narratives, trauma, and all of the things because they really wanted to be liked by the therapist and they thought the therapist had all the answers, and so they they went into their full fawning mode. And I would love to hear from you how you can recognize that in yourself as a client and how you as a clinician challenge and start to, or as much as you can, create a space where that fawning response starts to learn that it doesn't have to happen in that space or it isn't necessary.

Dr. Ingrid Clayton 32:31

Such an important question, and it's so common. If you have any piece of you that is oriented towards fawning, you're gonna do it in therapy, right? And I would say, how do you know? Ask yourself these questions. Do I want to be my therapist's favorite? Right? Am I waiting for the gold star? Like when they ask me a question, can I genuinely answer? Or am I noticing that I'm tucking stuff under the rug and presenting with something that feels a little less shameful? But honestly, here's my biggest belief. And this is why, even on social media and in my writing, I go first. Because as a therapist, I'm aware that I maintain another hierarchy in this relationship. I'm the experts and I have the answer, and that is ripe for a person with a fond response to go, well, then I need to do whatever you think I need to do, right? They're self-disclosing all over again in the name of wellness. I do not want to perpetuate that. And yet we do, right? So I lean in and I go first. This is why I am okay with self-disclosure. Um, it's why I say, I might even tell a client, you know, I've had a therapist ask me to do something and I closed my eyes and I sat there thinking, how long do I have to do this so that they know that I tried, right? This is where my fond response is useful as a therapist because I'll notice the thing a client might be experiencing when they don't even know. But I can be curious about it and go, oh, I noticed that you were just holding your breath there. It makes me wonder if something even came up in our relationship. I'm curious how that thing landed. I have to give a lot of space for them to be able to say, I don't like what you said, that didn't work for me, I'm not interested in that intervention or whatever it is, right? We have to go first. I think that's crucial in relational trauma. We're trying to invite people into maybe the first reciprocal, respectful relation of their lives. I can't leave my humanity on the other side of the door, or I'm asking them to do the same.

Ailey Jolie 34:33

Oh, has the inclusion of self-disclosure maybe changed how you show up as a clinician? Because I'm assuming, and you'll correct me if I'm wrong, that there was maybe a time when you didn't use self-disclosure.

Dr. Ingrid Clayton 34:44

I think I have always to a point because I come from a sobriety background where relating through personal experience was so fundamental that it's always been in there. But I was not self-disclosing about complex trauma or the fawn response or any of these things because I wasn't aware of it yet. So what I'm self-disclosing only based on my own ability to see it has changed over time. Although I did self-disclose, what I didn't do as well because I was in my own

Fawning In The Therapy Room

Dr. Ingrid Clayton 35:18

chronic fawn response is I believed that to be a good therapist meant I had to have all the answers, have that sort of expert hat on too, and that I was failing if I didn't know, right? And so that makes me sad to think about me as an early clinician, you know, earnestly doing her best, but at the same time not knowing that it was my not knowing that maybe would have been the most helpful in the moment. And I'm more comfortable with that now. In fact, there's not much that I do know. What my body tells me now is that all of the wisdom resides in my client's body. And my whole job is to try and, you know, encourage a situation where they're able to connect to it more deeply. And often, even when I think I know a thing, I'm wrong. It's sort of very analytical and it might feel kind of like smart and sexy, but you know, the body's wisdom is beyond. So I wish that I had known that a lot earlier in my career.

Ailey Jolie 36:19

What else do you maybe wish that the listener or others knew about their body that you wish you had known earlier?

Dr. Ingrid Clayton 36:27

Oh man, what I typically say to this answer is that you make sense, but I think that's true. But what I also want to offer in this conversation is your body knows what it needs to heal. And it might be so unique and personal to you, your path might not look like anyone else's has ever looked. That after I did all these traditional things, right? It was really when I sat down and I was called to write my memoir that my life changed. So that's not to say, well, everyone should go write a memoir, because I don't think that they should. But if you have a calling, if you have a nudge, if you have a memory of something maybe from your childhood where you go, gosh, I really loved that thing and it made me feel so connected to myself or joyful, lean in to the nudge. I 100% of the time you're going to lead to the next day and the next day. And this is your path, right? And it tends to come from this more embodied place, not like the I think that I should do this because so and so did it, or it sounds like it next right step. Tune to your body and listen.

Ailey Jolie 37:39

What are some practices that you have maybe had in your life or that you've guided clients into to start to create that place? Because what I heard there was this beautiful answer of like the unfolding coming from within. But I know from my own experience, it can be so hard to create that initial relationship where you're like actually can be in the unfolding. And I would love to hear from you a little bit around how someone does that if trauma or complex trauma has been a part of their experience or fawning has been as well.

Dr. Ingrid Clayton 38:10

Yes, but that's also why I included seven clients in this book. But I really turned to my practice and I have seven people from such a diverse set of backgrounds and experiences and length of time working together because I wanted to show as many possibilities in this book. But it tends to involve for a lot of folks taking some personal space, right? Like disconnecting from the things that trigger you and keep you in that hyperattunement. So that might be sitting in the car for 10 minutes before you go in the house at night and just noticing what it feels like to sit on the seat, see if the seat can support you a little bit more. It might be going away for the weekend. You know, I love taking walks, just the gentle bilateral stimulation, right, left rhythmic patterns that we use in ENDR therapy. You can sort of see what it's like to sway or dance or listen to music. Invite the senses into the equaven. The senses are the language of the nervous system. What kind of sense do you want to bring into your home? Like I have one client who lays on one of those prana mats with all of the spiky things. Like he loves it. I would hate that, right? It's about finding regulation, it's about finding attunement in these really small and accessible ways. Singing with the top of your lungs or humming could be meditation. Um, be curious what you're drawn to and do that. And then trust your body when it gives you feedback. If you're like, oh, I hate this, or like, I'm not a meditator. When I try to meditate with my eyes closed, my whole body goes into this like vortex where I get so dizzy. And yet for a long time I did that thing where we go, I'm just not trying hard enough, or maybe I need to do it longer. And it's like, no, meditating with my eyes closed is not for me. I'm gonna go for a walk. And then that becomes the thing that works.

Ailey Jolie 40:09

What are some of the building blocks in your perspective to building a trusting relationship with the body?

Dr. Ingrid Clayton 40:16

Honestly, I think this psychoeducation is like half of the job. Is that I think we've been sold a bill of good in a million different ways. And we're just orienting to a new story about your body was always genius. Like you can trust it from the zigwinning of time. You might be disconnected now in a way that you're still, you know, you're wanting to sort of come back more. incongruent, but that does not mean that you couldn't trust the wisdom of your body all along. So I really think this educational piece is a huge bridge to self-trust. And it reduces the shame, right? Because with the shame spiral that we're living in. So I can't do any of these things if my body's telling me like my my experience is like, no, you're broken. You don't have access to that. So the education allows us to reduce the shame. And when the shame is dissipated enough, then I can step into and try some of these things. Yeah. So that's what I would say.

Ailey Jolie 41:18

What do you feel like really helps someone move through shame?

Dr. Ingrid Clayton 41:21

It's not all this cognitive process, but it's certainly what's coming to mind in the moment. When I think about all the shame that I carried about how I thought, gosh, I've tried all these things and I'm so broken. Firstly what happened to me was traumatic. Right? That these events, these wounds, they are deeply painful because they tend to be related to your worth, right? The people that were meant to love me the most are the ones that hurt me, right? It's like the deepest wounds. And so boom, there's this layer of shame. And then when maybe we try to ask for help or we try to do things

Trust Your Body’s Unique Path

Dr. Ingrid Clayton 41:55

differently and we're told you're being ridiculous and you're selfish and you made it all up, boy oh boy, it just deepens the shame again. And then thirdly our trauma responses where now I know I'm being a bit incongruent because I'm privileging your view of me over my view of me, it deepens the shame even more, right? So it becomes this prison. But when I understand oh that was trauma worth was the wound they called me a liar of course I had to respond to that. It's like connecting these thoughts in such a different way. There's nothing to be ashamed of at all.

Ailey Jolie 42:32

I make sense I really appreciate that you have named the cognitive and also in your prior answer kind of name the role of psychoeducation because so often I'll have clients a lot of time come and they'll want somatics and they won't want to talk and they're not interested in the story. And I have to do that peaceable if we actually don't know the narrative if the psychoeducation isn't there then we're so likely to kind of fall back into this catharsis place or just kind of bring the nervous system back into this state without any real repair or reprocessing work. And so for me and how I perceive things the psychoeducation and more of those cognitive pieces are actually so important for us to understand and for us to know so we can move through the shame and really have a different experience and start to move out of that fawning response. I would love before you leave us today if you had one last thing that you wanted to leave the listener with about fawning, what do you hope that they remember?

Dr. Ingrid Clayton 43:33

I'm trying to think if there was anything new because we covered so many pieces of it already. I hope you know that your body was hardwired to protect you in this very specific way. And we are not meant to live in a trauma response 24-7. So in between these two poles is a new place that's very possible, right? Where you don't have to fawn all the time and yet you can still have it as a protector that that's real. I believe everyone can have access to it. And I'm so sorry that for so long we were sold the spill of goods that we were broken and dysfunctional and all we were doing was prioritizing survival.

Ailey Jolie 44:16

It's a really beautiful ending point for our time together today. Thank you so much for your time but also all the time that you invested in yourself and the relationship with yourself to write both your memoir and this book fawning. I loved hearing about the story of how the two came together is really beautiful and I deeply encourage the listener to pick up both and give them both a read. Do you have anything upcoming that you would like the listener to know about before we leave you for today no specific events on the books.

Dr. Ingrid Clayton 44:47

If you find

Everyday Practices For Regulation

Dr. Ingrid Clayton 44:48

me on Substack I have an ongoing newsletter there and all the other social media places come be in community with me there. I'm not taking new clients unfortunately but I'm very happy to be in community in these other ways. So let's continue the conversation.

Ailey Jolie 45:03

Beautiful thank you so much. If you found value in this episode it would mean so much to me for you to share the podcast with friends, a loved one or on your social platform. If you have the time please rate and review the podcast so that this podcast reaches a larger audience and can inspire more and more humans to connect to their bodies too. Thank you for being here and nurturing the relationship you have with your very own body