Description
From a clinical psychologist and expert in complex trauma recovery comes a powerful guide introducing fawning, an often-overlooked piece of the fight-flight-freeze reaction to traumaexplaining what it is, why it happens, and how to help survivors regain their voice and sense of self.
Most of us are familiar with the three Fs of traumafight, flight, or freeze. But psychologists have identified a fourth, extremely common (yet little-understood) response: fawning. Often conflated with codependency or people-pleasing, fawning occurs when we inexplicably draw closer to a person or relationship that causes pain, rather than pulling away.
Do you apologize to people who have hurt you?
Ignore their bad behavior?
Befriend your bullies?
Obsess about saying the right thing?
Make yourself into someone youre not . . . while seeking approval that may never come?
You might be a fawner.
Fawning explains why we stay in bad jobs, fall into unhealthy partnerships, and tolerate dysfunctional environments, even when it seems so obvious to others that we should go. And though fawning serves a purposeits an ingenious protective strategy in unsafe situationsits a problem if it becomes a repetitive, compulsory reaction in our daily lives.
But heres the good news: we can break the pattern of chronic fawning, once we see it for the trauma response it is. Drawing on twenty years of clinical psychology workas well as a lifetime of experience as a recovering fawner herselfDr. Ingrid Clayton demonstrates WHY we fawn, HOW to recognize the signs of fawning (including taking blame, conflict avoidance, hypervigilance, and caretaking at the expense of ourselves), and WHAT we can do to successfully unfawn and finally be ourselves, in all our imperfect perfection.
Author: Ingrid Clayton
Binding Type: Hardcover
Publisher: G.P. Putnams Sons
Published: 09/09/2025
Pages: 304
ISBN: 9798217045327
Language: English
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