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Ever Forward Radio with Chase Chewning

EFR 921: Why You People-Please: Understanding the Fawning Trauma Response (Toxic Hope vs Reality) with Dr. Ingrid Clayton

Ever Forward Radio with Chase Chewning

Chase Chewning

Education, Self-improvement, Health & Fitness

5.0 • 947 Ratings

🗓️ 26 January 2026

⏱️ 71 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

This episode is brought to you by LMNT, Audible and Strong Coffee Company.

You've probably heard of the trauma responses fight, flight, and freeze — but there's a fourth response that may be shaping your life without you even realizing it: fawning.

In this episode, we sit down with Dr. Ingrid Clayton, PhD a clinical psychologist, trauma therapist, and author of Fawning, to understand why people-pleasing, over-accommodating, and self-abandonment are not personality flaws — they're intelligent survival responses your nervous system learned to keep you safe.

You'll learn how fawning develops when fight, flight, or freeze aren't available — especially in childhood, unequal power dynamics, toxic relationships, and work environments where your safety or stability feels at risk. You'll also discover how living in a chronic fawn response can quietly disconnect you from your needs, your voice, your body, and your sense of self.

This conversation helps you recognize why "just setting boundaries" often feels impossible, why you may disappear in relationships, and why choosing yourself can feel terrifying even when you know something needs to change. Most importantly, you'll hear why none of this means something is wrong with you — you make sense.

If you've been stuck in survival mode, waiting for permission, approval, or safety outside yourself, this episode will help you understand what's been happening beneath the surface — and how you can begin moving forward by reconnecting with who you truly are.

Follow Ingrid @ingridclaytonphd

Follow Chase @chase_chewning

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00:00 – Introducing the "Fourth F": What Is Fawning?

02:16 – Why Fawning Is Not a Conscious Choice

03:40 – Power, Safety, and Why Fight or Flight Aren't Always Options

07:43 – Living in Chronic Survival Mode

09:27 – When Fawning Becomes Your "Personality"

12:09 – Empaths, Hypervigilance, and Nervous System Trauma

13:40 – Apologizing to People Who Hurt You

16:22 – Befriending Bullies as De-Escalation

20:29 – Gender, Power, and Why Context Matters

24:03 – Ignoring a Partner's Bad Behavior

26:43 – Toxic Hope vs Reality

28:27 – Presence as a Path Out of Fawning

31:24 – Reality as a Regulating Force

35:02 – Fawning in the Workplace & Overgiving

37:26 – Choosing Yourself for the First Time

40:29 – Becoming Who You Already Are

43:56 – Why "Just Set Boundaries" Fails Trauma Survivors

48:02 – Listening to Yourself as the Path Forward

51:12 – Writing Fawning & Seeing the Bigger System

55:06 – Somatic Tools to Regulate the Nervous System

01:02:27 – Health Costs of Chronic Fawning

01:04:03 – Self-Abandonment Explained

01:06:19 – What "Ever Forward" Means Through Trauma Healing

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Episode resources:

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0

The following is an Operation Podcast production.

0:03.6

Hi, I'm Dr. Ingrid Clayton.

0:05.1

I'm a clinical psychologist, a trauma therapist, and a trauma survivor.

0:08.9

This is Ever Forward Radio.

0:17.5

We've all heard fight, flight, or freeze.

0:20.4

Some people might say that that is a very typical

0:24.2

human response to almost like daily situations. But Dr. Clayton, your work is presenting a fourth

0:31.9

area. This aspect I never heard of called fawning. It's very overlooked, you're saying. So what is this fourth FF?

0:39.6

What is fawning? And how really does it differ from this traditional fight, flight, or freeze

0:44.6

response? Yeah. So fawning has been hiding in plain sight essentially. So although it is a trauma

0:51.5

response, it's a relational trauma response, it looks different from the

0:55.8

others in terms of fighting back seems sort of obvious, right? You don't want this thing to happen.

1:01.8

Flight similarly. Fawning has us leaning in to the very relationships that are causing us harm.

1:09.6

So it's sometimes called the please and appease response.

1:13.2

Pete Walker is the psychotherapist who coined the term fawning in the context of trauma. He says it's a

1:19.6

response to threat by becoming more appealing to the threat. But we know,

1:25.6

it's a response to threat by becoming more appealing to the threat. But we know, it's a response to threat by becoming more appealing to the threat.

1:32.5

So sometimes that looks like appeasement, smiling, flattering, flirting even.

1:37.5

Sometimes that looks like caretaking.

1:39.5

I'm going to sort of soak up all the shame and the relationship and do all the,

1:43.1

you know, the heavy lifting.

1:45.4

Is that a conscious choice, do you think, or people kind of subconsciously doing this because of,

...

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