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

by Meg Josephson

It was during these months of recovery that I was forced, whether by that guy’s rock-hard forehead or by the universe, to stop numbing myself, stop drinking, stop distracting myself. I had to stay with the emotions, memories, and wounds that I had ignored for so long, that had been tucked away into little dusty corners of my body and mind.

People-pleasing is the behavior we engage in when we fear that we’re disappointing someone, that we’re

in trouble, that we feel unsafe in some way. It’s the behavior that falsely soothes the queasy feeling that we’ve done something wrong. We can’t do the inner work if we can’t

Women in particular are conditioned to overextend, overexplain, overapologize. We’re caretakers. Nurturers. Peacekeepers. We’re taught to be good girls, cool girls, to agree with everything and everyone, and to give Uncle Richard a big hug, for goodness’ sake, even if he makes us wildly uncomfortable. We’re taught to not be too much or want too much, so we learn to get used to being unsatisfied with our lives. We’re taught to meet everyone else’s needs before our own, and along the way we lose the opportunity to get to

know who we really are, what we need, what we like and prefer.

the

fight response is about being aggressive toward the threat to make it go away (e.g., yelling or beating it up). The flight response is about physically leaving the environment or relationship (e.g., running away or ghosting). The freeze response happens when we can’t physically leave, so we do the second-best thing by mentally departing and blocking out what’s going on (e.g., dissociating, numbing ourselves, constant daydreaming). But the fawn response? Oooooooh, the fawn response is about becoming more appealing to the threat, being liked by the threat, satisfying the threat, being helpful and agreeable to the threat—so that you can feel safe.

We learn that the other person’s comfort is more important than our own, that we can’t feel okay until the other person is okay. We learn that, in order for us to feel safe, we need to keep the peace, whatever it takes. And as a result, we’re disconnected from questions such as What do I need? What do I think? What do I want?

Compassion is about authenticity, doing something because it feels good to be kind. It’s not compassionate if we’re constantly abandoning ourselves in our relationships. Being nice is often easier and a way to avoid conflict, but it can create long-term resentment if we’re constantly sacrificing our needs to make someone else happy.

Motivation matters. Why am I doing this? Am I saying yes because I want to or because I’m scared this person will be upset if I say no? Am I complimenting this person because I mean it or because I’m trying to make them like me? When we can pause before engaging in habitual behavior, we can get clear on the motivation behind it.

This hypervigilance carries over into emotional monitoring, which means we’re constantly scanning other people’s emotional states to gauge what they may be feeling so that we can adapt.

Anxiety

is like an alarm system in that sense. Your body has wisely learned to look out for certain cues that set off the alarm (e.g., mood changes, body language), and when it notices them, the alarm starts blaring whether or not the threat is there. Even when you’re perfectly safe, your body is physiologically responding as if you’re in danger, waiting for the lion to pounce.

When we’re often left to feel unsafe, unheard, unloved, or unseen by those who are supposed to make us feel safe, the effect is called complex trauma.

For people who are part of the LGBTQIA+ population, fawning is a common safety strategy.

Remember: The fawn response is a necessary, adaptive mechanism for survival. Sometimes, we do need to fawn.

The child who’s called “dramatic” is made to feel like they’re the problem, but really, they’re often just the one communicating the problem that others aren’t willing to look at.

There can be parts that were loving and other parts that hurt, and the loving parts don’t negate the reality of the hurtful parts and the hurtful parts don’t negate the love.

The point of this work isn’t to stay infinitely stuck in a place of blame and bitterness toward your parents or your past but to acknowledge and objectively understand how your early life experiences have affected you, so that you can begin to

from them. The point is to finally allow yourself to acknowledge the emotions that others didn’t. The point is to see that your parents’ actions and reactions weren’t your fault; they were reflections of your parents’ own unprocessed pain—their own inner children who were aching. Th...

Learning to fawn is especially necessary in certain childhood and adolescent dynamics where fawning is learned not just in society but within the four walls of a home that should have been a refuge, a place to put down the armor. Most people pleasers were “parent pleasers” first. The following are some client stories that explore common dynamics in which fawning is learned and the roles that each client learned to play as a child and continues to play as an adult. You may see yourself in one of these vignettes, or maybe a nugget from each will resonate with you. There’s no one-size-fits-all reason for fawning, because you have your own unique experiences, identities, and nervous system. What matters more is the feeling that weaves your past into the present, your current experience of neglecting yourself as an unconscious way of trying to protect yourself. Fawning looks different for everyone, but the fundamental feeling is there: My safety comes from pleasing you. I can’t feel safe until I know you like me.

That was my fault, not yours, and I’m really working on managing my frustration” paired with the parent’s active effort to self-soothe in the future.

The Peacekeeper believes: It’s easier to shove my emotions down than to risk upsetting the other person. I need to prove to other people that I’m good because I fear that I’m bad. When people are in a bad mood, it’s my fault. I shape-shift depending on what others are feeling.

For Theo, this looked like being the Performer, using humor and relentless positivity as strategies to ward off his parents’, especially his mom’s, tension and depression. He just wanted her to feel better. As an adult, he thinks he’s responsible for making people feel happy and struggles to be “himself” because it’s like he’s always onstage. Because of this, he has a hard time letting people get to know him beneath the surface.

The Performer believes: I’m personally responsible for making other people happy. I need to butter people up to make sure they like me. It’s unsafe for me to relax. I’m always performing, and I need to “keep up” the version of myself that people expect me to be.

Teachers often told Sophie, “You’re so mature for your age!”—and she was, because she had no choice but to grow up quickly. She spent so much of her time and energy meeting her family’s physical and emotional needs that she forgot she had needs of her own.

As an adult, Sophie overextends herself and then feels secretly resentful. She struggles to set boundaries and gets all her feeling of value from being nurturing and helpful. She was a parentified child—fulfilling part of the parent role from an early age. Sophie grew up to be a hyperindependent adult: she feels like she has to do everything on her own and struggles to ask for help. She’s the therapist-friend, the person everyone goes to with their problems, but she feels like her problems and emotions are burdens.

As a parentified child, she developed a harsh inner critic, which has served as a necessary stand-in to give her the parenting and guidance she wasn’t able to get while she was busy caring for everyone else. She also finds herself being critical of people who aren’t as self-sufficient as she is, in part because she’s envious that they didn’t have to grow up so quickly. Maybe you grew up with a single parent or had a parent or sibling with a disability or a severe mental health issue. Maybe you grew up with immigrant parents who relied on you to help them assimilate into the new culture. Maybe you experienced financial scarcity or just grew up with parents who couldn’t emotionally fill the parental role. There are so many circumstances that create the role of the parentified child, and that role is always the same: in order for you to feel safe and secure, you had to put your needs aside from a very young age. The Caretaker believes: I thought that if I cared enough for them, they’d eventually care about me. I need to manage other people’s emotions so that I can feel okay.

Other people’s needs are more important than my own. My value is in being helpful and taking care of others.

It felt like the only ways for her to connect with her family were complaining and gossiping. She craved a deeper connection with her parents, but when she tried to talk about something real with them, they’d wave her off, poke fun at her, or change the subject. It’s not that they were mean; they were just so focused on themselves, and she didn’t have any extended family to connect with on a deeper level.

Alicia found comfort by being a Lone Wolf. She learned to rely on herself not out of desire but out of necessity. She received the most praise from her parents when she wasn’t “bothering” them. “You’re so easy,” they’d say, and that was how she made them happy. This Lone Wolf behavior seeped into all facets of her life: she played only individual sports (mainly tennis) so that she’d continue to be seen as succeeding on her own, without the support of others, and so she couldn’t let anyone down. She never “bothered” her parents with anything, whether she was struggling with a homework assignment or experiencing crippling anxiety as a teenager. She felt safest alone in her room. As an adult, Alicia isolates. Because she learned that her needs wouldn’t be met, she doesn’t want to burden anyone with hers, leading her to keep her distance in relationships. The closer people want to get to her, the more she fantasizes about being alone, because the possibility of having her needs seen and then rejected once again feels too painful. She’s lonely but craves deep connection and will constantly look outward for approval and validation to soothe the part of her that wants to be seen. The Lone Wolf believes: Love should feel really hard to get. I avoid conflict by never allowing myself to get close to people. It’s unsafe to let people really get to know me.

to

cultivate a sense of internal safety. When relationships fluctuate, body language shifts, or life throws stressors at you, you have a place of inner stability to return to and to consciously reconnect with yourself, your needs, your body, and your emotions.

The Perfectionist believes: My emotions are too much, and I’m never doing enough. I need to be 100 percent “on” in order for people to like me and not leave. I need to be perfect to be loved, so I’m constantly trying to impress other people. At my core, something is wrong with me.

Chameleon. She started watching the shows that the cool crowd talked about, listening to the music they listened to, doing her hair the way they did theirs—not to be part of their crowd but so they wouldn’t have anything to make fun of her for. This marked the birth of Rachel’s fawn response, in order to avoid conflict and harm and maximize approval by morphing into someone the bullies wouldn’t target.

Most of the case studies on abuse in this chapter have been about forms of emotional abuse and neglect that often go unnoticed. For people who have experienced any form of abuse—whether sexual, physical, emotional, or narcissistic—at any point in life, fawning is a common, brilliant, and underrecognized strategy. It doesn’t have to look like being a chameleon—it can look like putting all your energy and attention into pleasing the abuser, spending more time with them, defending them, doing anything in your control to make them happy. This can include sexual fawning—complying with unwanted sexual advances or even initiating flirtatious or sexual encounters with someone who feels threatening. When others say, “Why didn’t you just leave?” they don’t understand the fawn response’s role in surviving abuse. Staying in an abusive or toxic relationship, even when there’s a part of you that knows it’s

The Chameleon believes: I must blend in and make myself small to be safe. I’m not allowed to say no. I don’t know who I am or what I want. Being seen or perceived is dangerous.

You can use what’s available to you right now—your body, your emotions, and your inner experience—as a blueprint for what you could have been feeling then. We can use what’s happening in the present moment as a way to heal from the past. All we have is what’s here right now, and that’s enough.

Constantly worrying what people think of you, if they like you, if they’re mad at you Overextending yourself, not setting boundaries (and then feeling resentful) Avoiding conflict at all costs Constantly fearing getting in trouble or being seen as “bad” Constantly fearing that you are bad and you’re just fooling everyone Constantly seeking external approval or validation Silencing your needs for the comfort and happiness of everyone else Feeling hypervigilant of people’s emotions and moods Overexplaining yourself as an attempt to feel heard or understood Feeling like everything is your fault, and then overapologizing Being indecisive because you don’t want to disappoint anyone or because you genuinely don’t know what you like or prefer Not trusting yourself to make decisions Having trouble identifying your needs and speaking up about them Never feeling good enough; feeling unworthy of your accomplishments Constantly feeling like you’re “performing” and trying to impress others and prove yourself to them Feeling like you’re a chameleon in relationships

Fawning, at its core, is what we learn to do to avoid being abandoned or rejected and to maximize feelings of love and safety. The irony is that, in an unconscious attempt to avoid abandonment, we end up abandoning ourselves. For us to appease others to the degree that fawning requires, we have no choice but to fully disconnect from our own emotions, sensations, and needs. We’re forced to withhold expressions of our sadness, fear, and anger to prevent conflict or negative reactions from our caregivers. But as we’ll learn, these emotions, sensations, and needs don’t just disappear—they go inward, toward ourselves, in the form of self-criticism and self-loathing. When we’re stuck in a constant fawn response, the behaviors just listed seep into all facets of our lives. The survival part of us thinks in black-and-white terms: It’s better for me to fawn every second, in every relationship, just in case.

As we’ll learn in the following chapters, when we’re stuck in a trauma response, our bodies are frozen in that stressful event or period, and they will react from that place.

Oh yes, I’ve seen this before. I know how to do this. I know how to act with this person.

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?

Grief isn’t just about losing someone when they pass; it’s also about what you didn’t have. It’s wanting to be nurtured but not having a parent who can nurture you. It’s watching other families be with one another on holidays in a way you’ve only dreamed of. It’s wanting to call your parent just to talk but knowing that they won’t listen. It’s a feeling of I want to go home when you’re in your own family’s house. It’s knowing that you

would be a family-oriented person if only you had a family to be that person with. It’s letting go of that last sliver of hope that someone could change and be the person you need them to be. It’s letting go of the hope for a childhood, a family, a parent relationship, a sibling relationship that you didn’t have but deeply wanted. This, right here, is a necessary step in the fawner’s healing process. We can’t jump straight to acceptance and compassion without first acknowledging the ways in which it hurts, too.

It’s a lingering weight that’s always there, constantly changing form as you enter into and move out of different seasons of life. There’s grief to be felt in realizing that your parents aren’t capable of being the parents you need(ed) them to be. There’s grief in realizing that your parents aren’t your safe space or the people you call in an emergency. There’s grief in realizing that you are your caregiver’s emotional support system but they won’t or can’t be the same for you. There’s grief in realizing that you shouldn’t need to beg to have a close relationship with your parent. There’s grief in becoming a parent yourself and not having a role model to look up to, relying on what you didn’t have

to create the vision of what you want for your own family. Acknowledging this grief is a crucial first step in your healing.

maybe it’s about changing your relationship to the relationship. Maybe externally, in the relationship itself, there won’t be any noticeable changes. Maybe the work is an internal shift, releasing expectations

that the relationship can or will look any different than it does, and processing the pain that goes with that realization. It’s not that grief disappears but that it starts to feel normal, and life forms around it—but we must first acknowledge it.

When I did need someone, no one was there, so I’ve learned that it’s