The Devastating Trauma Response No One Talks About
- LaFern Cusack
- Oct 7, 2025
- 3 min read
Updated: Oct 9, 2025
Dr. Phil and psychologist Dr. Ingrid Clayton uncover the hidden trauma response that drives people-pleasing and how to stop abandoning yourself to feel safe.
"When we stop people-pleasing . . .people will not be pleased."
Understanding Fawning
We’ve all heard of fight, flight, and freeze. But according to psychologist and bestselling author Dr. Ingrid Clayton, there’s a fourth trauma response quietly shaping lives, fawning.
“Fawning is the trauma response that hides in plain sight,” Dr. Clayton says in her conversation with Dr. Phil. “It’s not kindness, it’s survival. It’s what happens when fighting back or leaving would make things more dangerous.”
Dr. Clayton explains that fawning isn’t weakness, it’s wiring. It’s the body’s attempt to stay safe when fighting or fleeing isn’t an option. But over time, this coping mechanism becomes self-erasure.
For many, fawning looks like people-pleasing, over-apologizing, or staying silent to “keep the peace.” Dr. Phil sums it up best: “People think they’re being kind when really… they’re disappearing.”
Fawning: Why the Need to Please Makes Us Lose Ourselves — and How to Find Our Way Back
Do you apologize to people who have hurt you?
Ignore their bad behavior?
Befriend your bullies?
Obsess about saying the right thing?
Make yourself into someone you’re not . . . while seeking approval that may never come?
You might be a fawner. Devastating Trauma Response: Fawning
Chapters: Fawning: Why the Need to Please Makes Us Lose Ourselves — and How to Find Our Way Back.
00:00 — Intro: People-pleasing as a nervous system survival pattern, not a personality flaw.
00:06:06 — Origins in Childhood and Trauma Re-enactment: How early relational trauma teaches appeasement and compliance as protection.
00:10:13 — Recognizing Fawning: Signs and Patterns: Apologies, over-explanation, shapeshifting to earn safety or approval.
00:12:09 — Boundaries, Conflict, and Real-World Consequences: Why saying “no” feels dangerous and how chronic peace-keeping erodes authenticity.
00:14:35 — Recognizing Fawning: The hidden cost of self-erasure and confusion between kindness and fear.
00:16:25 — Cultural and Clinical Reception of Fawning: How modern psychology is redefining fawning as a legitimate trauma response.
00:16:28 — Understanding Fawning The Devastating Trauma Response: The body’s instinct to preserve connection by suppressing self-expression.
00:17:27 — From Survival to Internal Safety and Agency: Learning to regulate your nervous system and rebuild self-trust.
00:19:38 — Therapeutic Approaches and Somatic Methods: Why healing isn’t cognitive, it’s somatic.
00:20:54 — Creating Internal Safety: through self-awareness and embodiment.
00:23:44 — How To Reclaim Power and Identity: after years of self-abandonment.
00:25:53 — Repeating Trauma Patterns until the nervous system learns a new response.
00:30:23 — Embodied Healing Practices for trauma survivors.
00:35:44 — Reducing Shame and Building Self-Trust: “I can choose me now” — shifting from shame to self-validation.
00:37:25 — Recovering Your Voice after years of people-pleasing.
00:39:29 — Boundaries, Conflict, and Real-World Consequences: What healthy conflict looks like for recovering fawners.
00:44:27 — Why Fawning Is Only Now Entering mainstream trauma psychology.
00:49:44 — Moving From Survival To Self-respect — and choosing authenticity over approval.
00:52:05 — Choosing Yourself: Dr. Phil and Dr. Ingrid on reclaiming agency, truth, and self-worth.
About Dr. Ingrid Clayton
Ingrid Clayton, PhD, is a writer and clinical psychologist in private practice in Los Angeles, California. She’s the author of Fawning: a powerful to the often-overlooked piece of the fight-flight-freeze reaction to trauma, Believing Me: Healing from Narcissistic Abuse and Complex Trauma, where she uncovers her personal experience of childhood trauma from a psychologist’s perspective, and Recovering Spirituality: Achieving Emotional Sobriety in Your Spiritual Practice. Ingrid is a regular contributor to Psychology Today, where her article “What is Self-Gaslighting?” is considered an essential read!
With a Masters in transpersonal psychology and a PhD in clinical psychology, Ingrid has a holistic approach to psychotherapy, incorporating trauma-informed modalities like Somatic Experiencing, EMDR, and other experiential ways of working with the nervous system. Ingrid has been using a relational approach to therapy since 2004, bringing her whole self to the work—including her personal experience, intuition, and education. This enables her to be in real connection and collaboration with her clients.
More About Dr. Clayton: Website: https://www.ingridclayton.com/ Insta: https://www.instagram.com/ingridclaytonphd/ TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@ingridclaytonphd FB: https://www.facebook.com/IngridClaytonPhD YT: https://www.youtube.com/@IngridClaytonPhD/
If you grow up needing to appease to stay safe, you don’t stop when you grow up. You just call it love, loyalty, or hard work. - Dr. Ingrid Clayton
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