194 Unfawning: The Silent Survival Strategy That’s Shaped Your Life with Dr. Ingrid Clayton

💥 Ever said yes when you meant no?
💥 Ever lost yourself just to keep the peace?
That’s not people-pleasing.
That’s FAWNING—and it runs deeper than you think.

In this raw and revealing conversation, Dr. Ingrid Clayton peels back the layers of complex trauma, unpacks the hidden cost of fawning, and gets brutally honest about what it takes to stop abandoning yourself, especially during midlife shifts like menopause.

This isn’t self-help fluff. This is a nervous system truth.
This is unfawning—and it might change everything.

🔑 What You’ll Walk Away With:

• Why fawning is not your fault (but IS your responsibility to unlearn)
• The difference between “clean pain” and “dirty pain” (and why one heals, the other festers)
• How menopause can resurface unresolved trauma
• What happens when you finally stop performing and start reclaiming your needs
• The invisible grief of self-abandonment—and the messy power of coming home to yourself

👂 Listen if you’ve ever thought:
“I don’t even know what I want anymore.”
“I’m tired of betraying myself just to be liked.”
“This transition in life feels like a breakdown, but maybe it’s a breakthrough.”

📌 Tag us when you’re done listening. Let’s talk about the things we were never taught to name.

📲 Connect with Dr. Ingrid:

Website: www.ingridclayton.com

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/ingridclaytonphd/ 

Sally's Links:

[Free Guide] Healing The Trauma Underlying Your Menopause Symptom Severity: https://www.sallygarozzo.com/healingtraumatheguide

[On Demand Masterclass 2 hours] How To Heal The Trauma Underlying Your Menopause Symptom Severity [£17]: https://www.sallygarozzo.com/healingtrauma

[On Demand Workshop] Redefine Your Values at Menopause and Live Life in Alignment With Them [£27]: https://www.sallygarozzo.com/redefine 

[Online Practitioners Diploma - Self Paced] Menopause Wellbeing Practitioner [£127]: https://www.sallygarozzo.com/meno

[One to One] Transformational 30 Day Rewire (Includes RTT) [£447]: https://www.sallygarozzo.com/rapid-transformational-therapist

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/sallygarozzomindmentor

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sallygarozzo/

Send me a voice clip via WhatsApp: https://wa.me/message/FTARBMO7CRLEL1

Transcript

Sally (00:01.656)
So today I'm so thrilled to welcome Dr. Ingrid Clayton to the podcast. Ingrid is a clinical psychologist, an author and expert in the nuanced dynamics of trauma, particularly the survival strategy known as fawning. Ingrid's work explores how trauma responses like fawning shape our sense of self and our relationships.

She's the author of the memoir, Believing Me, where she shares her own personal journey of healing, which we're going to hear a little bit about today. She also has a second book coming out very soon called, Fawning, Why the Need to Please Us Makes Us Lose Ourselves and How to Find Our Way Back Home. So Ingrid, welcome to the podcast today. How are you doing?

Ingrid (00:47.25)
I am well, Sally, thanks for having me. I'm excited to be here.

Sally (00:50.562)
I'm so glad you said yes to this because your work really has helped so many people. I heard you on Mark Vicente's podcast. I'm a big fan of him because he produced What the Bleep Do We Know, which I was a huge fan of when it first came out back in the nineties. Then I watched, I watched The Vow and that, and then I was like, my God, Mark Vicente, the guy that produced

Ingrid (00:52.678)
Yeah.

Ingrid (01:01.052)
Great!

Sally (01:17.774)
that film is it so all the you know when all the pieces of the puzzle kind of pull together and Then I found you and your story would just blew me away really about fawning Because this podcast is about menopause people might be thinking why on earth am I getting somebody like yourself who knows about this trauma Aspects when my audience really is about menopause, but there is a link

Ingrid (01:24.049)
Yes.

Sally (01:45.794)
Because at this time in our life, it's really all about taking our power back, you know, and looking at where we might have given our power away. And I really think that people are going to see themselves in our conversation today, especially for those who are confused about why they have certain patterns of behavior, but don't believe they've experienced trauma. Because I think that's a big one. So I'm sure we're to get into all of that, but...

Ingrid (01:51.247)
Mm-hmm.

Sally (02:14.358)
I would love to start really with the heart of you and your work. What was the trauma that you experienced and how did you come to understand it as trauma? Shall we start there?

Ingrid (02:26.874)
Well, I didn't understand it as trauma for a long time. So I think that's foundational to my experience. And I became not just a clinical psychologist, but a trauma therapist who still didn't think that she'd experienced sort of quote unquote, real trauma. So there are a couple of factors there. One is that the mental health field generally is really still in its infancy regarding trauma and certainly relational trauma.

So while we have a diagnosis now for PTSD, in the States anyway, we don't even really have a diagnosis for complex PTSD, which is relational trauma. So although we know a lot more, like most things, it takes a while for these things to sort of get solidified and grounded in our training, in our general lexicon. And so as I was growing up,

You know, I actually tell this story in my memoir that I was in a training with Dr. Bessel van der Kolk, who wrote The Body Keeps the Score, famously. And he was giving a case presentation and I was there as a clinician, as a new clinician, but certainly a clinician. And he's telling this case study and my mouth gets so dry, I can't even swallow. And I am filled with shame and I want to disappear if I could shrink into the...

seat that I was sitting in, I would have because he was telling my story. He was telling my story. I mean, it was like mapped out so perfectly. And yet my story wasn't traumatic. So it was very confusing. And again, I was sort of filled with shame and I snuck away and went and looked in the DSM and looked up PTSD because that's what he was talking about. And I was like, well, I don't meet the criteria.

Was it life threatening? This was kind of the language that we used previously. So off I went for a couple more decades. Like, no, no, it wasn't that bad. What I now refer to as self-gaslighting, right? It's sort of like, no, I just need to let it go and forgive and move on. And largely what I knew for sure is that I came from an alcoholic family system. So that was clear. That was clear to me as a young child. But again, traumatic.

Ingrid (04:52.56)
like, come on, right? But even if we just take that piece of it, you know, the uncertainty and instability and terror when we would hear our parents' tires roll down the gravel driveway, and my brothers and I wouldn't say anything, but we would immediately turn off the TV and run to our rooms, right? This was a regular occurrence of just like...

wait to see what the mood's going to be, how bad it's going to be, and if it feels safe enough to sort of tiptoe back into the common area. And you would hear yelling, you would hear some violence, mostly verbal abuse, but this was the regular occurrence in my household. And again, a friend's parents

of mine when I was maybe 12 years old called social services and they were like, you guys need to intervene. And the social worker pulled me aside and in private, was without my parents knowing. And I told her probably a story like this, right? And she was like, but emotional abuse isn't reportable. Like she really just like flat out said, there's nothing I can do for you. I'm kept asking me, but like, have you witnessed physical violence? Where's the physical violence? And I was like, well, that's

I mean, you I saw my brother thrown up against a wall, but so now here I am trying to justify it. Now I feel even worse, like, gosh, someone was called and now they think that I'm being dramatic and it's not really. So all of this I now know constitutes the makings for what is complex trauma, which is ongoing repeated threats to your safety, often relational.

in nature. So complex trauma can be synonymous with childhood trauma, with developmental trauma. And we now know that these ongoing regular occurrences day in, day out, the cumulative effect is essentially comparable to what we see with acute or single incident traumatic to the nervous system.

Sally (07:03.458)
Right.

because that's what a lot of people say, isn't it? They're like, well, nothing bad ever happened to me. And I get that a lot on the calls. And I'm like, it's not what happened to you. It's your experience of the environment. It's your experience of perhaps the grooming is your experience of the push me pull you kind of, because let's face it, our parents have the power when we're

Ingrid (07:10.853)
Yes.

Ingrid (07:31.698)
That's right, that's right. And it's our only experience, right? And so to us, it's like, well, no, this is just normal. This is just day to day life, right? And it is, and you're just surviving it you're probably going to school every day like I was or whatever. There's a lot of these sort of normal markers. I had clothes on my back, we had food, we had all of those things. So I think it's really easy to say, you know, that wasn't traumatic. And here's what I say to that, which is,

There may be someone who grew up in my exact circumstance. And you mentioned grooming. And of course, if anyone knows my story, they know my stepdad went on to groom me to be his girlfriend. And there was a lot more that was going on. But there are people that may have lived my exact circumstance. And they didn't walk away with complex trauma.

So it's not about the event. It's about how the event or the events overwhelmed your particular nervous system and what it had to do to cope and to adapt in order to survive. So for me, it's less about the particulars of what happened and more about what am I living with now? What are my symptoms now? For me, I had repeated dysfunctional relationships my entire adult life. I couldn't have a healthy relationship to save my life.

Sally (08:40.76)
Yeah.

Ingrid (08:50.746)
A core feature of complex PTSD is this negative sense of self. There's sort of like, there's something wrong with me. I don't really fit in. If you really knew me, you would know that I was dot dot dot. So for me, let's just, let's look at the reality of what your life looks like today. That's the marker.

Sally (09:11.286)
Hmm, yeah, that's the markup of what happened to you. And then how did you go about dissecting it all? I mean, it must have, so the, was it a long term thing or was there a pivotal moment for you where you realized?

Ingrid (09:12.498)
That's the mark.

Ingrid (09:26.988)
I'd say maybe both are true in that what I think started it all off for me is that my stepdad died. And so for me, he was the abuser. And even though I didn't live near him or have much contact with him for many, many years, the fact that he was still on this earth meant I was unsafe. That's how my body felt. I didn't know that really until he died and my body suddenly felt safer than it had ever felt my entire life.

Sally (09:56.034)
Did you know that he was your abuser, by the way? So he's interrupt. Yeah, okay. As it was going on when you were younger.

Ingrid (09:58.587)
yes. Yes.

Well, I did. In fact, I organized an intervention with social services years after that first meeting with a counselor at school who said to me, Ingrid, this is reportable what's going on. We need to have a conversation. But even after that, and this is sort of where fawning really comes into play as a trauma response, because me setting up that intervention

was an aspect of the healthy fight response. I was asking for help. I was having a voice. I literally said in a room full of all of the adults that I thought could make decisions on my behalf as a 16 year old at the time, I need help. This is not okay. And the fight response essentially made things worse. Right? So this is what happens to a lot of us.

The fight response either isn't available or it makes things worse. You get more harm. You try to fight back with the people that have more power. Guess what? They're going to exert even more power over you, which is what happened. Particularly in childhood trauma, there's where are you going to go? You can't flee. You can't leave. So the body has to find a way to remain in these circumstances and fawning becomes sort of the last house on the block.

which is like, okay, well, gosh, it kind of must be me. And well, how can I sort of remain in the good graces of the people that are causing me harm and continue to, you know, take the crumbs and pick up the pieces and do the caretaking and smile when you're not happy and all of the rest of it. And so I did always know what happened to me. But the way that it sort of landed at the end of the day was like, well,

Ingrid (11:53.156)
It was still that self gaslighting piece of like, yeah, but you know, I wasn't raped. wasn't, you know, I wasn't this, that, and the other thing. Maybe it really wasn't that bad. And my mom is still with him. She stayed with him until the day he died in order to have a relationship with her. had to have a relationship with him and you just start sort of reorganizing everything, right? It's sort of like,

Okay, it's on me. I'm going to have to figure out how to navigate this. And that's what I did until it was really, I really had convinced myself and I had talked about it on a million therapist couches over the years too. could tell the story, but what I never understood was how that story was still living in me and impacting every minute of every day. How it, how it was still in my

in my body, in my psyche, and without reprocessing that, I was stuck. I was trapped. It didn't matter how much information I had, how many degrees I had, whatever the achievements were, none of this went away. And so you say, how did it start? Well, my stepdad died. And it really, it really led to this calling, this out of the blue calling to write my story, to write what happened.

Sally (13:13.642)
Hmm.

Ingrid (13:17.628)
to write about my first miserable marriage, to write, all of these things, it just started coming to the surface. And it was five years of unpacking all of this. And I had stopped going to therapy at that point in time. It was basically me here where I'm sitting now at my kitchen table, just obsessively, like writing, writing, writing in the shower. I'd have to grab my phone and start dictating, because something else was coming. Like, this feels important, and I don't know why. And years into it, I could finally look at my own story.

in black and white with enough distance outside of my body and onto the page and I was like, I could see it through a therapist's eyes. my gosh, I have complex PTSD, that's what this is. my gosh, my stepdad was a narcissist. This is narcissistic abuse. I never had that language for myself. So once I had it and I realized how hard I'd been working,

Sally (14:00.91)
Mmm.

Ingrid (14:16.389)
to try to sort of, you know, overcome my past and let go and be successful. And that I even had all this information at my disposal and none of it unlocked it. I thought, how many people are living with unresolved complex trauma and don't know it? And so that led to me then publishing my memoir, which you mentioned, Believing Me, which is that story.

Sally (14:38.21)
Mm.

Ingrid (14:40.634)
And it's changed my life, right? It's just led to more and more excavation of myself, of my clients' lives, friends and colleagues. And it's been this major awakening and it continues to unfold. I continue to make more and more sense to myself than I ever did my whole life. It's the best feeling in the world. I have more of myself in my life. I am more here than I have ever been.

more clarity, more of my voice, more of my agency. And it's the most important thing I've ever done, right? And your point, I think a lot of us at this stage in life, like you can maybe see my gray hair if you're watching this, you know, I'm 50 now. And so even though internally I still feel maybe 24 tops, I am not. I am now in my 50s. And I think

Sally (15:16.044)
Hmm

Sally (15:21.614)
I love it.

Ingrid (15:35.29)
A lot of what I talk about in this new book on fawning is unfawning, right? How do we come out of this lifetime of perpetual service to others and, you know, propping other people up and thinking we maybe don't belong and all of the different ways that fawning manifests. I think a lot of us are in this position to being like, well, this is my life. I'm going to live in the center of it and maybe have a voice for the first time ever.

Sally (15:40.366)
Hmm.

Ingrid (16:05.49)
And so there definitely is a lot of overlap there, which is really exciting.

Sally (16:05.506)
Yeah.

Sally (16:10.446)
There's so much crossover, isn't there? And really that's what the menopause transition for me is all about. Yes, there are hormone changes, but I think it's those hormone fluctuations and the eventual decline of the estrogen that really makes our shit come to the surface. And I wonder as well if the whole writing of your book, Believing Me, was possibly part of your early perimenopause journey. I'm not quite sure what happened for you.

Ingrid (16:26.919)
Yeah.

Ingrid (16:38.108)
be surprised because I made this link at this just the other day that I'm starting to get frozen shoulder on the right side, which I also understand is very related to menopause. But you know what I had right before I started writing the book, frozen shoulder on the left side.

Sally (16:53.56)
Okay, that's the mother energy, isn't it? think

Ingrid (16:56.504)
Someone also just told me the relationship, yeah, between whether it's feminine, masculine or mother and father. So I don't know the answer to that. I'm very curious if someone knows, reach out and tell me. But right before I go and do five years of digging on basically what led to, I had to finally look at my relationship with my mother, who was the enabler and who called me a liar and who stayed with him, right? I got this frozen shoulder on the left and now

here I am just finishing this book on fawning and it's the right side that's going through it. So I just find that fascinating and just generally speaking, I know it's all related, right? We talk about like mind, body as though these are two separate things. It's not two separate things. It's one thing. It's one organism. It's like, so I'm sure it all relates.

Sally (17:47.05)
It all links up. Yeah. I love how writing your memoir enables you to find more of you in your body. And I, in fact, as I was listening to your podcast yesterday with Mark, I, I wrote that down for one of my clients who had sent me a huge message about some stuff that was coming up for her around her family. And I said to her, I feel like there's a memoir in there. And then

Ingrid (17:53.266)
Ugh.

Ingrid (17:58.673)
mmm

Ingrid (18:13.298)
Wow.

Sally (18:14.238)
I heard your message and I sent her that quote and she literally took her breath away. So yeah, it's amazing how your work just continues to touch. And these podcast episodes that you record, I don't know when you recorded that with him. Yeah, right. So they live on, don't they? Like this conversation will live on and it will touch somebody's life maybe in five years time, who knows? So.

Ingrid (18:25.67)
Yes, yeah years ago now.

Ingrid (18:37.61)
I love that. The other thing I didn't say, which I want to just touch on is that fawning as a trauma response is not gendered, right? It's sort of an equal opportunity coping mechanism, survival mechanism. I certainly have men in my practice that in their childhood trauma in particular, they became lifelong fauners. And I think more women tend towards the fawn response because we are conditioned to be fauners, right?

Sally (18:41.462)
Yeah.

Sally (19:05.313)
Yeah.

Ingrid (19:07.248)
We see that a lot too. And I think there's some confusion. Some people think it's only women, but I'm like, no, it's anywhere that you're in that hierarchy that you mentioned, right? That there's people that have power over you. it's so it's any system of power. Certainly patriarchy is included, but there's many others. And I go to more of that in the book, but your body understands the pecking order and it understands where it is in the pecking order and what's available to you in terms of keeping yourself safe.

Sally (19:37.676)
Mmm.

Ingrid (19:38.822)
So for a lot of women, it's like, I can't push back, right? My job is to acquiesce, to be sweet and to smile and to be pleasant and to say, thank you very much. When what we're really thinking is go F off. know what I mean? So yeah.

Sally (19:50.572)
Yeah. And you feel that in your body, don't you? It's a visceral sense in your body that you feel that perhaps, you know, when that healthy fight response comes to the surface, the fawn response might take over, or the safety, because fawn is about safety ultimately, and quell that fight response to keep you safe. It's that diminishing, isn't it, that we often do.

Ingrid (20:08.016)
Yes. Yes.

Ingrid (20:14.192)
That's right.

Sally (20:17.654)
to placate our caregivers or whatever, but we hit menopause and sometimes because of the hormone changes and the rage, we can't stop that anymore. Come what may, like the consequences suddenly do not matter. And we could be in the boardroom, you know, I've heard stories of women just walking out of a classroom, they're teachers, they're walking out, they're like, I'm done.

Ingrid (20:25.114)
Yeah, that's right.

Ingrid (20:44.154)
Yes, I love equating it to the rage. I mean, that was one of my first big symptoms. And it was problematic, let's be fair, right, for this like overwhelm in my body to be like, with my husband and my son, the people that love most in the world, I was like, I need to be under house arrest and you guys need to leave because I cannot control what is coming out of my mouth. But I also do love that return of the fire that has been

Sally (21:04.75)
Right.

Ingrid (21:11.92)
you know, watered down for so many of us for so long. And of course, there's going to be a period of like, I don't know what to do with this heat. You know, I don't know what to do with it. But I talk about this in the book, not related to menopause, but related to unfawning. Generally, we have to learn to become fire tenders. We have to learn to sort of sit with those inner sparks and be curious about them. They are likely leading us someplace very important in terms of a

a feeling or a compass or a longing, right? And we have set that aside for so long or squashed it down or not paid attention. It didn't feel safe. So how can we make it safe now to blow on it a little bit, right? Like, yeah, start to tend that fire within. It's organic energy. It's mobilization. It's creativity. It's all of these things. It's like so, it's powerful.

Sally (21:51.918)
Okay.

Sally (21:59.95)
Mm.

Sally (22:08.044)
Yeah, it's really powerful that healthy fight response that is often turned right down in many women, many of my clients as well that I speak to. I think perhaps we should take the opportunity to really go into what fawning is, like the difference between fight, flight, freeze and fawn. Because I know your book cover, you've got fight, flight, freeze in the background and then fawn and jumps out.

Ingrid (22:32.976)
Yeah. Okay.

Sally (22:35.414)
Talk about that in your own words, what's the difference between them and what really is fawning.

Ingrid (22:42.202)
Yeah, I think most people have heard of fight, flight or freeze. And again, they really come out of our understanding of acute single incident trauma. And you can look at the animal kingdom. This is the animal defenses, right? We share with our animal brothers and sisters. And so you go, yes, you see the prey animal, hear a noise and he bolts or the sort of bigger lion that's gonna sort of lean in and fight back.

The freeze response of the deer in the headlights, God, I'm not safe, right? But fawning is a relational trauma response. So it comes out of this complex trauma, the foundation of understanding complex trauma and what happens in these ongoing situations. It can still be in a moment, How many people, or you've seen it in a movie a million times that someone's walking down the street and they're minding their own business and suddenly like,

Sally (23:18.934)
Okay.

Ingrid (23:38.928)
someone comes up and they're like, hey, you or you're being hit on aggressively or there are these situations and suddenly you see usually it's women be like, hi, you know, their voice goes, I need to appease you, right? Fawning is sometimes referred to as please and appease. And it takes a different shape depending on the context. But in that context, I think a lot of women know very well that

Sally (23:56.587)
Okay.

Ingrid (24:08.294)
you know, we, we are overly sexualized, right? As women and our bodies and told that essentially that's our power and our currency. And so when you are being hit on or leaned in on it's sort of, kind of turn to that, like I need to be. Pleasant and maybe even attractive, but also while I need to kind of bring you down in terms of your interest and make enough space so that I can keep myself safe.

So it can look like flirting, it can look all these different ways. But like all the rest of the trauma responses, this is not conscious. It happens in an instant. The body chooses the response that it instinctually thinks will keep us the safest in like a nanosecond, right? So just like the animal kingdom, an animal isn't sitting there going, should I run?

Sally (24:47.711)
Okay

Ingrid (25:07.664)
pondering and bringing in conscious thought. You don't have time for that. When you feel threatened, the body reacts. And so this is what happens with fawning. And so I'll slow this down because here's where I want to really make a fine point. Fawning is a genius adaptation that keeps us safe. I think we are threading a very fine needle when we fawn, which is

Part of us is having to disconnect from our agency and our values even and what we would really want just enough to be able to manage the powers that be to keep ourselves safe. And I go, thank God for it, right? I have so many stories both in my memoir and in this book of myself and the seven clients that I'm featuring in the book where we go, wow, can you believe that my body did that?

Like, you believe that my body kept me safe in that particular way? It's like, it's miraculous. And we are not meant to live in survival mode. We are not meant to live inhabiting a trauma response 24 seven. And what happens when you're with complex trauma and the threat is happening day in and day out, we really start to not know where do I end and where does fawning begin? We start to mistake it for our personality.

Sally (26:12.503)
Right.

Sally (26:31.426)
Yeah.

Ingrid (26:31.558)
You know, have a client who's like, Ingrid, just thought I was being nice. I just thought I was a nice person. Now she is genuinely a nice person, but her niceness was never really a choice. Her niceness was actually compromising her own beliefs and values and goals every step of the way. Right? So there's a big distinction there. And so when I talk about like, are we fauners? It's sort of.

Sally (26:44.397)
Yeah.

Ingrid (27:00.083)
the people that have been stuck in a chronic, fawn response, which is me, for most of our lives and didn't even know it.

Sally (27:10.474)
Yeah, so you lose yourself, you're losing your value system, your sense of identity, your sense of self and of course, un-fawning, I would imagine, I love that phrase by the way, un-fawning, it's genius. I'm imagining is about finding out who you are. Who am I?

Ingrid (27:29.296)
That's right. Yeah. And it's about everything from my opinions, you know, I often talk about it. It's like I was Pinocchio and didn't know it. And one day I go, my gosh, I'm a real live boy. It's like, I'm actually here. I'm dropped into reality. I'm dropped into this body and I can start to take my gaze, which has been habitually oriented to the external environment.

What do you need? What do you need? How can I help you? How do I put out that fire to keep myself safe? And I turn my gaze inward.

Who am I? How do I feel? Do I have an opinion on this? Do I want to smile right now? Right? It's sort of this deep curiosity of being like, whoa, who am I in the world? And it can start with something small, like, well, Sally, where do you want to go to lunch? And it's like, well, do I actually have a preference? You know what I mean? And practicing it, saying it, because really what the fauner has been guarding themselves from is conflict.

Sally (28:34.328)
Yeah.

Ingrid (28:35.154)
Even if it's about where to go to lunch, it's like, well, what if Ingrid doesn't like Mexican food and I don't want to sacrifice the, like the relationship that we're building. Right. So do I really care where we go? I probably don't really care. And we talk ourselves out of being a real person. Being flexible and right. You um, so when we lean in, we start to take a risk. Relational.

Sally (28:50.86)
Yeah, under the guise of being flexible, I suppose.

Sally (28:58.818)
We talk and... Sorry.

Okay.

Ingrid (29:04.75)
risks of like maybe they are going to disagree and then there's this whole new paradigm into like well, how can I stay engaged with another whole person and I remain a whole person and we this is why that fire tending is so important because Real relationship usually involves some level of real conflict But our bodies are still in this old paradigm that conflict the stakes are too high, right? I gotta keep

The stakes as low as possible all the time. So I'm genuinely inviting people into playing a little bit in ways that are safe with like elevating the stakes. And it's terrifying. This is so hard and brave. And it's also why I love taking things like people pleasing or codependency and recognizing that fawning is the root. Fawning is the heartbeat of those.

behaviors and let's talk about it that way because it puts it back in the body. It puts it in this trauma informed conversation, which means, my gosh, of course boundaries feel terrifying, right? Like we make it sound so easy, like, well, Sally, just go and set a healthy boundary. Like just take care of yourself. It sounds of course, intellectually, logically, like it makes all the sense in the world, but we can't do it.

This is why, because our body is filled with terror of what might happen. So understanding fawning allowed me to understand myself in that way and finally have self-compassion instead of self-loathing.

Sally (30:42.21)
Hmm, makes perfect sense. And it's like crossing a threshold, isn't it? So when you've got that risk and I think that's why so many people stay the other side of the boundary. And then of course, you've got the fawn response. And then I would imagine over the top of that, you end up with a freeze response because someone can't move. They can't ignite their power into the other side of that threshold, which is the risk.

Ingrid (30:46.162)
Right? Woo.

Ingrid (31:12.668)
Well, I would say this and different people talk about it differently, but if you kind of look at a spectrum of response, is the sort of most mobilizing and kind of aggressive, right? And then flee is still you're running, you're getting out of there. Freeze is a hybrid. So freeze, although that deer is in the headlights and it can't move, it still has all that adrenaline like you do in fight or flight. It's just crap.

Sally (31:18.627)
Yeah.

Sally (31:40.333)
Yeah.

Ingrid (31:41.562)
It can't move. So fawning is similarly a hybrid. That's why we're stuck because there's a hypoarousal that's disconnecting us from self while there's a hyperarousal that is engaging with the environment and looking like nothing is going on here. So it's a different presentation. It's similarly a hybrid of hyper and hypoarousal, but it presents very differently.

Sally (31:59.054)
Okay.

Sally (32:08.76)
Well, I've learned something new. That's brilliant. I love that. That it's this hybrid method, yeah, of the parasympathetic and the sympathetic being switched on at the same time. Yeah, because I knew that about freeze, but not about fawning. Yeah, I'm definitely going to get your book when it comes out. You can get it on pre-order now, can't you?

Ingrid (32:11.502)
Yes.

Ingrid (32:18.076)
What thread? That's right. Yes. Yes.

Ingrid (32:28.272)
Yes, yes, anywhere you get books, it's available for pre-order and we authors love a good pre-order.

Sally (32:35.662)
But you're biting your nails. Brilliant. Okay, so do you ever get pushback from sort of typical like medical kind of psychiatrists, psychologists who don't necessarily understand the relational aspects of complex PTSD or complex trauma?

Ingrid (32:38.545)
Right.

Ingrid (33:01.094)
mean, personally, not as much because if I'm consulting with folks, they're people that share the paradigm that I work in. But I will say, you know, I am somewhat visible on social media and having conversations there. And people send me things. They send me things where someone is like, can you believe? Because fawning can still be looked at as though it's conscious manipulation. And it's deeply

shaming and stigmatizing. And it fills me with rage when I get these things sent to my inbox. I'm like, they don't get it. What it tells me is that they haven't spent a day in their life in a fawn response or a need to fawn. And I will often find that the people holding these opinions are men and white men in particular. So lots of privilege. It makes sense that they would be like, on, fauners.

Sally (33:45.922)
Right.

Ingrid (33:59.184)
You're just being manipulative here. Are some of our behaviors at the tail end about manipulation? Yes. We're trying to like, quell the fire. Is that our intention? And so the other thing I say is if you want to keep a fawn or fawning, tell them that they're doing something wrong. And then they're immediately going to shape shift to appear to look as though they're doing it the right way. Right. And you keep people trapped. It's the same.

hamster wheel maybe running in a different direction to be like, I'm never gonna let them catch me in that behavior again. So yes, I think there are definitely people that see it differently and that's why I'm just shouting it from the rooftops to be honest. That's why I can't wait for the book to be out. I'm like, can we finally have this conversation? Because this is the conversation that allowed me to make sense to myself.

I'm sharing the lived experience of seven different clients, what their trauma history is, what fawning looked like for them, what unfawning looks like on the other side. It's like a real rich, diverse landscape of what this is. And I don't know, I'm a little bit like, argue with that, right? It's like, what do you...

Sally (35:16.504)
Well, I was just about to say you can't argue with progress if someone's feeling better because of the work that they've been doing, the reprocessing that they've been doing with you, understanding themselves. Because often this isn't about, you know, the journey of recovery isn't about go, go, go, growth, growth, growth. I just need to change my mindset. It's about understanding what happened to you so that you can understand who you are. You can understand the pattern.

Ingrid (35:27.462)
Yes!

Ingrid (35:36.338)
No!

Sally (35:43.414)
behind the drive to betray yourself essentially. And when you understand the pattern and why, you can be so much more self-forgiving. know, the nervous system relaxes and you can sense that in the body. And like you say, you can't argue with that at all.

Ingrid (35:47.888)
Yes. Yes.

Ingrid (36:01.039)
Yes. Right. Right. And you're given the tools that actually work. So that's the other thing. As long as I thought the word trauma didn't apply to me, I couldn't avail myself of all of these incredible tools that we now know really work with trauma. So that's the other thing. go, even if you think, and this happens in my practice all the time, people bristle, like the word trauma. And I go,

All right, fine, we don't have to use that word, but I'm gonna use trauma therapies on them and their life is going to change. And somewhere along the way they go, suddenly the word doesn't cause as much anxiety because they go, wow, look how far I've come.

Sally (36:43.884)
Yeah, it's very interesting that you mentioned that actually about the word trauma, because people do find it prickly and they do think that it doesn't relate to them. Like I said in the very beginning, but when you understand what relational trauma is, then you can pretty much, well, not guarantee, but a huge percentage of women, especially Gen X women, I think will have experienced some kind of relational trauma in this world that we live in. That's very kind of patriarchal at its core.

Ingrid (36:56.454)
Mm-hmm.

Ingrid (37:11.174)
Yeah.

Sally (37:14.19)
So yeah, something that I just wanted to get into with you a little bit before we finish is some of the consequences of maintaining this fawning pattern, especially perhaps as we go through the midlife menopause transition and we've got all those hormone changes occurring at the same time, maybe hot flashing, maybe brain fog, maybe losing our confidence. Yeah, like what?

Ingrid (37:24.112)
Hmm.

Sally (37:42.299)
What can happen? What are some of the examples, I don't know whether you've seen it yourself or your clients, of the consequences of fawning later on in life?

Ingrid (37:53.008)
Well, I think the biggest one, the one that runs through every other symptom is the self abandonment, right? And the sense of betrayal. And so I think what tends to happen for a lot of folks is when they start to really recognize that, it actually takes us into a pretty deep grief. Because what we see is that we've gone missing from our own lives for so long.

Sally (37:59.597)
Right.

Sally (38:13.504)
Okay.

Ingrid (38:21.948)
And that's really heartbreaking. We see the actual nature of the relationships and the dynamics that we've tolerated for so long. And that's heartbreaking. So it's another reason. It's like, on one hand, I'm saying walk towards the fire, the thing that you've like avoided your whole life, because it's going to burn you and walk towards the grief and the heartbreak. It's like, who would do this, right? It does not sound very compelling. And I say,

Sally (38:31.928)
Yeah.

Ingrid (38:49.958)
that with everyone that I've worked with and in my own experience, finally feeling these real feelings, being that present in my body to be able to feel them is part of what has enabled me to reclaim everything else, my voice and my joy and my passion and all of it. It's like, so it's not for nothing in other words. It's sort of like, I feel like it can sound like, why on earth would I wanna take a look at this?

Sally (39:05.667)
Hmm.

Ingrid (39:18.256)
because I want you to take a look at you, because you are the most precious thing that you're excavating and taking back for yourself. So there's a lot in this unpacking that I think can be deeply painful, and in part because it's unprocessed pain that maybe you've been holding for decades.

Sally (39:20.939)
Yeah.

Sally (39:26.348)
Yeah.

Sally (39:41.334)
Yes, so much of it we hold onto, don't we? In the name of not wanting to open Pandora's box because of all the grief and the shame. But as you say, they're the raw and the real emotions. They're actually the vehicle, I think, back to you. It's like that's the U-turn going on right there.

Ingrid (39:50.204)
Well...

Ingrid (40:01.126)
That's right.

That's right. Yeah. There's a saying that I don't know if you're familiar with Dr. Resma Menikim's work. He wrote My Grandmother's Hands. It's a beautiful book on racialized trauma largely in the United States, but he uses these phrases that I love, which is clean pain versus dirty pain. And I think most of us are real familiar with this dirty pain. It's the pain I lived with for so long. Like what's really wrong with me? And I've done all this work on myself and why can't I have a healthy relationship and on and on and on.

We're used to that dirty pain. What I'm talking about in unfaunting is clean pain. It's the pain that delivers you through to the other side, right? It's labor pains, essentially. It's like, I'm giving birth to this version of me that has wanted to be here my whole life and deserves to be here. And so it's painful either way. Let's be honest, right? We've numbed ourselves to the dirty pain.

Sally (41:01.101)
Yeah.

Ingrid (41:03.778)
We found all kinds of ways to cope with it and pretend like it's not really there. But it is. It is. And so moving through it is always going to be better.

Sally (41:17.494)
Yeah, what a great analogy, clean pain versus dirty pain.

Ingrid (41:22.428)
I I reference it all the time. It was like, me in my tracks when I read that.

Sally (41:27.692)
Yeah and like you say we're so good at dealing with dirty pain and numbing out and shopping and drinking wine and eating food and you know all the things all the addictions and no shade I'm not throwing shade to anyone because done it all done all of it and more to avoid dirty pain.

Ingrid (41:40.57)
Yeah, me either, I've done it all.

Ingrid (41:45.65)
Yeah.

Sally (41:48.514)
when actually I just needed to kind of sit with the real pain, the real feelings underneath. I've had some great experiences actually feeling that, the real pain in breathwork sessions and doing journey work and therapy sessions when you actually allow that real pain, when you don't resist it, that's you.

Ingrid (42:01.948)
Mmm

Sally (42:12.524)
That's you that you're experiencing and it's a bittersweetness, but I prefer that kind of pain. I really do. Yeah. Have you ever heard the expression, your suffering? I'm sure you have. And I think it harks back to this, know, what we're talking about here. And I think that gets to a point, especially with women going through the menopause, who have...

Ingrid (42:12.892)
That's right. That's right.

Ingrid (42:26.683)
Yes.

Ingrid (42:38.694)
Yeah.

Sally (42:40.866)
you know, had so much of the suffering, the suffering, one type of suffering. And then it's like the straw that breaks the camel's back. Someone will leave a dirty teacup in the sink and that will be it. You know, it's like, and then you go and find the therapist that can help you or you that the magic weaves itself and the right therapist comes up on your Instagram page or the right book or the perfect moment happens. And,

Ingrid (42:48.818)
Yeah.

Ingrid (43:08.42)
time though too where I want to say that those things are more available than they've ever been and yet they're still not really available to everyone. And so the one thing I would say about choose your suffering is that you have to get to the point where it is a genuine choice because you have the information, right? So for years and years women would go to the doctor and they would say, you're being ridiculous, right? There's nothing wrong with you. Your numbers are fine. Go back home. Or they literally knew nothing about menopause, that all of these symptoms that they're coming with represent this time of life.

Same is true with complex trauma. And so once we have the information, then we're afforded choice that we've never had before. And so that's why conversations like this to me matter so much, because we're arming people with the language that allows them to enter into the conversation.

Sally (43:59.746)
Yeah, yeah, to be part of the conversation that they've not been a part of, even not been invited in and now they can be invited in. They can see themselves in these conversations. Yeah.

Ingrid (44:04.09)
Yes.

Ingrid (44:09.946)
Right. Right. And advocate for themselves in a way that, we couldn't before.

Sally (44:16.908)
Yeah, no that is good. I love that about the age that we're living in even though it has so many other problems. I know. So let's do final thoughts then. What are your final thoughts? What would you love? What would you ultimately love the people that are listening to really take away with them around this idea of fawning, un-fawning, menopause, anything really. What's coming up for you?

Ingrid (44:22.802)
I

Ingrid (44:41.202)
I mean, I think what often comes is coming again, which is I want people to know that they make sense. That if they identify with fawning as a trauma response, that maybe they've lived in their whole life. That their body did this very ingenious adaptation to allow them to survive the circumstances that they were in. And just starting from that place, just to honor that.

you know, you can look at it differently, like through parts work that you had these protectors that came online and they've been protecting you your whole life and they've looked, they don't actually know that now we're in our fifties and that maybe we don't need that same level of protection that we can, we as our whole being can now be the protector and step in and take that role. But that every moment that led up to this one, I go,

your body was doing its very best to keep you safe. And I always honor that. And we also don't have to live in survival mode. And my greatest hope is that people have genuine flexibility, not performing flexibility of like, I don't care where we go, but like genuine flexibility in their life to be able to say, I choose to lean in here and I choose to lean out here.

Sally (45:41.975)
Yeah.

Ingrid (46:01.062)
because I'm so connected with myself that I know what works for me and what doesn't.

Sally (46:07.156)
Yeah, and it's kind of a calm feeling, a calm flexibility, knowing that I can, I can assert my choice here if I want to go for Italian or if I want to go for Mexican. Yeah, I have that, that solid, you know, nothing bad's going to happen or, or wondering, well, something bad might happen, but I'm going to do it anyway.

Ingrid (46:15.504)
Yes.

Ingrid (46:19.185)
Yep.

Ingrid (46:24.518)
Nothing bad is gonna happen.

Ingrid (46:32.245)
take care of myself in the face of that, right? If something bad does genuinely happen, well, that's important information. Then how do I take care of myself in the face of that? If you lose it, I know this is a simple example, but if you lose a friendship over Mexican food, it's not really a friendship that you want to keep engaging probably.

Sally (46:49.568)
Yeah, yeah sure everything is information yeah the way that people respond to us is information yeah you're right. Brilliant thank you so much Ingrid for for this wonderful conversation. Where are you most active on social media?

Ingrid (47:07.352)
Instagram and Substack now. So Instagram is the shorter form stuff and more longer form stuff over on Substack.

Sally (47:14.232)
Brilliant, and when is your book coming out?

Ingrid (47:17.2)
September 9th is Pub Day. Yeah.

Sally (47:19.338)
Okay, so lots of time to pre-order, but do go and pre-order it. So I want people to get it. Follow your staff. Honestly, like the information that you put out has really popped some light bulb moments into my head. And just, know, when you get those moments of resonance, you feel it in your body, don't you? It's a visceral feeling in your nervous system. So.

Ingrid (47:23.641)
Yes, thank you.

Ingrid (47:32.853)
that's terrible.

Ingrid (47:40.464)
Yes. That's right.

Sally (47:44.3)
Yeah, I'll put all of your links in the show notes, Ingrid. Thank you so much. It's been incredibly illuminating and I hope the listeners have enjoyed it and really been able to see themselves in some of this and share it, share it with all of your friends because that will be really helpful. Yeah, thank you, Ingrid.

Ingrid (47:57.818)
Yes.

Ingrid (48:01.252)
Thank you, Sally, so much.