Fawning Quotes

“here is where there is some good news for fawners: We are brilliant caretakers. We have loads of resourcefulness. We are creative and compassionate and willing to go to any lengths. And when we turn all of that back on ourselves”
― Ingrid Clayton, Fawning: Why the Need to Please Makes Us Lose Ourselves—and How to Find Our Way Back

“Backed into countless corners and then blamed for the ingenious ways we’ve adapted, women have been sexualized, then called sluts; victimized, then scapegoated; never seen as whole people with bodies reflexively keeping us safe, for good reason.”
― Ingrid Clayton, Fawning: Why the Need to Please Makes Us Lose Ourselves—and How to Find Our Way Back

“Because fawning is a relational trauma response, while it manifests in an individual, it plays out relationally. Fawning perpetuates the patterns in which we learned to fawn. As a short-term intervention, fawning is hard to fault. But when we are stuck in a chronic fawn response, we are turning our lives over to the most primitive part of ourselves. Remaining in survival mode has serious long-term consequences.”
― Ingrid Clayton, Fawning: Why the Need to Please Makes Us Lose Ourselves—and How to Find Our Way Back

“A definitive symptom of childhood trauma is trying to get a difficult person to be good to us.”
― Ingrid Clayton, Fawning: Why the Need to Please Makes Us Lose Ourselves—and How to Find Our Way Back

“Although we have great capacity to heal on our own, there is a saying in trauma therapy: “Wounding happens in relationship, and healing happens in relationship.”
― Ingrid Clayton, Fawning: Why the Need to Please Makes Us Lose Ourselves—and How to Find Our Way Back

“This is what unfawning often looks like in the beginning, telling a radical truth we didn’t think we could tell (once enough internal and external safety has been established). A risk that feels bigger than we might survive.”
― Ingrid Clayton, Fawning: Why the Need to Please Makes Us Lose Ourselves—and How to Find Our Way Back

“Avoiding conflict is avoiding intimacy, but it’s sometimes the safest bet. And in that initial safety, we can see how perpetual fawning becomes the thing that keeps us stuck. It keeps us from actual safety. From enlarging our capacity for healthy conflict. From healthy attachments. From engaging with reality. From healing. We can wear those blinders for decades, and they ultimately conceal a lot more than conflict—they conceal our unprocessed trauma while we’re attempting to rise above it. Thinking that we can.”
― Ingrid Clayton, Fawning: Why the Need to Please Makes Us Lose Ourselves—and How to Find Our Way Back

“Healthy conflict involves tolerating some upset, but most fawners don’t know what healthy conflict feels like. We don’t know if we are in relationships that can support it, and we don’t want to risk trying. Our bodies are keeping a perpetual eye out for new threats, so even potential upset is overwhelming. We might interpret hints of disappointment as It’s happening again, and automatically say we like onions rather than face being violently kicked out of the house. Building new capacity means facing the fear and overwhelm we’ve instinctively turned away from, for good reason.”
― Ingrid Clayton, Fawning: Why the Need to Please Makes Us Lose Ourselves—and How to Find Our Way Back

“Every decision or opinion is an opportunity to upset someone by not doing things their way.”
― Ingrid Clayton, Fawning: Why the Need to Please Makes Us Lose Ourselves—and How to Find Our Way Back

“Perfectionism, in truth, is anxiety masquerading as discipline. In this context, it aims to keep us relationally safe by ensuring we are “perfect.” We achieve in order to please. So many fawners are longing for validation, to be seen, and it seems safe to do it through success, achievement, some obvious marker of our worthiness. But perfectionism is just another way to mask our fears. It ultimately keeps our worries firmly in place because no amount of success erases their origins. And then the perfectionist thinks, Maybe next time…”
― Ingrid Clayton, Fawning: Why the Need to Please Makes Us Lose Ourselves—and How to Find Our Way Back

“Due to our anxiety, fawners overfunction and overcommit. We volunteer, take on extra work, take the load off for others. We can’t tolerate the anxiety when no one else steps up, and this leads to—you guessed it—more anxiety. We can’t do it all, and while being of service is a wonderful thing, fawners don’t know where the line is, when we are of service to others—at the expense of ourselves.”
― Ingrid Clayton, Fawning: Why the Need to Please Makes Us Lose Ourselves—and How to Find Our Way Back

“Because of these fears, fawners have trouble asserting ourselves, asking for help, or expressing opinions. We have difficulty setting fees or asking for money we’re owed. We’re afraid of taking up too much space in the overhead bin. We don’t want to disappoint people or “get in trouble.” Most people want to be liked, but fawners need it like Linus needs his security blanket.”
― Ingrid Clayton, Fawning: Why the Need to Please Makes Us Lose Ourselves—and How to Find Our Way Back

“Survivors of complex trauma are constantly assessing people’s moods, scanning our surroundings for potential threats. We notice subtle cues and facial expressions. We see things coming from a mile away. Our hypervigilance has us walking on eggshells, being preoccupied with the worst-case scenario, not sleeping well, startling easily, overanalyzing, and waiting for the other shoe to drop.”
― Ingrid Clayton, Fawning: Why the Need to Please Makes Us Lose Ourselves—and How to Find Our Way Back

“fawning is a relational trauma response—dependent on the relationship we are in at the time.”
― Ingrid Clayton, Fawning: Why the Need to Please Makes Us Lose Ourselves—and How to Find Our Way Back

“And here is where the fragmentation of complex trauma can happen. As though I were two different people sandwiched together: the one who knew what happened—who knew it was wrong and that I wasn’t to blame—and the one who had to take responsibility just to survive it.”
― Ingrid Clayton, Fawning: Why the Need to Please Makes Us Lose Ourselves—and How to Find Our Way Back

“I’ve been gaslighting myself for most of my life. It ran so deep that I became a psychologist who specialized in trauma but still couldn’t believe or reconcile my own traumatic past. It was like a ghost that haunted me, as I kept thinking, I’m being too sensitive, I’m probably overreacting.”
― Ingrid Clayton, Fawning: Why the Need to Please Makes Us Lose Ourselves—and How to Find Our Way Back

“fawners “are usually the children of at least one narcissistic parent who uses contempt to press them into service, scaring and shaming them out of developing a healthy sense of self.”
― Ingrid Clayton, Fawning: Why the Need to Please Makes Us Lose Ourselves—and How to Find Our Way Back

“children can’t learn to regulate emotions they aren’t allowed to have.”
― Ingrid Clayton, Fawning: Why the Need to Please Makes Us Lose Ourselves—and How to Find Our Way Back

“if your nervous system was oriented to safety in a context of abuse and neglect, you likely felt like you couldn’t survive unless you devoted significant emotional resources to appeasing your parents and other family/caregivers. Like a fish who can’t conceive of life outside its bowl, fawning becomes a condition of living in a toxic system.”
― Ingrid Clayton, Fawning: Why the Need to Please Makes Us Lose Ourselves—and How to Find Our Way Back

“It was about the women. How we are abandoned at our most vulnerable, ridiculed when we ask for help, shamed when we take care of ourselves. How standing up for ourselves often means losing partners, jobs, and friendships along the way. How we are told to smile, be sexy and play along, don’t be too smart, elevate the men in our lives.”
― Ingrid Clayton, Fawning: Why the Need to Please Makes Us Lose Ourselves—and How to Find Our Way Back

“there are power structures everywhere we turn that reinforce, reward, even require fawning. We can’t just say, Stop doing that! when we continue to live in contexts that encourage, and actually necessitate fawning.”
― Ingrid Clayton, Fawning: Why the Need to Please Makes Us Lose Ourselves—and How to Find Our Way Back

“This is how the body seeks power in powerless situations. If I broke it, I can fix it. This also sets up the rescuer dynamic as a proxy for secure attachment. We learn that safety and connection happen only when we prioritize someone else’s needs.”
― Ingrid Clayton, Fawning: Why the Need to Please Makes Us Lose Ourselves—and How to Find Our Way Back