Hello and welcome to being well. I'm Forrest Hansen. If you're new to the podcast, thanks for joining us today. And if you've listened before, welcome back.

Many people struggle with people pleasing, overthinking, or the general fear that they've done something wrong.

At the heart of these patterns is what we call the fawn response, a survival strategy where we keep ourselves safe by keeping

other people happy. This behavior makes a lot of sense in some circumstances, but it can also

lead to some problems for us, hypervigilance, self-abandonment, and a general sense that we're

disconnected from our own wants and needs. To help us understand these patterns and how we can work with them a bit better, I'm joined by Meg Josephson, a therapist and author of the new book, Are You Mad at Me? So Meg, thanks for doing this today. How are you? I'm doing well. Thank you for having me. Super happy to have you here. We were talking a little bit before we got started. You mentioned you're living in the San Francisco Bay Area, which I also live in. You're also a podcast listener, which I thought was so cool. I was so flattered when you said that. That's so awesome. And I would love to actually start with your own experience here. Earlier on in the book, you wrote something along the lines of what I once saw self-sabotage

was actually self-protection. I thought that was such an interesting line, and I was hoping that

you could explain that a little bit. Yeah, well, I liked your intro of the fawn response. I think

you said that very well and sharply. That sometimes we need to fawn sometimes we need to appease and

be hyper attuned to what's happening around us and it's really when we're carrying it into

situations and we're doing so unconsciously when we're carrying it into situations where we don't need

it that's when it leads

to behaviors that we might view as self-sabotage. But to look at it through the lens of how did

this once protect me, I find that to be a much more sustainable framework and helps us really

get to the root of that. So for me personally, I grew up in a home that

had quite a lot of volatility and my dad specifically struggled with addiction when I was growing up.

So I just found myself needing to be on high alert a lot of the time, needing to be really attuned

to how he was feeling. And I was just kind of always holding

my breath and tiptoeing around him. And so being a fauner and being good and being perfect

and being what he wanted me to be or what I thought he wanted me to be was really helpful and protective for a while. And I found

when I left that environment, when I had, you know, graduated college, I was out in the world,

that feeling and those tendencies were still there. They were just changing forms. So I was now overthinking, why did they put a period instead of an exclamation point

...