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

by Meg Josephson

whether it’s a younger version of you or a fictional character, it will be easier to remember that those thoughts are not you, that you are the one listening.

the harsh inner critic became someone who had your back, a voice of guidance to protect you, to parent you, or to help you get ahead of the criticism you might’ve received from others. If you’re critical of yourself first, you can be “perfect,” someone whom no one will find fault with. Think of this critic as your inner adviser, a concerned friend working tirelessly to keep you safe. Your inner critic put tons of pressure on you and learned what sorts of things attracted criticism or sparked conflict, and it learned what to say to get you to prevent those things from happening. The inner critic is trying to protect you, but that doesn’t mean you always need protecting. So many fawners have such harsh inner critics because there once wasn’t space for their uncomfortable emotions like anger, sadness, and fear. Those emotions couldn’t be expressed and they had to go somewhere, so they went inward, toward the self, manifesting as harsh self-criticism.

Compliments can provoke anxiety when we’re stuck in a fawn response with low self-esteem because they challenge our perception of what’s true and familiar.

So much of fawning is making other people feel comfortable, or even superior, so that we can feel safe. A compliment feels like a threat to the body: Deflect so they know you’re humble and good! Don’t feel threatened by me; I’m just a nobody. This is the same reason fawning can make you feel unworthy of your accomplishments.

The fawn response is about finding safety by doing more: if you reached the point where you felt “good enough,” that protective part would feel scared because it would mean you could stop trying so hard.

Because fawners often struggle with low self-esteem, it can feel like no accomplishment is impressive.

If you were able to achieve it, then it must not be that important or have been that hard, leading you to consta...

Achievements may bring a sense of relief instead of joy, because those achievements were merely an obligation, another milestone you had to ...

She wants to reject herself before others can reject her. She doesn’t think she’s enough, so it feels absolutely unbelievable to her when someone else thinks she is.

she was judging other people through the judgments she had about herself.

it’s more accurate to say that our focus creates our reality. What we pour our attention into is what shapes our lives.

Our thoughts are not actions. What we do with our thoughts and with our emotions—that’s our responsibility and that’s what’s in our control.

relating to that part of yourself with shame and hatred means that you’re replicating the cycle that was modeled for you. If you’re screaming at the scared part of yourself, wishing it would go away, of course it’s still scared.

By wanting it to go away, you’re still telling that scared part that something is inherently wrong with it. The scared part isn’t something to get rid of; it’s a part of you that’s starving for love and acceptance. If you don’t soothe that inner voice, the need to soothe and protect it will never go away.

Talk to this part of yourself the way you’d talk to a toddler. The next time you accidentally break a glass and your inner voice starts berating you, pause and shift the dialogue: Oops, that’s okay. Mistakes happen. You don’t need to be perfect.

The next time this younger part feels scared, you might just say to yourself, That’s okay. You’re safe.

You can relate to this scared part, frozen in time, in the way that you wished your parents had related to you when you were growing up. You can give it the love, acceptance, and care that it’s been waiting for.

this pressure to feel calm in my practice was what was causing so much of my suffering. My relationship to mindfulness practices shifted when I realized that they were not about trying to feel calm but instead about allowing whatever was arising to be there, without trying to change it, control it, or judge it.

mindfulness leads us to being deeply and authentically connected to ourselves, to our internal world, and to the world around us.

Being present doesn’t mean feeling good all the time.

it’s simply a practice of paying attention, of noticing what’s happening right now. When you do get caught up in a spiral of judging yourself for thinking, don’t judge yourself for judging yourself. Just notice that voice, too.

The inner voice will always find something to be dissatisfied with, something to comment on and critique, something that you need to be working on in order to be as close to “perfect” as you can (and the closer you get, the farther ahead the finish line in front of you just keeps getting pushed).

mindfulness is really providing us with the ability to be with reality. Mindfulness trains us to deal with what life throws at us with a sense of inner ...

we’re altering how we relate to the stress so that we don’t make things harder than they need to be. Practicing mindfulness doesn’t change what’s happening—it changes our capacity to be with what is.

When we find ourselves overthinking, we don’t necessarily need to dig into the thoughts themselves and pick them apart. We can instead notice, I am overthinking, focusing more on the shape of the thoughts, the rhythm of them, than on the thoughts themselves.

The mind wants to get pulled into the details of the thoughts in an attempt to figure them out.

By labeling the experience as self-doubt, Charlie was able to remember that these were just thoughts, not the ultimate truth.

Another key idea in Buddhism is that we tend to cling or attach to what feels pleasant

have an aversion to what feels unpleasant

and feel nothing toward or even detached from things ...

We like what fe...

and we don’t like what feels u...

(Notice, Invite, Curiosity, Embrace, and Return)

is a tool to keep in your pocket to help you in moments of anxious panic.

Fawning conditions the mind to rumina...

Do I actually want to go, or do I just not want to sit with the discomfort of feeling guilty about being honest about what I need?

By allowing myself to pause, I was able to keep myself from reacting from a dysregulated place and return to the present.

Just because it’s a thought doesn’t mean it’s the truth.

I feared that I was a chronically angry person, but I began to see how not chronically angry I was since I’d been living on my own. To my surprise, I was quite happy a lot of the time. It was the environment and the situations I was put in that elicited so much anger within me.

If you remained totally focused on making sure other people were happy and managing their moods, you didn’t get the opportunity to know the vastness of your emotions and how to coexist with them.

How you relate to your emotions is a window into (1) how your caregivers related to their own emotions and (2) how they related to your emotions when you were growing up.

If we witnessed our caregivers’ emotions seeming out of control, we naturally learned that it was unsafe to be with someone who was feeling angry, sad, annoyed, anxious—and to manage their emotions as a way to return to safety.

And if our caregivers couldn’t manage or hold their own emotions within themselves, they would react to our emotions the way they internally related to their emotions. So then we learned:

When I feel anger, or sadness, or other emotions, it makes people upset. It causes conflict. Love is taken away from me, or my emotions are completely ignored. I receive the most love and care when I’m happy, so I need to be happy all the time in order to f...

So we never learn how to live with these uncomfortable—and human—emotions. We may pretend that everything is okay even when it’s not, because we have learned that there’s no space for our emot...

Fawning Is Trying to Keep Us from Feeling Uncomfortable Emotions

What emotion am I trying to protect myself from?

If we’re fawning, we won’t need to feel the fear that may arise when we sit down to have an honest conversation.

So much of this healing, then, is slowly and safely increasing our ability to experience discomfort and to identify that as what it is.

Healing is the practice of slowly getting comfortable with being uncomfortable. Because we’re hardwired to resist discomfort, we tend to jump right into co...