The strange psychology behind fawning

If you have ever found yourself dealing with a threatening person, and instead of fleeing them, you flattered – that’s called fawning. Psychologist Ingrid Clayton on the psychology behind this self-preservation strategy.

Ingrid Clayton, author, clinical psychologist, trauma therapist, and complex trauma survivor who specializes in addiction and trauma treatment. Author of "Fawning: Why the Need to Please Makes Us Lose Ourselves – and How to Find Our Way Back."

Part I

MEGHNA CHAKRABARTI: On August 26th, President Donald Trump held a cabinet meeting at the White House. It was more than three hours long. Its entirety was broadcast live, the longest ever televised cabinet meeting in presidential history. Americans who watched it witnessed each and every member of the cabinet update the president on their departments and agencies.

But before they did that, they each began with something like this.

KRISTI NOEM: Mr. President, first of all, thank you for the opportunity to work for you.

CHAKRABARTI: That is U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem.

NOEM: You made this country safe. You opened up the economy. You enforce the law. Now people can get up and provide for their families and go to work every day and be confident in that.

CHAKRABARTI: U.S. Director of National Intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, began her comments this way.

TULSI GABBARD: This is just such a great opportunity really to recognize your leadership as a true champion for working people. And I know we'll hear as we go around the table here, how your focus singularly on putting the wellbeing and interest of the American people first, is that common thread that we're seeing in your policies being implemented across your administration.

CHAKRABARTI: Then came Lori Chavez-DeRemer, the U.S. Secretary of Labor.

LORI CHAVEZ-DeREMER: Mr. President, I invite you to see your big, beautiful face on a banner in front of the Department of Labor because you are really the transformational president of the American worker along with the American flag and President Roosevelt. Because we're bringing business and labor together, and I was so honored to unveil that yesterday, and everybody is taking note of that.

CHAKRABARTI: And here's Kelly Loeffler, small business administrator.

KELLY LOEFFLER: Everyone knows there's no stronger advocate for hardworking American families than you, sir. Thank you for the largest tax cut in American history for working families.

CHAKRABARTI: Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins took the praise in a different direction.

BROOKE ROLLINS: Thank you for saving college football. By the way, we're all very grateful.

CHAKRABARTI: By the way, Rollins is talking about a recent presidential executive order aimed at addressing changes to name, image, and likeness compensation for college sports. The EO also protects non-revenue generating and women's sports as well.

But then Rollins continued. Elevating the President into the pantheon of America's greatest leaders.

ROLLINS: At this moment in time, which I do believe we're in a revolution. 1776 was the first one. 1863 or so with Abraham Lincoln was the second. This is the third with Donald Trump leading the way, and we are saving America.

CHAKRABARTI: Jamieson Greer filtered his praise through his perspective as the U.S. trade representative.

JAMIESON GREER: One of the major reasons why American workers and organized labor voted for you is because of your trade policy and the policies you've had and advocated for 40 years or more. You have reset global trade policy in the past few months, and it shows that it's been working for American workers.

CHAKRABARTI: Scott Bessent, Secretary of the Treasury, added this.

SCOTT BESSENT: As we've said very often, economic security is national security, and our country has never been so secure. Thanks to you. You have brought us back from the edge. You have the overwhelming mandate from the American people. You're restoring competence in government.

CHAKRABARTI: Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth went on at length describing his adoration for the commander in chief.

PETE HEGSETH: From the troops directly, which they ask me to say all the time. Thank you for your leadership, for your boldness, for your clarity, for common sense, for providing a shield for the rest of us to put America first and to apply peace through strength.

We're in the strength business. That's our job, to stand behind everybody here and alongside John in everything they do to keep the country safe.

CHAKRABARTI: And here is U.S. special envoy to the Middle East Steve Witkoff seemingly aiming to outdo every other cabinet member at the table.

STEVE WITKOF: And there's only one thing I wish for, that Nobel Committee finally gets its act together and realizes that you are the single finest candidate since the Nobel Peace, this Nobel Award was ever talked about to receive that reward. Beyond your success is game changing out in the world today. And I hope everybody one day wakes up and realizes that. 

CHAKRABARTI: Cabinet meeting August 26th. Joining me now is Ingrid Clayton Ingrid, welcome to the show. And let me say, first of all, this is not an exaggeration. Every single cabinet member did begin their remarks to the president in that way. What do you hear in those clips?

INGRID CLAYTON: Yes. Thank you for having me on, Meghna.

And what I hear is what is common in any system of power, when your job, your livelihood, your sense of community really lies in someone else's hands. There is a real consequence for not fawning. There's a lot to lose. Voicing dissent comes with consequences and we certainly see a lot of examples of that. So although my work originates in the family system, you can absolutely move that out and look at a relational trauma response in relationship to any system where there are hierarchies, where your body knows instinctively where it resides in the pecking order and who holds the most power.

CHAKRABARTI: Interesting. Okay, so Ingrid is a clinical psychologist, a trauma therapist, and most recently the author of the new book "Fawning: Why the Need to Please Makes Us Lose Ourselves – and How to Find Our Way Back." Ingrid, you said this phrase, the relational trauma response. That may be something that's going on in some of these cabinet members.

I cannot pretend to know. Others of them are true believers. And absolutely are ardent supporters of the president and genuinely think that he's maybe one of the greatest Americans to live of all time. But when it comes to the kind of fawning that you have written about in your book, how would you describe it?

How would we recognize it?

CLAYTON: Fawning is prioritizing, privileging someone else's needs over your own in order to have a sense of relational safety. So to your point, I also cannot tell if any of those comments are originating from a fond response, but the truth is that they certainly could. The thing that allows us to know is that we feel like we have to say those things in order to preserve our sense of safety.

We don't feel like we have a choice, in other words.

CHAKRABARTI: I will, we'll move past this cabinet meeting in just a second, Ingrid, but it was so striking to me. ... Look, as we all know, cabinet members definitely praise the presidents they're working for.

As you said, in a hierarchical structure with such profound power differentials, that is par for the course. And they stand by the president in terms of defending policy, et cetera. This seemed category different though. Simply because it wasn't just, I support the president.

It's a privilege to work with him. That's common. It was, you are saving the American people. You are the greatest of all time. I am proud to have a giant flag of your face hanging outside of my agency. This seemed a step beyond what is traditional when it comes to, again, the sort of power dynamics in an American White House.

Does it seem categorically different to you? Or is it just sort of me?

CLAYTON: No, I would agree with you. Yeah. I think there's also a sense of perhaps some unpredictability that invites even more of a fawning tendency, that you really have to lean in hard with the alliance in order to preserve it.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay, so then coming back to what you've clinically described as fawning, like in more concrete terms, what are some of the symptoms that we recognize as fawning behavior?

CLAYTON: It can present differently depending on the context. So on one hand it looks like the appeasement that we heard in some of those clips, it's a flattering or a flirting. A lot of praise. On the other hand, when the power dynamic is such that you need someone and they are neglectful or absent, it can really look like caretaking.

Doing all the emotional labor, soaking all of that up in the relationship, and the hope that if you help enough, if you hope enough, if you wait long enough, you will be able to help that person stand so that they can eventually show up for you.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay. In your book, you describe the symptoms in even more detail, and stop me if any of these are not accurate, but some of the symptoms include apologizing to people who have actually hurt you. Befriending bullies. We'll come back to that one. That's really interesting.

One, ignoring other people's bad behavior. Obsessing about saying the right thing. Even if there is no right thing to say, and making yourself into someone you're not while seeking approval that may never come. I think all of these things are quite familiar to people when laid out that way.

CLAYTON: Yeah, that covers a lot of it. There's a real conflict avoidance, we shapeshift to fit the situation, but I think what's important is to put this back in the context of what we know about trauma responses generally. So if we think about fight, flight, and freeze, a lot of my work in relational trauma is synonymous with childhood trauma, developmental trauma.

So you think about a fight response, someone who is disempowered or a child, in this case, they can't fight back, right? We need our caregivers longer than probably any other species, literally to survive. Similarly, the flight response, where are they going to run? They're probably going to be right back, brought right back to the scene of the crime.

So fawning is this really adaptive response that allows you to navigate the environments that you are in. It might be the last house on the block, so to speak, but we still have to recognize it as preserving a sense of safety and self. That is the motivation. Yes, there is a cost, but we're not thinking about abandoning our larger values or sense of self.

Fawning is this really adaptive response that allows you to navigate the environments that you are in.

We're oriented towards the safety. We're oriented towards minimizing the threat.

Part II

CHAKRABARTI: Ingrid, I hope you don't mind me asking, but I'm wondering if you could tell us the story that you actually begin the book with. About your personal experience in your own young life that led you down the road of wanting to understand this fawning response even more.

CLAYTON: Sure. Yeah. I've spent decades essentially trying to crawl out from something I couldn't really understand, and all of the language that we have historically ascribed to these types of behaviors never really seem to allow me to make sense to myself, whether that was people pleasing or codependency. Those ideas seemed to plant this dysfunction in me, arising out of nowhere for no reason, perhaps a real desire to control or care take.

And that was certainly not what it felt like in my body. It was not where I was coming from. And so looking back on my childhood, growing up in an actively alcoholic home with a stepfather who was volatile and unpredictable. Those types of episodes were common, running to your room when you hear the tires coming down the driveway.

But there was an incident when I was about 13 years old. I was sitting in the hot tub by myself at our house when my stepdad came to join me, and it was the first time that I felt a real sense of threat, when he wasn't yelling or raging. He was seemingly being very kind and nice. And initially I thought, oh, he's extending an olive branch.

Maybe he wants to be friends. And it was a relief. But ultimately what I came to know many decades later is that sense of threat that I felt in that moment was because he was grooming me. And that he had a history of doing so. And if I could witness it from outside my body, I knew in that moment I did not like him, and that my entire life was in his hands.

I needed him to like me, and so my voice, although terrified, stayed very neutral. What do you mean? And why would you say such a thing? And I lingered long enough to feel like he wouldn't think I was abruptly running away or getting out. And ultimately what I was feeling was terror.

So this pattern that so many of us sadly have had to live in day out, sort of breakfast to bedtime, the sense that I am not safe, but this is my home. I need these people. It creates what can become this fixed, chronic pattern over time. That the fawn response was acting as me in the world, ultimately well into adulthood.

Whether I felt a sense of threat or not, right? Because ultimately the body says, I'm never going to let that happen again. It's, I'm this protector. I'm going to be 10 steps out ahead of you. And so I was repeating these patterns and subsequent relationships with partners, with friends, with mentors, you name it, at work, right?

And I couldn't stop, and all of the language of, just set a healthy boundary, right? Like, why would you care what anybody thinks of you? You're so great. It all sounds rational. And I go, yeah why would I care what anyone thinks of me? And yet understanding fawning as a trauma response puts the roots of these behaviors in my body, in my nervous system, to your point, unconscious reflexes. And from that perspective, it's not a conscious choice.

So giving me conscious behavioral tools to a problem that does not reside in that part of my brain, of course, I was stuck. And secondly the trauma response lends in language puts these behaviors back into context.

They originated for a reason. In fact, I am not dysfunctional. I was adapting to responding to a deeply dysfunctional environment, and I'm grateful for it, right? I'm so glad that I had a fawn response that came online when I needed it. And none of us are meant to live in survival mode 24/7, right?

At a certain point it absolutely does become maladaptive, but I think the other tricky thing, if you set it next to fight, flight, and freeze is those all look like obvious trauma responses. Right? You're fighting back. I don't want this thing to happen. I'm running away. With fawning, it's essentially hiding in plain sight. Because we are leaning into the very relationships that are causing us harm.

And for many of us, if you think about a patriarchal society, or racism and classism and all these things, culturally, many of us have been taught to fawn. It's encouraged, it's applauded, it seemed like being a team player, so I think that's one of the reasons why this one has gone missing for so long in the discourse.

With fawning, it's essentially hiding in plain sight. Because we are leaning into the very relationships that are causing us harm.

CHAKRABARTI: Before we go any further, Ingrid, I hope you don't mind me saying that I am so sorry that happened to you.

CLAYTON: Oh, that's very kind.

Thank you.

CHAKRABARTI: Because I can only barely begin to imagine the terror that you were feeling. Because when I read, you know, that beginning portion of the book I felt some kind, just even at a remove, at a reader's remove, I felt terror filled. As well, just the way you describe what happened and so I cannot imagine what that would have been like for a 13-year-old, especially given that he was your stepfather.

It's not someone that you could actually flee from.

CLAYTON: That's right.

CHAKRABARTI: Under any circumstances. So I'm very sorry that happened to you. But as you said, it did give you silver linings, it gave you this insight into this not adequately researched aspect of trauma response. To your point about, it hasn't really been recognized, because it looks like something else. You keep saying that it's an unconscious, fawning is an unconscious response. How do we know that? Have we been able to measure that in the brain? Is it activating similar neural pathways that are activated when someone immediately has that fight or flight response.

Is there any sort of neurological connection here?

CLAYTON: Yeah, we definitely need to do more research. I think fawning is still pretty new to the scene, and most of my work is really grounded in lived experience and the prevailing theories that we have now, which is that fawning is a hybrid trauma response, and that one aspect of fawning has that fight-flight activation, that sympathetic activation in the nervous system, which is mobilizing, right?

It's adrenalized, it's your heart is racing. That's the piece that allows us to lean in, right? To feel like we're managing the very relationships that we're in. We're scanning the horizon for threat. We're deeply empathic and generous and all of those qualities.

But at the same time, the hybrid presentation is that the end of that spectrum of trauma response is what we call collapse or submit. And this is where there's really a downregulation, this hypoarousal in the nervous system, and ultimately this can lead to a dissociation. This is where we see the disconnect from self. So this is how I essentially unplug from me and put my sense of life force into you.

Why all of my focus is now on the external environment, right? Where my entire sense of self and safety resides outside of my own body. And I need you in order for me to be safe.

CHAKRABARTI: Oh wow. Okay, that's really interesting. You actually also profile several patients that you worked with in the book.

Is there one that you can think of that really, whose experience highlights what you just said about almost having this unconscious response to need the person creating the danger?

CLAYTON: The first person that comes to mind is just the first client that I speak about in the book, but I do have seven clients that participated in this process. Where we collectively said, listen, we're not talking about this lived experience.

We really want to understand the nuance, and how it presents for different people in different contexts with different backgrounds. So I'm grateful to my clients that participated. But the first client that I present is Anthony. And he was someone who came in, who could not use the word trauma for his childhood.

He bristled at it every time. And yet what we came to understand is that his traumatic experience was really chronic invalidation never being seen or supported or validated within his family system. In fact, he was often really shamed. Boys don't cry and you have to go out for sports and do all these things that just never really felt like him.

And consequently, he went on this lifetime pursuit of external validation of Ivy League schools, and he became a partner in this global law firm and had a wife and a family in the house, and he achieved all of these things, these external markers of, I am okay. I am safe. And yet when he showed up in my office in his fifties, Anthony had no sense of who he was.

He had no hobbies. He didn't even like the work that he was doing. So there was this very clear presentation that when his entire sense of self resided in these external ideas of who he was supposed to be, he had gone missing in his own life.

Yeah. So I think that's one very common presentation.

CHAKRABARTI: How is that a trauma response though? How is that fawning?

CLAYTON: Because the fawning essentially is, I don't exist. I don't matter unless the hope is if I achieve these certain things, in the eyes of whether it was his family or the other partners that he overextended, over volunteered, do you see me?

Am I worthy? Am I okay? So it was just this constant, pervasive need to be seen and validated, and yet it never allowed him to actually step into his full sense of self. So it's almost just on this perpetual hamster wheel trying to seek safety. That was the intention, that maybe I'll arrive. One day, I can get off this hamster wheel.

But the method for achieving that was the very engine of the machine, and it kept him stuck and spiraling.

CHAKRABARTI: I'd like to hear more about what your work and your research shows about how to underscore or support your notion that fawning is an unconscious response, because I think a lot of people hearing this, or even when thinking about examples that they may know in their own lives or the lives of people close to them when fawning has emerged.

Oftentimes, I think people say, why'd you do that? You didn't necessarily have to tell that person who was bullying you that they're amazing. They're the greatest person of all time. You could have just, you could have just walked away. But you keep saying that it's unconscious.

Tell me more about why or what you're seeing or researching that supports that.

CLAYTON: I actually see that it's a 'yes, and' response. That yes, it is an unconscious response and as we discussed earlier, it is also conditioned and expected and learned. And so I think there is a spectrum of response where sometimes people are more conscious, but certainly in my own personal experience, there was no part of me that chose or even understood to respond the way that I did with my stepfather.

Again, I did not understand these dynamics for many decades later, when I could then go back and mine my own experience from this adult perspective, from the perspective of a clinical psychologist.

I could go back and see. Interestingly, I have a very recent example where I was at my son's baseball game and there was a dad who was a bully and he was yelling at the kids and he is yelling at the coaches, and I did not know that I was doing this at the time. But rather than lean in towards all these other families that we were meeting and getting to know them, my body immediately, this is that sort of befriending the bully piece.

It was almost like my body sensed the threat as though this man was the fire. And I experience myself as the fire-retardant blanket and I have to get in the way and put myself in this position where I'm absolutely buttering him up and trying to reduce his reactivity. And honestly it worked.

He wasn't yelling at my son. And yet it was later when this family left the team that I heard some other parents say. I told that guy, don't you ever talk to my son. They set these overt boundaries, and I thought, wow. I still, there was no part of me that thought that was even an option. I didn't even think about it at all.

I just reflexively was literally sitting closer to them on the bleachers. I was managing this overwhelm in this way that I could only see in hindsight.

CHAKRABARTI: Ingrid, in hearing you describe what a fawning, a trauma response that leads to fawning is, it occurs to me that one of the key differences, which is that maybe leads to this sort of lack of understanding of fawning, is that for fight, flight, or freeze, these are physical manifestations, right?

Of safety seeking. Fawning, it involves our ability to communicate, speak. However. However one communicates. So it's not, it's partially physical, but it's also linguistic. And I wonder if that's one of the reasons why.

As you said earlier, we recognize the first three responses. Because they're like almost, they're visually primal, but fawning isn't necessarily that visually primal. Is that one of the reasons why there's all this sort of judgment around fawning behavior?

CLAYTON: I think that's a fair point.

And I would also say, with the fight response, at least with human beings, it's like, although we do have violent behavior, I think yelling and screaming. That's also a part of it. You are engaged with other people verbally. But yeah, I do get that it presents differently in the softer way, and the fawn response essentially hijacks all these other systems, whether it's your empathy or your generosity, or honestly, for a lot of women, they recognize their level of attractiveness to other people or their sexuality. It co-ops these things that we are recognized for, right?

If you are disempowered, you don't have a sense of power, but you know that you can have a sense of safety in these ways, the fawn response grabs onto that and leads with it.

And so I get that. It's this response that essentially hides in plain sight, and that's part of the reason why I am dedicating so much time to it, is let's look at this for what it is. Let's. Let's peek under the cover, so to speak.

I did not understand these dynamics for many decades later, when I could then go back and mine my own experience from this adult perspective, from the perspective of a clinical psychologist.

Part III

CHAKRABARTI: Ingrid, we did hear from a listener who felt like this phrase fawning was quite familiar to him.

This is Ricardo Vargas from Milwaukee, and he says in the context of a relationship he had, he found himself engaged in a kind of fawning.

RICARDO VARGAS: I was in a relationship that in hindsight was extremely unhealthy and a lot of that came from the fact that if they weren't happy, then things weren't going well in the relationship, so it felt like it was my job to make them happy, doing little things, taking extra care, going out of my way to pump them up.

And it felt like whether or not it was true, I know I was not in the best place because of all this. If they weren't happy, it was somehow my fault, and that created a lot of stress in my own head.

CHAKRABARTI: So that's Ricardo from Milwaukee. Ingrid, did you want to respond to what Ricardo said?

CLAYTON: I think that's a very common presentation of a chronic fawn response, where you're caretaking, you're leaning in, you're doing all the work in the hope that your larger needs will be met.

But what he's pointing to is this underlying sense that I can never do enough, right? There's no place of arrival. Ultimately, my needs are not being met, and this level of resentment or anger that you can't express is actually a really good sign that you might be engaging in a chronic fawn response.

The sense that if I do speak up, it makes things worse, allows us to perhaps evaluate, is this a relationship that I want to continue to choose?

CHAKRABARTI: Ingrid, if you don't mind, I want to go back to something you said about Anthony, one of the clients whose story you feature in the book. And you talked about his just lifelong search for external validation which kind of led to an erasure of his sense of self. I think the reason why I'm still thinking about that is just a few days ago we did a show about how therapy concepts or therapy speaks have really spread throughout society, especially amongst Gen Z.

And how a lot of people online, just talk about their own self diagnoses and they turn the small sort of human foibles into much larger issues of mental health when maybe that's not really a mental health issue.

And the reason why I'm thinking about that is, for example, the need for external validation or seeking external validation is one of the hallmarks of fawning. We are social species, right? And part of the way that we find our place in our tribes, whatever they might be.

And also, one of the ways to reduce social friction is to say, to compliment others, to seek information that they are validating our place in the tribe. So I'm just wondering, how can we really tell or know when one has crossed from that sort of healthy human spectrum into what you're describing as a trauma response of fawning.

CLAYTON: Yeah, that's such a fair point. We are relational beings, right? We are hardwired for connection. Babies cannot regulate their own nervous system. They need us to co-regulate with them. That's why we bounce them. ... It's why we mimic what they're doing. What I'm talking about is when we didn't get those secure attachments, when those were sacrificed, and we have to become our own sense of regulator, long before we're even capable of doing it, it starts to disrupt this pattern of essentially healthy attachments.

So yes, in all of life, do we want to lean in and be generous and empathic and connect with other human beings? That is absolutely the goal. The problem with fawning is we do this to such an extent that I almost don't even exist in this equation. It's not really kind or generous or empathic if it's not also kind and generous to me. Does that make sense?

CHAKRABARTI: Yeah, it does. Okay. Then you also write about how fawning can actually create its own cycle that ends up trapping a person. Can you talk about that?

CLAYTON: Yeah, so when we think about trauma reenactment, there's a lot that we know about how the body seeks what's familiar in the environment in order to recreate these scenarios that we grew up with.

And in my personal case, if my body felt safest in the world and while my brain and body were developing in particular towards this constant fawn response. The way that my body then felt safe in the world, long after I moved away from home and was in different environments and different relationships.

I felt safest ultimately in the world when I was being neglected or exploited. It's like it turned something on in my body that goes, I know how to navigate these situations, right? So in other words, this became essentially my chemistry, and I did not know that this was actually an indicator of unprocessed complex trauma.

I thought this was, oh, I'm attracted to this person. So it was a lot to undo over time to essentially teach my body as an adult what it looks like to have reciprocal, respectful, easeful relationships that don't ignite all of that overwhelm.

It was a lot to undo over time, to essentially teach my body as an adult what it looks like to have reciprocal, respectful, easeful relationships that [doesn't] ignite all of that overwhelm.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay. This has really got me thinking about how fawning behavior is represented in popular culture, for example. Because I keep thinking about how you said like only relatively recently, I mean through work like yours, we're starting to identify that this is a survival response.

Because I was just imagining in my mind, I think everyone can think of a television show, for example, or a movie, courtier dramas, court drama. Royalty dramas come to mind where there's always a character who, that's just fawning, just excessively complimentary, complimenting the person in power. And even actors tend to physically manifest that by someone who bows a lot or whose back is rounded and won't even stand up straight.

And the way that these things are portrayed in popular culture is those characters, are judged as being some kind of, having a moral weakness or an emotional or spiritual weakness that somehow like they are choosing a path that makes them less than. And the hero of the scene is the person standing up straight and retaining their sense of self. So we look upon fawning as some kind of, as an indication of someone being morally damaged. We really do pass judgment on this behavior.

CLAYTON: Yes. I think what's missed in all of those representations is standing up straight is really a privilege, right? Again, if you think about all of these systems of power, we've long talked about things like masking for the neurodivergent community, or code switching for people of color.

This idea that you have to become a different person in these different contexts in order for your needs to be met. And I think those presentations, and honestly, we don't just think that about those characters in those shows. Clients in my practice have come in saying even other mental health professionals look at them, and they say, you just need to raise your self-esteem.

It's you must not really love yourself. And the real truth is that I'll speak from myself now. I loved myself a whole lot, right? I absolutely knew that if I were to speak up, and the truth is it's later on in my story, but I did speak up. I did stand up for myself, and here's the reality.

It made things worse. So for a lot of us, this notion of a healthy fight response, right? Just engage in conflict, have a voice, set a boundary. It absolutely made things worse. It's as though the fight response gets snuffed out. So continuing to present these ideas as the answer. It's really shaming, stigmatizing, and pathologizing people.

It's blaming the victim, it's keeping them stuck, right? So again, I'm not saying that we want to stay habitually in these patterns, but if we do not finally honor the healthy and adaptive origins of the thing, we're never going to reduce the shame. And then I don't care what we're talking about. If you don't reduce the shame, you're not going to have any access to real change.

You're just going to be mired in that same pattern over and over again

CHAKRABARTI: Now, I want to get to how you counsel your clients here in just a second, but I think there was one recent-ish movie that came to your mind when it comes to like, how, oh yeah. Is it Woman of the Hour? Is that right?

CLAYTON: It was Woman of the Hour. Yeah. I saw that film by Anna Kendrick while I was writing the book. And on the surface, it's this movie about this real-life serial killer, I think from the '70s. But honestly, when I was watching the movie and because it took this subtext of fawning and essentially made it the main point that it wasn't in fact about this serial killer man, it was about the women that were in his life and the impact that he had on them.

It was really this brilliant display. Every single woman in that film, and not just related to this man, but in their jobs with their neighbors, with their friends, every single one of them had either a moment or a lifetime of fawning, and I was so struck that rather than pathologizing these women and being like, what's wrong with you?

It really showed, I think, brilliantly what this looks like, how it presents, and quite frankly how helpful it is. At the end of the movie, I think she's 13. Wow. I'm now just making that connection now to my own story, but she was raped and left for dead by this man, and she wakes up the next day and finds him lying next to her crying, and she turns to him and starts to comfort him. With his tears, she calls him baby, what's wrong?

And then she says, please don't tell anyone about this. I would be so embarrassed, and I just thought, oh my gosh, this is such a powerful example that she was literally left for dead, and she leans to this man as her only chance at still surviving it all, and she gets back in his car.

As though they're a couple now and together, and they drive back into civilization from the middle of the desert, and she's ultimately able to escape, right? She escaped. She saves her own life because she called him baby, and she said she made it about her. She soaked up all the shame, right?

Oh, it's not you. You didn't do a bad thing. Please don't tell anybody that this happened. It was powerful.

CHAKRABARTI: It makes a lot of sense that thinking about how you just said for you when you did try to stand up for yourself and have a fight response. That's right. It made things worse.

In a way, getting back to where we started in terms of power hierarchies in the White House. I imagine that a lot of some of those cabinet members that say what they say about President Trump because he does fire people if they don't.

CLAYTON: That's right.

CHAKRABARTI: If they don't compliment him enough, he has a long history of doing that. You could just wake up one day and find out on social media that you lost your job as secretary of whatever department. So it could make things worse. But let's put the political power issue aside, because I think on a normal human level for all the rest of us.

How do you, with the threat of things getting worse with other responses, how do you counsel the clients you work with to slowly remove themselves from having this fawning trauma response?

CLAYTON: Yeah. First of all, I say you're never going to get rid of it, just as you're not going to get rid of a fight response, right?

Like these are hardwired instincts and I'm grateful for them. But where we do have a shot at change is when there's a chronic presentation, right, when it's happening, whether there's an experience or a sense of threat at all or not, this is where we can start to move the needle. And so ultimately, I say it has to start with changing this external focus from, do you validate me?

Do you give me permission? Are you mad at me? Like, how can I help you? And really turning inward and to the body, to our sense of what do I notice right now? What am I experiencing right now? This somatic language that starts to bring us into present tense, into our own body, and we start to grow. For some of us the first time ever, a genuine relationship to self, a real experience of internal safety.

Because without that, what you're saying is, well just go out in the world, set a healthy boundary, have a voice. What's probably going to happen is it's not going to go as well as you hoped, and the body's going to go, Ugh. See, I knew it wasn't worth it.

I'm never going to do that again. As opposed to once I start to build a sense of internal safety, I can engage in healthy conflict, I can start to discern between, is this discomfort or is this actually danger? Over time when you're in these chronic patterns, you lose the sense, the ability to discern.

And so it's a slow process, but it's one of reconnecting to self, to our own body, and ultimately for people with a history of complex trauma. I think seeing a trauma therapist tends to be an important part of that equation to reprocess some of those traumas, whether it's with EMDR, somatic experiencing, internal family systems.

These are a few modalities that are well known for working with complex trauma.

CHAKRABARTI: But even the recognition though of how your body is responding, that seems to be a tall order.

CLAYTON: I think the psychoeducation, though, goes a long way in allowing people just out of the gates to finally make sense to themselves.

I think so much of the discourse has been so shaming and blaming that people are really defeated. So just understanding, oh my gosh, my body actually adapted in this really genius way to help me stay even a little bit safer.

Maybe not the safest, but let's be real. That wasn't an option. So understanding that we loved ourselves, this was a reflexive response to keep us safe, I think honestly goes a long way towards being able to do some of the other work that avails us more conscious awareness and flexibility and, yeah. But like I said, we're not, it's not about never fawn again, right? I wrote the book and I've fawned however long ago with the guy at baseball. It's going to happen.

The first draft of this transcript was created by Descript, an AI transcription tool. An On Point producer then thoroughly reviewed, corrected, and reformatted the transcript before publication. The use of this AI tool creates the capacity to provide these transcripts.