Fawning: How We Can Lose Ourselves and How to Come Back with Dr. Ingrid Clayton [Episode #1018]

 

Episode Summary:

In this conversation, Kimberly speaks with Dr. Ingrid Clayton who shares her journey of understanding complex trauma and the Fawn response. After years of therapy and personal work, she reflects on her struggles with self-acceptance and healthy relationships. Through her experiences and education in psychology, she has gained new perspectives that have facilitated her healing process.

 

 

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TRANSCRIPT:

Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (00:01.436)
Hi Ingrid, thank you so much for joining us today.

Ingrid (00:04.802)
Thanks for having me!

Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (00:07.834)
You know, I think your book really stood out to me because I only recently heard of this word fawn and fawning. And we all hear about fight and flight quite a bit because of all the nervous discussion and then freeze. But this whole fawning aspect, which of course we’re going to get into really deeply today, seems to be newer, at least in its identification.

Ingrid (00:21.891)
Mm-hmm.

Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (00:34.556)
Can you tell us a little bit as a clinical psychologist how you even started focusing on this aspect in your work?

Ingrid (00:42.666)
Yeah, it’s new on the scene to just about everyone, actually. We’ve long talked about fight, flight and freeze, but I feel like fawning has been kind of hiding in plain sight and there are lots of different reasons for that. But one, think when you think about fight, flight and freeze, they look like obvious sort of trauma responses, right? You’re going against the threat. But with fawning, you’re actually leaning in.

Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (01:02.138)
Yes.

Ingrid (01:07.832)
the source of harm. And there’s this appeasement factor, which could look like flirting or flattering or going along to get along. There’s a caretaking aspect. So it looks like you have agency. It looks like conscious choice, but actually underneath that is just like a fight, flight and freeze responses and unconscious reflexive survival mechanism. And so, you know, Pete,

Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (01:29.519)
Yes.

Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (01:34.864)
And why did you focus on this?

Ingrid (01:36.782)
Yeah, well, so Pete Walker coined the term, the Fawn response, I think in like 2013, but it’s really just coming into the mainstream now. And I come at his work and through this lens of complex trauma, which is relational trauma, in part because I’m a clinical psychologist, but more than that, I’m a childhood trauma survivor. And the reason I became a psychologist to begin with is largely because I’ve been trying to crawl out from under something that I’ve

Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (02:01.754)
Yes.

Ingrid (02:05.28)
lived with my whole life and none of the other frameworks ever freed me, right? Whether you talked about people pleasing or codependency or, know, it just felt like those frameworks were keeping me just as stuck as everything else I tried. And so when I came upon Pete Walker’s work and understanding these behaviors, you know, what we’ve called sort of codependent or people pleasing behaviors,

in this trauma-informed lens, it was like, my word, I finally make sense to myself, right? And it just kind of set off this cascade of not only personal understanding, but my work with my clients changed. And now here we have the book on fawning. So hopefully, honestly, more people can make sense to themselves too. That’s the whole point, yeah.

Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (02:58.074)
You know, I really, think there’s, I think this is a lot more common than we realize. And I also, you know, applaud your bravery and telling some of your story in the book and sharing client stories. And I have to say Ingrid, when I started to read your book, I got a very specific feeling in my body. You know, trauma can get stored somatically and I’ve done so much work on myself, but it brought me back to

Ingrid (03:04.992)
Yeah.

Ingrid (03:10.999)
Hmm.

Ingrid (03:19.403)
Mmm. Mmm.

Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (03:27.41)
my childhood and very early adolescence where I know you talk about being 13 and 12, 13, 14. I just remember walking around in the world and being quite innocent. And I started my period later and I started to get, my aunt said this to me, oh, you’re getting all this attention from men. And they would sort of look and be like, you here’s this, you know, what they would be pretty little girl or teenager. And I didn’t know what to do. I would smile.

Ingrid (03:28.59)
Mmm.

Ingrid (03:33.249)
Yeah.

Ingrid (03:39.918)
Hmm.

Ingrid (03:54.349)
Yeah.

Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (03:56.144)
or sometimes even giggle like you talk about when you’re feeling uncomfortable. And my author said to me, stop smiling. And it was almost like this shame, know, every time we went into public, don’t smile. And I remember being very confused and feeling shame and feeling like I didn’t really know what was going on. And then reading your book and I thought about it, but it just feels very complicated. There’s a complication to finding, cause we’re not trying to flirt.

Ingrid (04:00.035)
Yeah.

Ingrid (04:04.267)
Wow.

Ingrid (04:09.966)
Mmm.

Aww.

Ingrid (04:19.416)
Yeah.

Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (04:24.828)
We’re trying to be safe. We’re trying to get out of danger. It’s very uncomfortable. But then there’s this shame that can get wrapped into it. So I started to read the book and I was like, gosh, I didn’t really dig into fawning before, but I really think that’s what was going on.

Ingrid (04:33.176)
That’s right.

Ingrid (04:39.277)
Mm-hmm.

Ingrid (04:43.438)
I think it is very common and I think about it this way that fawning tends to come online when fight, flight and freeze are either unavailable or would make things worse. So if you think about your example there and certainly my childhood, right, fighting back to the powers that be to, you know, largely men or your parents, they’re twice your size, they hold all the power. Yeah, it’s not going, you know, they literally hold your life in their hands.

Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (04:56.251)
Right.

Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (05:06.77)
Yeah.

Ingrid (05:13.454)
The flight response, right, where are going to go? You’re going to be brought right back to the scene of the crime. Where are you going to go? This is wherever you go. This sort of male gaze, this threatening sort of, it’s the waters that we swim in day in, day out. And the freeze response, although also very common response to trauma, when things are so chronic and ongoing and it’s day in and it’s day out, the body found this way to adapt. I believe it is this ultimately genius adaptation to go,

This is my reality, right? That I have to navigate. I can’t fight back. I can’t leave and I can’t freeze. I can’t be a deer in headlights. I got to get up and go to school every day and sit at the breakfast table and engage with these people. And so it really struck me, particularly when I was writing the book, just how many systems of power the body is navigating on any given day. And listen, the body knows where it resides in the pecking order. Like it knows that I’m not the one.

at the top of the food chain. And so this reflexive thing of like, well, you hold the power. I need to make sure you’re happy in order for me to be safe and the body will always privilege safety and survival. Right? So all these historical ways that we’ve talked about some of these behaviors like, well, know, Kimberly just raised your self-esteem or smile or don’t smile. Right? It’s like you could get either side of the equation.

Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (06:22.02)
Five.

Yes.

Ingrid (06:37.026)
telling you to just do all of these things that maybe seem so obvious and yet they were not available to us. And this is where the shame comes in. It’s like, you know, well, how could you stay in that relationship or how could you smile when they were being so aggressive or how could you this? How could you that? you know, shame is a deep symptom.

Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (06:45.264)
Yeah

Ingrid (06:59.09)
of complex trauma, but you can see why too. goes hand in hand with the Fawn response that in order to keep yourself safe often and not knowingly, sometimes you have a sense of it, but often not knowing, there is this level of self abandonment, of betrayal. We know that I can’t respond to all of my values or all of what’s going to sort of honor who I am. I have to privilege this one piece first and it comes at a cost.

Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (07:15.186)
Right.

Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (07:27.268)
Yes. Well, you know what it feels like Ingrid as you’re describing it and I can recall this. am feeling it and just trying to really process this trauma, which is obviously still stored somewhere in me is this feeling of being deeply misunderstood because when the Imam was saying, well, don’t smile like I was doing something wrong. It was like, wait, I didn’t ask for this attention and I don’t want this attention and I’m actually uncomfortable and I don’t know what to do.

Ingrid (07:32.78)
Mm.

Ingrid (07:42.199)
Yes.

Ingrid (07:46.211)
Yeah.

Ingrid (07:53.996)
Yes.

Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (07:54.052)
And so it’s just feeling like no one else is looking after me, misunderstood on our like kind of on our own, like this feeling of aloneness, abandonment, you know?

Ingrid (07:57.592)
Mmm.

Ingrid (08:03.032)
That’s right. I think that that’s real, right? That you’re not really seen for being a whole person. And there tends to be this sort of hyper independence that develops alongside a chronic fawn response for that reason. It’s like, we’re never really fully or wholly seen by anybody else. It’s like, I’m the only one who has my back. So I have to sort of react accordingly.

Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (08:19.932)
We’ll

Ingrid (08:29.59)
in the world. And there’s a real sadness even as you talk about it right now. think there’s such a heartbreak there that in order to keep yourself safe, you had to prioritize these men and how they were sort of looking at you. And often with fawning, it’s sort of like, don’t like you, but I need you to like me in order to stay safe. Or maybe if you do like me, you won’t hurt me. And when your body has a sense that you’re being sort of pursued or

Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (08:51.6)
Bye.

Ingrid (08:56.974)
and you don’t really feel safe, like you’re still a child and you’re an old man and you know, it’s like, yeah, it’s a lot. It’s a lot to hold. It’s like you said,

Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (09:08.07)
Well, Ingrid, you I think like your experiences and my experiences, I imagine a lot of women listening to this would be like, wait, I wasn’t actually sexually assaulted. No one actually, you know, did something physical, but there was uncomfortability. Can you share a little bit about, you know, what happened with your stepdad where he was, you know, having you sit on his lap in the hot tub or going to Vegas and he didn’t actually physically assault you, but there was a lot of uncomfortability.

Ingrid (09:14.029)
Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Ingrid (09:23.032)
Yeah.

Ingrid (09:27.342)
Mm-hmm.

Ingrid (09:36.397)
Yeah. Yeah. I think it’s very common that a lot of us, and this is based on sort of the old idea of trauma by definition, we looked at it as though a certain event entitled you to use that word. And those events tended to be very clear and obvious and everyone would agree, right? It’s a vet coming back from war time. It’s a car crash. It’s sexual assault.

Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (09:37.532)
that went on for years.

Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (09:52.412)
Right.

Ingrid (10:01.347)
things along those lines. And so a lot of us now, it’s like we have this trauma measuring stick that’s like, well, mine wasn’t that bad, right? And when we do that, unfortunately, we say, well, now I’ve been, I’m not allowed, I can’t avail myself of all of these tools of trauma healing that would actually be the thing that would help me, right? And so

A part of what I’m hoping to do is also just educate people on complex trauma generally. Complex trauma is relational trauma. It’s ongoing experiences of threat over time. And it might not be this overt thing that everyone could name. It might be your parents, whether it was culturally or they were doing the best that they could, or maybe there’s generational trauma, but you were left feeling invalidated, like chronically invalidated or unseen.

Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (10:36.741)
Right.

Ingrid (10:49.455)
over time, this buildup, this residue, the body learns like, oh, I can’t be my full self. Oh, it’s not safe to be me. And this sort of, know, fawning looks like this masking element of like, well, who do you need me to be in order to be included and seen and valued? And I think, yeah, this misconception of like trauma looks a certain way. It kept me on the outside for a long time, even knowing my own story, because similarly, like you said,

Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (11:12.914)
Right.

Ingrid (11:19.531)
My stepdad didn’t like overtly sexually assault me. He was grooming me for years and it started with these, you know, seemingly innocuous, but my body felt that it was not innocuous of, you know, come on over here and sit on my lap and I’m glad we can be this close. And I knew in those moments that I wasn’t safe, but I’m also sort of clocking like, would anyone else think this was bad? Like he’s

Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (11:46.757)
Right.

Ingrid (11:47.501)
He’s my stepdad and he’s being nice and he’s not always nice and I like it better when he’s nice. And so I’m also leaning into that. I knew I couldn’t embarrass him. I knew that I couldn’t push back. I knew that he had another side to him where he really could steamroll me. He could be a rager.

Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (12:04.402)
What about your mom? You couldn’t go to your mom.

Ingrid (12:07.565)
I couldn’t go to my mom in part because I saw her disappear as he came into our lives. It was like she just was in his shadow, wouldn’t say anything unless she’d heard him literally say it before. I say in the book that it was like my mom went missing even when she was standing right in front of me. It was just she was not there.

Ultimately, I did do the things that we’re all told to do as though we’re all entitled to having a voice and standing up for ourselves and setting healthy boundaries as though it’s that easy. I did attempt to do those things and it made things a lot worse because now I had a stepfather who was grooming me, parading me around as a girlfriend and a mom who didn’t believe me. They were like, you’re a liar. You made it all up. What are you talking about?

Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (12:51.825)
Ugh.

Ingrid (12:59.339)
Again, a whole lot happened, but not a whole lot happened. Even when I turned to social services as a child, they were like, is it that bad? Right? And it sort of seemed like the collective, yeah, the collective response was like, well, no, it’s not that bad. We’re not really going to intervene. There’s not much we can do. So my body learned along with the cultural conditioning of what trauma is that it wasn’t that bad. know, this is normal.

Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (13:07.908)
Right, we’re questioned.

Ingrid (13:27.039)
And you’re not safe, essentially. If I’m a nervous system perspective, I learned, boy, I am not relationally safe. The only thing I can do to be relationally safe is to go along with your narrative to a certain degree, don’t push back, to swallow this deeper truth that never really got fully validated or metabolized. And ultimately what I now know is that kept me stuck for decades, right? It was like,

Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (13:54.438)
Yeah.

Ingrid (13:55.435)
imprisoned in my own body in a way that’s essentially what unmetabolized trauma really is, is that you’re stuck, you’re stuck. So understanding complex trauma and understanding the Fawn response, like I said, after decades, I sat on so many therapist couches, I’ve been sober for decades, I’ve done so much inner work, it wasn’t like I wasn’t trying, I got three degrees in psychology, right? It was like I did all of this to try to overcome

Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (14:17.882)
Right. The wounded here. Yeah. Yes.

Ingrid (14:21.237)
Yes, this feeling of like, what’s wrong with me? I’m still broken. Why can’t I have a healthy relationship? Why can’t I really have this loving relationship with myself? And these were the lenses that allowed me to see myself differently, to access myself differently, and actually to finally heal.

Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (14:40.722)
Yes, and there’s this whole amazing section in the book about that. But before we go in, Ingrid, and someone’s listening to this, can you explain a little bit about the difference between fawning and people pleasing? Some signs of like, hey, you know, these are some real signs of the fawning. And also, part three, it’s this complex question is, what kind of patterns might you see in relationship where you haven’t addressed fawning or what types of

Ingrid (14:53.432)
Yeah.

Ingrid (15:05.966)
Mm-hmm.

Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (15:09.074)
people might you attract if you’re in that fawning trauma cycle. So signs, difference with people pleasing and relationships.

Ingrid (15:13.751)
Yeah, so great questions.

Ingrid (15:18.383)
So for me, I think both actually people pleasing and the language of codependency, these were our best attempts to name something that is real, right? With whatever information we had at the time. But.

the problem that I can have with some of these terms is that they sort of place the problem as it were in an individual’s body as though it just originated out of thin air for no reason, as though it’s a problem that they possess that they need to fix and solve. And to me, the Fawn response, I see it as sort of the engine of these behaviors. It’s the why, right? That’s what has gone.

missing this notion that we are relational beings, we are hardwired, we co-regulate, we cohabitate, we literally need one another. So to divorce this notion of needing one another and our dependency, our literal dependency on one another is really shaming and blaming.

First of all, to the caregivers, it’s like we go here, here’s the emotional load, do all the heavy lifting. And then when they do it, we go, what’s wrong with you? Why can’t you take care of yourself? Right? There’s this crazy double bind. so fawning to me is the heartbeat of these behaviors that allowed me to go, that’s why I’m privileging.

Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (16:31.1)
Yeah.

Ingrid (16:44.917)
external validation or your opinion of me or I’m wondering why you’re mad at me. It’s why I’m so hypervigilant because my entire sense of safety in the world was built on needing to prioritize what was happening outside my body in order to keep my body safe. I had to be divorced from my internal sense of safety and orient to your need first and then come back to me. go, my gosh, that makes perfect sense. And the second thing that

Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (16:49.722)
Yeah.

Ingrid (17:14.209)
I think the fawn response tends to that people pleasing and codependency have not historically is the context that I am not just a dysfunctional person. My body adapted, I think in a very genius way to a deeply dysfunctional environment or context. And again, it’s the piece where I go, my gosh, okay, now it makes sense that I was doing this, right? It’s not just because I love to…

Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (17:34.651)
Yeah.

Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (17:41.286)
Yeah,

Ingrid (17:42.893)
I’m obsessed with control, right? It’s like, no, I was obsessed with safety. I was obsessed with the feeling that I could exist in the world. And now I understand why. So to me, that’s the sort of, it’s like, we know more now. These terms arose before we understood trauma at all. And they were also steeped in this sort of disease model, which I think we just know better now. Let’s do better. Let’s help people understand where these…

Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (17:44.859)
Wait!

Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (17:50.63)
Yes.

Ingrid (18:09.913)
these behaviors came from. And so some of the common signs and symptoms then are if I can’t have a voice because it makes it worse, right? It puts me as more of a target and maybe you’re gonna come for me. Well, we’re conflict avoidant, right? So a lot of chronic fauners have kind of lost access to a healthy fight response, which is all these things that we’re told to just go and do, right? Set a healthy boundary. Well,

Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (18:20.347)
Yeah.

Ingrid (18:34.849)
setting a boundary might mean that I’m really going to get steamrolled. Saying a no might mean, now you’re really going to come for me. And so the body learned time and time again, like, no, no, no, no, it’s safer not to push back, right? It’s safer. But ultimately, what happened for me and what happens for a lot of my clients is like the FON response is almost 10 steps out ahead of you, like a perpetual protector or a shield. And it’s,

Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (18:41.692)
Right.

Ingrid (19:01.769)
acting, even environments that might be perfectly safe, but the body goes, I’m not going to risk it. This is my way to safety. This is how I show up in the world. We tend to be conflict avoidant. We tend to prioritize everyone else’s needs, our own. think even this idea where we started the podcast of like, your trauma matters, but mine doesn’t really. That’s also kind of a common sort of fawning response. It’s like, you’re entitled to have

Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (19:08.166)
Well, yeah.

Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (19:20.7)
Yes.

Ingrid (19:31.533)
your story and experience and you should have all the resources, but mine don’t really matter that much. What else? Yes. Yes.

Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (19:37.083)
Yeah.

So gets swung down over again, like for decades it took you, I think in the book you said it was 30 years, you know, for you to really sort of unpack that. there’s just, feels at least, you know, in my experience with myself, it feels like there’s all these different energies wrapped in. It’s sort of like that shame as guilty, should I have been doing that? Like, should I have been doing something else? But then fear, I didn’t know what else to do. And then this.

Ingrid (19:46.358)
Ugh.

Ingrid (19:51.214)
Yeah.

Ingrid (19:58.926)
Yeah.

Hmm.

Yeah.

Right.

Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (20:09.02)
hollowness in my throat or you can’t really express yourself. And, you know, it affects relationships for a long time, I think, until you can actually find center. Obviously, you when we we heal ourselves, we find that centeredness and compassion. Everything around us changes. But, you know, like you said, sometimes we don’t hear about this for a long time, or we don’t have tools for a while. So it does go on. It’s pervasive.

Ingrid (20:11.119)
Mmm, yep.

Ingrid (20:29.624)
Yeah.

Ingrid (20:36.621)
Well, look what the bind is, right? Because when you say center yourself to me, what that means is you start to grow a sense of internal safety, right? Which is that all my safety doesn’t reside outside of my body. But when your whole life has been built on this very foundation that your sense of safety resides outside of your own body, just telling someone to like center themselves, and it doesn’t make any sense. It’s like, what are you even talking about? Of course, logically, we go, well, I do love myself, right? Like,

Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (20:43.408)
Yes.

Ingrid (21:05.591)
It’s not about these ideas that make sense. It’s about a felt sense. It’s a nervous system experience of, don’t care what you say and how you say it, my body is not safe in the world. And so we have to start from a place where we acknowledge someone’s lack of internal safety and go, yep, that’s where we’re starting. I’m not pretending like you have all this access, you’re just not using it.

It’s you’ve never had the experience of really feeling autonomous, of feeling maybe like an adult, you know? This language that so many of us use, like you can see now with all this gray hair, I’m in my 50s, but half of the time I go, my God, I’m gonna get in trouble, right? I’m gonna get in trouble. Get in trouble with who? But this is the feeling that I’m walking around in the world, right? I’m gonna get in trouble. You’re gonna be mad at me. So there’s this…

Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (21:41.616)
Yes.

Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (21:49.17)
It’s quantum.

Ingrid (22:03.047)
new level of capacity that we have to build from the ground up, which then does equate to things that you’re talking about, compassion or emotional maturity or reciprocal relationships. But shaming us to get there has never been helpful for anyone. I don’t know if you have grown through shame, but it’s never been my vehicle.

Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (22:18.033)
Yeah.

Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (22:25.508)
No. Well, you know, let me tell you Ingrid for my story. And again, I love the stories, including your own in the book, because I think we can relate so much to stories. So for me, it started to become aware that my worth, I was putting my worth externally in achievements. It was like perfectionist, number one in my class, had to have highest grades and like showing I’m the smart one in all these ways. And so once I started to sort of dismantle that, like, hey, I’m working here.

Ingrid (22:33.477)
Mm. Yeah.

Ingrid (22:53.871)
Mmm.

Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (22:55.856)
and do a lot of work with my heart and heart coherence and the energetic heart and feeling that wholeness in here, not up in my mind created ideas. think later this centeredness, I’m talking about this steadiness in here, sort of, part of that putting worth out here is feeling safe to be in the world if I can show something for it. It’s like layers of like, what I’m really talking about is safety and like, sure the validation like.

Ingrid (23:03.47)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Ingrid (23:15.831)
That’s right, yes.

Ingrid (23:21.412)
Yep.

Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (23:24.058)
Validation to be even here gets really

Ingrid (23:26.157)
That’s right. That’s right. Yeah. All the different layers. I think that’s what’s so tricky too about why fawning has kind of gone hiding in plain sight because it also just looks like I’m being a good girl. I’m being successful. I’m doing the things you told me to do. I’m buying into this paradigm that like I’m good enough when…

Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (23:38.085)
Yes.

Ingrid (23:45.773)
you know, when I have a PhD, when I’m married, when I have a house, when I have like all these external markers, right? We go, okay, well, maybe if I do that, then I’m finally going to arrive at some sense of being okay. And a lot of us get that next marker and that next marker and we go, I’m still here. I’m still me. When does the magic happen? Right? When does, when does this all kind of arrest the human condition and it doesn’t. And then I guess that’s the great news because we go, okay, well, then I can’t.

Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (24:05.391)
Yeah.

Ingrid (24:14.105)
keep trying that same old paradigm. have to find a new one. And yeah, it sounds like you did, which is powerful.

Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (24:22.63)
Well, and one of the things you talk about in the book is you talk about the nervous system. There’s this awareness that comes in and you talk about re-parenting. Can you explain a little bit what you mean by that?

Ingrid (24:31.608)
Hmm.

Ingrid (24:35.243)
Yeah, I think it means different things to different people. I will admit that I hated that word for a long time alongside even inner child. There was a part of me who was never really allowed to be a child. always had to be, you know, an adult. A lot of us were called old souls. We sort of felt like, you know, I was having a midlife crisis when I was 19 years old is what it felt like. Those notions, I was like,

I just, they weren’t accessible for a very long time. But I think that’s why, right? It was sort of like it rough, like bumped up against what felt like, well, I was never allowed to be a child. And that’s the point, right? That’s the point is that all of us were children, whether we were allowed to be.

Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (25:14.918)
Yeah, you didn’t connect to it. Yeah.

Ingrid (25:23.275)
or not. And if you had to override that process and take care of the people that were supposed to take care of you, you have missed out on important developmental milestones. And if we don’t go back, and it can look a million different ways. It can look like trauma therapy. It can look like journaling to your young self. It can look like holding your young self in a meditation, whatever.

Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (25:31.441)
You know.

Ingrid (25:50.667)
way works for you. It’s the idea that you as the chronological age that you are now, right, or your highest self, the capacity that you’ve amassed to this point, you are going back and bringing that to this often really stuck, wounded inner child that never had a chance to grow up, right? And you’re helping these internal experiences of being stuck and alone.

Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (26:05.664)
Mm-hmm.

Ingrid (26:19.745)
you know, again, it looks differently depending on the model. So I’m trying to speak kind of generally to the process, but it tends to be a pretty important part of healing from relational trauma is going back and healing the parts of you that got stuck along the way and got stuck for good reason, right? It wasn’t safe to be vulnerable and openhearted and right. It’s like those things got steamrolled. You had to be oriented to the other person. You had to be listening for the sound of the keys when they came in the front door, you had to be

Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (26:24.262)
Yes.

Ingrid (26:49.507)
Like, yo, you’re smiling at me, the stranger, but now you’re getting a little too close. It was like, you couldn’t just be free to grow and to develop and to be seen and have these reciprocal, healthy attachments, right? That was robbed of a lot of us. And so now the healthy attachment in a way becomes my adult self. I’ve got my own back.

Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (27:03.931)
Right.

Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (27:11.77)
Yes.

Ingrid (27:14.063)
to the younger self who never got it. And I think what’s amazing even as I say that is that it works. go, my, this is so powerful and transformational is that these ideas, it works. Like you can kind of go, come on, that’s kind of hokey and silly. And now you’re going to like raise yourself up, but it’s powerful when people find this way in, you you go, yeah. So that’s the essence of the reparenting piece.

Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (27:30.267)
no, I agree.

Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (27:42.31)
Well, you know, I love it too much. So much Ingrid too, is it’s saying this power to heal is inside of me and it’s not external and I don’t need people to get on board because I remember years ago, there was something my mom said when I was seven, that was formative and I got a 98 on a test and I remember being really excited to show her and she’s, she said she was kidding, but to my child brain, what she did say and what I heard, she goes, why didn’t you get a hundred? So then I sort of took it and nothing’s good enough, right? For years.

Ingrid (27:48.654)
Yes.

Ingrid (28:08.494)
Yep.

Yeah.

Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (28:12.05)
And then I remember later when I, a young adult, I think it was 20 or 21, I was trying, you know, I was sort of trying to heal myself. And so I had her replay this and I remember being like seven and showing her the test and I, and she’s like, Oh, then she said, Oh, how great you got a hundred, right? This is like years later. And I remember being like, okay, it feels kind of good, but it wasn’t really deep. And then years later when I was, you know, 28, 30 coming even deeper into this work, said, well,

Ingrid (28:28.911)
Hmm.

Ingrid (28:35.873)
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (28:41.362)
It’s not about her validating. It’s me understanding that, you know, this wound looking outward, that little girl looking outward to be told I’m worthy enough to be told I got this on the test so I’m good enough. It’s me to sit with that, you know, the inner woman be like, you know, whether I get an A or an F on the test, I’m still worthy. It had to come from me. It was like,

Ingrid (28:56.622)
Yes.

Ingrid (29:02.923)
Yes, to sit with, I think that language is profound because it’s not about, you know, deciding that it wasn’t worth being upset about to begin with. It’s not about jumping to forgiveness and overriding any kind of a process. It is about sitting with the fact, just the fact that regardless of someone’s intention or whatever was going on externally, there’s a wound there. And to sit with the wound,

Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (29:12.966)
Yeah. Yes.

Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (29:28.145)
Yes.

Ingrid (29:31.775)
not even with the intention of fixing it, making it better, dressing it up. It’s just literally being a witness, a compassionate witness. And I agree that, you know, I think there is a lot of work that we can do relationally with others, but for most of us, there are many, many points along the journey where we are the only ones that can save us, right? And it is a deeply personal job.

Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (29:58.939)
Yes.

Ingrid (29:59.935)
And it’s why I called my memoir, Believing Me, because I finally had to unhook from anyone else saying what happened happened or didn’t happen, or I should have responded this way or whatever. It’s like, uh-uh. I know what happened. I know what it did to me. I know how long it’s taken me to crawl out from under it. This is my story. No one else’s. And it changed my life, right? It’s like, I’m not going to wait for anyone else to choose me or accept me or any of it. I have to do it. And

Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (30:04.24)
Yes!

Ingrid (30:28.559)
In a way that’s like, oh, it’s a hard thing to tell people who have also been waiting their whole lives for their mom or their partner or whomever to kind of show up to be like, you know what, they may never do it. And you can, right? You can.

Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (30:45.938)
I love it. It’s empowering. It’s like you said, it can be scary for some, but it’s empowering because you can’t control what other people do. It’s like, wanted my mom to say this one thing to feel okay, but someone else is going to say something that triggers that wound of not okayness or this. And it just, it’s taking back this power to say, people are going to do what they do. The world is what it is, but I can feel that steadiness, more of that centeredness from inside.

Ingrid (30:50.241)
Yeah. Yeah.

Ingrid (30:57.719)
Right, right.

Ingrid (31:05.977)
Yeah.

you

Mmm.

Yeah, that’s powerful.

Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (31:16.376)
Yeah. So, you know, back to, you talk about triggers, right? Starting to become aware in this, you know, the latter part of the book where we get out of identifying fawning more into the healing aspect of it. Can you talk a little bit about triggers and, know, for anyone listening to this that starts to say, well, you know, hmm, what, you know, how can I start to turn the corner with the fawning?

Ingrid (31:22.735)
Mmm.

Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (31:43.814)
come back to center. And also, how do I even know what centered or healthy it is between kind and sort of amicable and now crossing into fawning?

Ingrid (31:48.119)
Yeah. Yeah.

Ingrid (31:55.245)
Yeah. I think in some ways the word trigger, the notion of trigger has sort of gotten this bad rap. It’s like, don’t trigger me. You know what I mean? Like don’t, I’m meant to avoid my triggers. Yeah, yeah, exactly. And the truth is you’re never going to be able to avoid all of your triggers. You will get triggered. And in fact, I think a trigger is a really useful way to see in real time

Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (32:04.962)
It back to the external again. Yeah.

Ingrid (32:23.041)
where some of those unhealed wounds are that need some attention, right? So they become these opportunities really. of course, I wish that we didn’t have triggering this sort of residue that’s left over from unresolved trauma, but they are the markers in present time of what still needs our attention. And so

You know, a big part of healing from complex trauma and coming out of a chronic fawn response is growing our capacity just to feel, right? To be in reality. I think, you know, if you think about the window of tolerance and the bodies like…

genuine desire for sort of flexibility and moving in and out of sort of dysregulated states, but always coming back to this notion of center. A lot of us have a very shrunken bandwidth. So any, like the breeze blows and that’s a trigger and we go, I’m not safe, right? And I’m not at all shaming or pathology. This is a reality. It’s sort of like my trauma was relational trauma. So guess what triggered my relational trauma? All relationships.

Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (33:25.563)
Yes.

Ingrid (33:41.859)
being in the world, seeing someone across the street, the way that you looked at me, the sound of that person’s voice, the sense that you have more power over me, the fact that I’m a woman in this body and I’m short and you know, it’s like all of it would trigger me. And so ultimately what we want is to have more freedom and flexibility, but that means tolerating more discomfort. And here’s the thing where so many of my clients, they go, well, how do I know if I’m triggered?

Or if this is like, in other words, is this my past sort of coming back in the present moment? is this being, is this a new harm that’s being ignited in the moment? And this, what we’re talking about right now of growing our capacity is where we start to be able to discern, is this discomfort or is this danger?

Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (34:15.121)
Yeah.

Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (34:23.495)
Right.

Ingrid (34:34.911)
And initially a lot of us don’t know the difference because like I said, fawning has been guarding against even potential harm for so long that pulling back on it, you’re going to be triggered. It’s going to be uncomfortable. You’re going to go, I don’t feel safe in the world. And here’s where that reparenting notion comes in is we can pause, we can slow down, we can get curious. You’ve referenced somatic work many times already. This is powerful to turn to the body and to go,

Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (35:03.696)
Yes.

Ingrid (35:04.553)
What am I experiencing right now? Every trauma training I’ve ever been to, we don’t say, what do you think about that? We say, what are you noticing now? What are you experiencing? We go into the body and this type of curiosity is what starts to grow this capacity, right? Like Peter Levine’s work in somatic experiencing, he talks about the senses. The senses are the language of the nervous system. Can we use our senses, our connection to the natural environment?

Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (35:10.854)
Right.

Yes.

Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (35:26.737)
Yes.

Ingrid (35:34.783)
not to tell ourselves, I am safe. I should feel safe. But I know that I’m safe because I can slowly look around the room and I can notice what I see. I can listen to the ambient sounds in the room. I can use physical touch. All of these different literal touchstones and touchstones of the senses are putting me in present time and place where my body starts to know, it’s not happening right now.

I am safe. I might be afraid, but can I be with myself in that fear? Can I do it from an embodied place where maybe I immediately put my hand on my heart because it releases oxytocin, allows me to have this stance of self-compassion, maybe one on my belly, I notice my breath, right? There are 8 million ways that what I’m saying isn’t prescriptive, but the point is it’s these types of things that start to move the needle.

Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (36:19.642)
Yes.

Ingrid (36:33.377)
in our day-to-day lives where suddenly we’re not living in a chronic trauma response 24 seven, I have a little more access to me, a little more access to what am I experiencing? What do I notice? And now I can build more internal safety because I’m not just hypervigilantly focused on external.

I’m building this connective tissue with my internal world, with my gut, the second brain, my instincts, all these, yes, all these things that I had been disconnected from. And this is where the body again starts to learn experientially the contrast, right? Between discomfort and danger, but also between my fear of how you’re perceiving me versus what I know to be true about me in this moment.

Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (37:05.586)
and then the heart starts to break.

Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (37:16.442)
Yes.

Ingrid (37:29.401)
Right? Yeah.

Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (37:29.425)
Wow.

Ingrid, as you’re talking about all this rewiring, I have an interesting question for you. Back to the wounded healer, I think one of the reasons I came into wellness and starting with nutrition was because I struggled with food and eating disorders back when I was 16. And I read something a long time ago that says once you have an eating disorder, you’re always going to have it, which has not been my personal experience. I got to the point where I really…

Ingrid (37:37.764)
Yeah.

Mm.

Ingrid (37:52.68)
Mmm. Mmm!

Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (37:58.138)
was able to heal so much emotionally. I wasn’t projecting it onto food and it’s just become very simple and pragmatic. And I honestly don’t think about it very much. don’t have tendency to restrict if I’m stressed, purge. So I don’t, in my experience, that wasn’t true. In your experience working with so many different clients and with yourself, is it, or I guess different people work in different ways, but let’s say fawning or different types of trauma in your childhood have that impact as an adult?

Ingrid (38:06.723)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Ingrid (38:13.679)
Mm-hmm.

Ingrid (38:23.257)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (38:27.12)
where you’ll still have it, but you learn to manage it? Or have you seen where people can actually fully widen their capacity, heal their nervous system, and they’re actually as if someone who had a really healthy childhood that didn’t have fawning part of it? Does that make sense?

Ingrid (38:46.009)
So it’s a great question. It’s an important question. And so I’ll say this, even if you had the perfect childhood, you will have a fawn response, just like you’ll have a fight, flight and freeze response. We would never say to someone like, work through so that you never have a fight response, right? That would be, that would actually be dangerous. I want to have a trauma response when it’s appropriate to have a trauma response.

Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (38:56.494)
Okay.

Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (39:02.35)
Right. Okay.

Ingrid (39:11.693)
What we don’t want is to be living in survival mode 24 seven. That’s where it becomes maladaptive. So I literally say, just wrote the book on fawning. It’s called fawning. I wrote the book, guess what? Probably fond last week. Like it’s not about never doing it again. And, but I love how you’re sort of relating it to your experience with disordered eating is that

Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (39:16.626)
Right.

Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (39:28.155)
Yeah.

Ingrid (39:37.475)
Listen, are there things that we can heal from? Absolutely. But what I always say is at the end of the day, if I’m still here, I still have a body. And so there may be things that were really plaguing me before that they’re not plaguing me now. But if I’m still growing and learning and changing and being in the world and being in reality, and like I said, I’ve never been 51 before with a mom with a 10 year old before, like I’m going to continue to bump up against new things and

Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (39:46.96)
Yes.

Ingrid (40:06.855)
I will always have some level of coping or struggle. So I get a little, think sometimes in wellness, we can talk about a binary experience of sort of healed or broken, right? And if you have any level of sort of struggle or coping or sort of, need even, we can be like, well, maybe you should try a little bit harder or something along those lines. And I go,

Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (40:10.908)
Yeah.

Ingrid (40:34.157)
We can’t keep doing that to people. It’s why I lead even in the book or when I sort of, you know, go on social media, I try to bring my personal experience to the forefront so I can really level the playing field and be like, I’m not some expert who’s got it all figured out. It’s sort of like peek behind the curtain. You’re going to see all kinds of stuff back here.

Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (40:51.479)
yeah.

Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (40:56.497)
Your Sheen is.

Ingrid (40:58.836)
And it’s okay for you to have your stuff too. It’s always a work in progress in the bigger picture. It’s sort of my bias. That’s how I see it.

Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (41:07.41)
You know, I love that. And then it sort of makes me reframe what I even what I was saying to you, which was that perfectionism or that safety, that unsteadiness, the food part healed in me, right? But then it manifests still in other ways in, in my life is just that the food part was like, okay, I’m not going to project it there, but there’s still, you know, fawning trauma, abandonment, all sorts of

Ingrid (41:11.663)
Mm.

Ingrid (41:22.915)
Yeah. Right.

Ingrid (41:33.667)
Yes!

Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (41:34.63)
things that I worked through and I keep touching my heart Ingrid, noticed that dramatic work has helped me so much. The art coherence has helped a lot, meditation. We’re all on the journey and the journey keeps on going.

Ingrid (41:37.613)
Yeah. Yeah.

Hmm. Hmm.

That’s right. As long as you have a body, we’re all here. Yeah. And I go, okay, great.

Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (41:51.086)
Yeah. So beautiful. Well, is there anything about fawning and your new book that we didn’t cover that you’d love to share with us before we wrap up?

Ingrid (42:03.631)
The piece is I always just want people to know that you make sense, right? That these are hardwired responses. You come by it honestly, and like we’ve touched on, none of us are meant to live in survival mode all the time. And to me, that is really where the freedom is, is that I know who I am today. I know where I end and someone else begins. I’m no longer strictly privileging external validation, whether that was me being a caretaker or flirting and flattering, because it’s sort of…

manifest in all kinds of different ways, including the perfectionism like we talked about. I believe in the power of trauma informed work. just, like I said, we know better now and I think we need to do better and give people the bigger picture that returns them to themselves. So I appreciate you having this opportunity to have one of those conversations.

Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (42:57.69)
Yes. Well, thank you so much, Ingrid, for sharing some of your wisdom with us and certainly your heart, which comes through in your book with your story and your passion embodied. again, you’ve been through this. You’re living it. You’re teaching about it. It’s really beautiful. So once again, everyone, Ingrid’s book is called Fawning, Why the Need to Please Makes Us Lose Ourselves and How to Find Our Way Back.

Ingrid (43:04.111)
Thank you.

Ingrid (43:12.396)
Yeah.

Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (43:25.808)
and it’s packed with personal stories as well as real tips and tools. And I love the combination. Ingrid, can you tell us where we can get your book and where we can find out more about you and your work?

Ingrid (43:37.335)
The book should be everywhere books are sold. It’s also on audible. I’m narrating if you’re an audio book person like I tend to be and my website’s ingridclayton.com so you can find the links to the book there, but also all my social media and yeah, I tend to tell people I’m not taking clients in my private practice. So unfortunately that door is closed, but come find me on Substack and Instagram and all the other places. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes.

Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (43:42.684)
great.

Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (44:02.0)
I mean, and of course the book. There’s so much in the book. I love it. And it’s such a great way to be a kind of client because you’re giving so much information that’s work with clients. So thank you so much again, Ingrid. And thank you everyone for tuning in. We will also link directly to Ingrid’s book and her website on our show notes at mysalooner.com. Please check out the show notes for other podcasts, articles I think you would enjoy.

Ingrid (44:11.79)
Mmm, thank you.

Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (44:29.872)
We will be back here in just a few days. Till then, sending you so much love. Also seeing you on social at underscore Kimberly Snyder. Take great care.

Ingrid (44:41.326)
Thank you!