Are You Mad at Me?: How to Stop Focusing on What Others Think and Start Living for You

by Meg Josephson

Overexplaining yourself as an attempt to feel hea...

Feeling like everything is your fault, and then...

Not trusting yourself to make decisions

Having trouble identifying your needs and speaking up about them

Constantly feeling like you’re “performing” and trying to impress others and...

Feeling like you’re a chameleon in ...

Fawning, at its core, is what we learn to do to avoid being a...

The primitive part of our brains—in other words, the part that is trying to keep us alive—tells us that safety lies in familiarity.

We unconsciously gravitate toward situations that we’ve seen before because we know how to deal with them, even if they’re toxic. We fulfill these fawning roles because that’s what we know how to do.

We’re often unconsciously drawn to relationships that remind us of past relationships (especially parental ones) that caused us pain, or that we didn’t feel good enough in, so that we can unconsciously re-create those relationships and finally “fix” them and be enough for someone,

And we try harder and harder, we do more and more, in the hope that one day, the person we’re with will change and we’ll feel we are enough.

What draws me to this person? Do I like them because they remind me of what I know, or because I genuinely feel safe and enjoy how I feel around them?

Does this feel uncomfortable because it’s unsafe, or is it just unfamiliar?

If you only ever witnessed anger in extreme ways growing up, you learned: Anger = unsafe. I must avoid anger at all costs, avoid conflict and disagreements. Anger is something to be feared.

anger was punished or dismissed, or we were told not to feel it. So from that we learned: Anger = bad, and when I feel anger, something is wrong with me for feeling it.

Acknowledging anger is one of the most important things for fawners to do. Anger is an emotion that has been swallowed again and again, for years and years.

The healing begins when we can acknowledge our inner teenager who’s starting to make sense of it all, or our inner self of whatever age comes to mind, and say to them, “You’re allowed to be hurt and angry. Your anger makes sense and it deserves to be acknowledged. You’re not bad for feeling angry.”

Waiting for an external cue to allow us to move forward puts our healing in the other person’s hands and often comes from a fantasy that that person will change.

Through this fantasy of the other person apologizing or changing, the mind is seeking false control over pain.

We can start healing when we stop trying to get our pain validated by the people who caused us harm.

we look for external validation from those who aren’t emotionally capable of seeing the pain they caused and may never be capable of doing that in this lifetime.

Repeating yourself or trying to prove yourself to someone who’s emotionally immature will not work and will keep you stuck in the cyc...

You can begin to move forward when you can accept this reality—and give the younger version of you the validation you’ve been craving: I believe you. What you went through was really hard, and it wasn’t your fault. You didn’t deserve...

With a parent, or with anyone who is staying the same while you’re growing, it hurts.

maybe it’s about changing your relationship to the relationship.

Maybe the work is an internal shift, releasing expectations that the relationship can or will look any different than it does, and processing t...

Having caregivers who don’t provide a safe emotional connection can lead to deep emotional loneliness in childhood and adulthood, feeling like you need to hide who you are because it was once risky to fully show yourself

I cultivated the skills of taking care of myself

so that I could mother myself.

“I don’t need anyone; I can handle everything on my own,” that often translates in my therapist-brain to When I did need someone, no one was there, so I’ve learned that it’s safer to keep people at a distance than to risk letting people in and being let down (again).

Fawning keeps us from being vulnerable, honest.

Fawning pushes away authentic connection for the sake of short-term harmony.

I tell them that the goal of this work isn’t to silence the anxious voice—trying to silence it only makes it louder—but to start becoming aware of it, attaching to it less, and soothing it.

The most important aspect of your healing is your own awareness. It’s realizing that you aren’t the voice inside your mind; you’re the one who notices it.

The fact that it’s a thought doesn’t mean it’s the truth.

And even still, something can be true without being the truth.

our brains are hardwired to worry. This voice in our heads is often scared and is bringing past experiences into the present moment.

The experience of what we’re feeling is real, but the thoughts surrounding those feelings aren’t always true.

A key idea in Buddhism is that worrying about or fixating on a scenario gives us a false sense of control.

When we are adults, this protective mechanism manifests as overthinking:

We repeatedly play out the worst thing that could happen to control how we’ll feel if it does. If the worst-case scenario brings up a lot of fear, or anger, or guilt, we’ll imagine that scenario again and again so that we can figure out what to do with the discomfort of those emotions.

Research has actually found that while we may believe thinking about the worst-case scenario will help us emotionally prepare for it, such thinking often does not alleviate our distress when the anticipated event actually occurs. Instead, it increases anxiety and stress during the anticipation phase without significantly reducing the emotional impact of the event itself.

Fixating on the worst-case scenario repeatedly doesn’t make that scenario any easier if it even happens; it just adds more suffering.

People-pleasing is an unconscious way of trying to feel a false sense of control

People-pleasing makes us feel safe by allowing us to feel in control of the narrative, of people’s perceptions—all to avoid our own discomfort, to avoid our own emotions, which feel scary to sit with.

Underneath the need to control is discomfort. By fixating, we put off looking at and feeling the uncomfortable emotions that linger beneath the surface. On the other side of that discomfort is freedom.

This background noise often comes from the internalized voices of the people who raised us, as the recycled words of our parents speaking out of dysregulation. From the time we are at an early age, these voices become the subconscious beliefs we hold about ourselves.

and our brains look for information to affirm these beliefs, to prove them to be true.3 So if your conditioned belief is When people are in a bad mood, it’s my fault or No one likes me, your brain will surely find ways to prove these beliefs are true, like scanning people’s faces to see if they thought your joke was funny (and overanalyzing their reactions).

Meet the harsh inner critic many of us developed in childhood as a stand-in for the support we needed.

These parts are like little beings who live within you, trying their best to keep you safe and to keep the “system” within you running smoothly.