Why People-Pleasing Makes You Lose Yourself (And How to Get Back)

Sometimes we wonder why setting boundaries feels impossible. Or why we keep ending up in the same kinds of relationships that don't serve us, even when we know better. In this episode, I sit down with Dr. Ingrid Clayton, a psychologist and trauma therapist who has lived this work herself. She breaks down something that most of us have never heard. The fawning trauma response. And suddenly those patterns that used to feel confusing or shameful actually start to make sense. This isn't about tips or tricks. It's about understanding yourself in a way that frees you to show up differently in these incredibly difficult conversations. I can promise you the way that Ingrid explains it will stick with you long after this episode ends. Let's jump in with the new book. What would you say your hope is with the message in the book?

Oh, my goodness, it's the best question. My hope is that people who have lived a long time where they cannot find a healthy relationship to save their lives, where they feel like they've tried everything people tell them, set boundaries and raise your self esteem, and it all just feels unavailable to them. My hope is that they will know that they make sense and through this trauma informed lens, that they will be able to find the tools to finally give them the flexibility to give them the flexibility to give them the reciprocal relationships they've been longing for. But mostly a healthy and loving relationship with themselves.

Oh, my goodness, Ingrid. There's so much to unpack here, Kwame.

Just a few.

Wow, where do we even start with this? I think for me, one of the most interesting things that you said is letting them know that they make sense.

Sense. Well, I come to you as, you know, as a clinical psychologist and a trauma therapist, and I've been in this field for decades, but, but largely I come to you as a trauma survivor who didn't know she was a trauma survivor, largely because we didn't have the lens and language of complex trauma when I was, you know, growing up and interning and in graduate courses. And quite frankly, we don't really have the lens and language of complex trauma, at least in the United States, in a real legitimate sense in terms of a diagnosis so complex. PTSD was added to the International Classification of Diseases, the manual there, And I think 2018 or 19, and in the DSM, sort of the diagnostic bible here in the US there is no complex PTSD. So to back that up for just a second, you know, when we think of trauma, I think a lot of us still think of, of these acute, obvious, you know, incidences of, of threat and harm. A natural Disaster, car crash, sexual assault, for instance. Complex trauma is ongoing relational trauma that you can sort of liken it to water torture, like, drip, drip, drip. So it might not be as obvious externally. Things like neglect, emotional abuse, generational trauma, you know, emotional, emotionally immature caregivers. There's a whole host of things. Racism, classism, poverty. All these things can create the same experience physiologically in the body as these acute traumatic events. And this is called complex trauma. So I worked so hard to try to overcome my past and my childhood. I did all the things, I took all the prescriptions, I sat on a million therapists, couches, and I still felt stuck. And now I know that I was stuck because we weren't looking at the impact of the environment, what it did to my sense of self, to the way I showed up in the world, and we weren't looking at the impact to my body. So in other words, trauma is stored in the body. It's a nervous system experience, not this conscious prefrontal cortex, rational idea of like, well, Ingrid, just go and set healthy boundaries. It's right. I can't march into behavioral change in order to change the wiring that's, you know, under the COVID so to speak. So understanding myself through this particular lens was the thing that made me make sense to myself and all of my clients make sense to themselves. And so this is the thing I want to offer people. It's sort of an update on what we've long called codependency, or people pleasing. These terms that I think place all of the problem in an individual. Instead of zooming out and looking at the context and going, oh, these are dysfunctional environments. And the individual actually adapted in this genius way to survive it. Excuse me, but then we're calling that person dysfunctional because, in essence, they're soaking up all the shame from the system that they're living in. And we're continuing to pathologize and stigmatize people rather than honoring the roots, the origins of what is actually a survival mechanism called the fawning trauma response.

Tell me if this is landing, because it sounds like, number one, there's an element of validation and normalization. So it's validating to understand, hey, there is some validity in your story. And also, you're not uniquely broken. There is something that led us to this point. And then also I think there's a more empowering lens that you're providing because you're recognizing, hey, we are in many ways in these circumstances where we don't even recognize how toxic and problematic they are. And we develop these adaptive responses for those circumstances. But then when we are removed from those circumstances, what was one time, at one time adaptive has now become maladaptive. And as a society, we are stigmatizing the person for their adaptive response and not recognizing the resilience that it took and then addressing that from a more trauma informed lens so they can accept where they currently are and then make the changes later.

Best synopsis of all time. I'm going to add that to the back of the book, the fawning book, because that's exactly it. I'm so glad you're. You're absolutely picking up what I'm putting down.

Yes. Okay. And now let's take a walk down memory lane. I want you to talk to the older version of Ingrid, Ingrid from the past. And let's say if we could go back in time and give her this book and she put everything into action, what would have changed for her if she were to have that opportunity?

I often get emotional. I'm not shy of coming to tears when I feel moved. But you're speaking to something so important, which is so common with complex trauma, is that healing often is the act of going back in time and almost rescuing these parts of yourself that were stuck. Right. Who still believe they're in these same environments that still have the same access to coping, which isn't much. Right. That. And so there's a reason that I start this book with me as a 13 year old and I'm in our hot tub at home and my stepfather is coming out and this is the man who ultimately was grooming me. I now know I couldn't use that language for a very long time, but my body felt the threat. My body felt the threat. And unlike fight, fight, fight, flight or freeze, which we often think of in terms of trauma responses. Right. I'm a child, I'm 13, he's twice my size. Fighting back is not available to me. You think about that. In a lot of systems, fighting back is either not available or would make things worse. Similarly with the flight response. Where am I going to go? We lived in the mountains in the middle of nowhere, right? These were my people are reliant on our caregivers for longer than any other species. Freeze is a common trauma response. But often with complex trauma, we have to get up and go to school and go to work and there's some level of, you know, you have to show up day in and day out. And fawning allows us to have enough mobilization to where we can lean into the Very environments that are causing us harm. And so I knew in that moment as a 13 year old girl that I was not safe. But what I instinctively also knew, because all trauma responses are not conscious. They are instinct, they're reflexive, they come online without our conscious awareness. I did not like this man. I needed him to like me in order to stay safe. And what this led to, time and time and time again was this feeling that I was filled with shame. Because I know that my behavior is not matching my values and how I truly feel, right? So when you talk about this long term maladaptive experience of chronic fawning, this is one thing that a lot of us feel. It's like we're holding all this shame. What is wrong with me? Why can't I just, you know, dot, dot, dot, fill in the blank, stand up for myself or, you know, have some sense of agency or have a voice? I would go back to myself as a 13 year old, as a 16 year old, as a 25 year old in the world, wondering, why can't I be attracted to and date healthy partners, right? Why is my chemistry so connected to this pattern over and over again? Well, I now know it's connected because as my body and brain were developing, I was living in a chronic trauma response. It was in the driver's seat. My basic sense of relational safety in the world was married to a feeling of threat, exploitation, abuse and neglect. So guess what my body needed to feel in order to have a semblance of safety in the world. Abuse, exploitation, unavailability. All of these things, right? We talk about this in a very casual way, like, well, you know, your chemistry is what's familiar, what's comfortable. But beyond that, what was familiar and comfortable to me were these threads. So I would go back to myself in every single point in time and I would say where we began this podcast. First of all, Ingrid, you make sense. Your body was genius. It did exactly what it was meant to do in the moment to help you survive what was a very threatening, overwhelming situation. And I am here now. Chronological, present tense. Me, I'm going to be 51 years old this week, Kwame. Like, I am here now and you are not alone. You do not have to continue to live this way. And this is, this is the heart.

Of the work that is so powerful. And you know, there's, as you were saying this, what I'm going to say is going to sound slightly comical and trivial, but also, I think it really, like, exemplifies how pervasive this challenge is the thing that kept on coming to mind is when I'm scrolling on Instagram or TikTok or whatever and I see these memes of people saying, kind of making light of the fact that, oh, I always seem to be caught in these toxic relationships. Oh, why can't I just date the nice guy? I need somebody to be mean. And now I'm thinking based on what it is that you're saying, it's almost like now looking at it through this lens, I'm getting a very dark view into the, the childhood that they may have had that led them to be wired in this way. And it, it's, it's kind of, it's taken the comedy out of those memes for me, Ingrid, because the, it just helps us to recognize how many people find themselves in this position but don't acknowledge or recognize where it comes from and the potential damage it could cause throughout their lives.

That's right. And even if they recognize consciously, oh well, this was my childhood. And often I have people come into my practice and they can say, well, these are my attachment wounds and my attachment style. They can say it from a very sort of telling my story, disconnected kind of place, but they have yet to reconnect with their body, with the emotional process that tends to need to happen in terms of what we call reprocessing that trauma. And there are a lot of modalities that help us do this. Things like EMDR or somatic experiencing or internal family systems. There are particular trauma therapies aimed to bring our story level awareness down into our body so that we can reprocess re experience and sort of, you know, if you look at trauma, I think about this roller coaster where you're going up to the very top and it's like your body gets stuck here at the highest arc of the roller coaster. It's still experiencing the threat. Like it's happening now, it's happening now. And I can tell you, yeah, I know what got me up to the top of the roller coaster. But what most people do is don't come down the other side to where we can reinhabit ourselves from a place of flexibility and agency.

I love this. This is super helpful. And it also makes me think too, because one of the things I always say about the negotiat and conflict resolution industry is that a lot of times you're giving recipes to people who are afraid to get in the kitchen. It's not that they don't know what to do, it's that there's something inside that holds them back from doing it. It's not when, when it comes to saying no and setting boundaries semantically, it's really quite simple, but it's the what it takes to actually say it that makes it so hard. And it seems like, tell me if I'm getting this right, Ingrid. It seems like it's not just the ability to say no and set boundaries within the relationship. It also seems as though depending on your upbringing and your. The trauma that you've experienced in your life, there might be something within you that gravitates toward these types of relationships that are fundamentally asymmetrical and somewhat toxic.

Yes, well, because you make another point there, that if I'm in a chronic fawning response, my entire relationship to safety lies outside of my own body. In other words, can you validate what I'm saying? Do you give me permission? Do you like me? Do you endorse this message? Right. So we are, we are disconnected from self almost at all times. So when you say to someone, we'll just go say no. And they are disconnected from themselves. They are hardwired to look for. You know, we manage moods and states. We're hyper vigilant, we're empaths, right? We're sort of noticing like, oh, oh, oh, they disagree. I need to bring them in agreement so that I can exhale. When your whole sense of safety resides outside of your body, telling someone just to go and say no is likely going to re traumatize them. Because guess what's going to happen when they don't get a positive response? Their body is going to go, see, see, it happens again. I'm not safe. I can't have a voice. So before we give them their marching orders, we have to build a new internal sense of safety. It's like building a foundation, a relationship to self. For a lot of us, maybe for the first time in our whole lives, then and only then can we find our no. Because we have at least a little bit of a sense that I'm going to say no. And even if they're mad at me, if they're coming for me, if there's retaliation, I'm going to be able to tolerate the bad feeling or the consequence or whatever it is. So there's a lot of tolerance building in this work so that we can ultimately discern is this discomfort or is this danger, Right? And so the alarm bells for a long time have been ringing no matter what. Nope, it's dangerous. Can't be your full self in relationship. You're going to be steamrolled and squashed. Right. But over time, as we start to practice and grow this capacity, this is where we start to learn experientially. Not learn from a textbook case, learn in our bodies, where we go, okay, this is hard. And I feel guilty and I feel selfish and I feel mean. I'm not being helpful, but I can tolerate those feelings of discomfort because I'm actually holding onto myself in a way that is giving me self esteem and giving me more of a chance at these reciprocal relationships that I'm longing for. Right. So it's a bottom up process, not a top down process.

Yes, this, you know what, and the next, the next insight is going to be terrible for business. So as the, this is not Kwame, as the CEO of the American administration, it's. This is your pal Kwame. I'm wondering here, I'm wondering if we are kind of as an industry fundamentally misguided in how we are approaching this. Because I think there are people who have no problem setting boundaries. And they have, they don't. They might not be the most articulate, they might not be well coached in how to set boundaries, but they don't have any problem setting boundaries because of the foundation that they have. And so I'm wondering if we're approaching it completely in a misguided way because we're talking about the skill set, not really the underlying foundational challenge. Because if you address the underlying foundational challenge, then you appear as the type of person who has the resilience and foundation necessary to set that boundary. So you don't even necessarily need the skills because you have the psychology behind you operating in the right direction.

And I would argue actually that the skills come online automatically when the foundation is built. They are an extension of having a sense of authority and autonomy and agency. You become, you have access to your full system. Suddenly you are more creative and more joyful and more assertive and you can take up space not from a role of dominance or from overcompensation, but from a, like, I know who I am, I know what I bring. I think these skill sets become available to us automatically. So I agree wholeheartedly that we're approaching it in this, it's like this upside down world. Right. And here's the other piece that I think is true as a therapist that speaks to that same idea and it's also embedded in this book, Fawning, where it's sort of like, I give prescriptive advice, there is a place for, for that. But I do it Sparingly. Because what I'm ultimately wanting to do is restore one's relationship to the wisdom that lies in their own body. Wisdom that I. Even if I saw them once a week, six times a week, all day long, I could never tap into your wisdom and your body, Kwame. Like, it's absurd when we think about it. So I don't think telling people what to do is often the most useful thing. It perpetuates a chronic fawn response. Because guess what? Now your safety lies in my body, the one who has all the answers. And I'm going to give them to you. It keeps these hierarchies in place. It keeps us stuck. Oh, gosh. The hand on the face.

Yeah, you're so right. This is mind boggling. Yeah. Because I just think about so many. Me too. I mean, my first book was on like my journey, overcoming people Pleasing and. But people were very surprised at like the 80% of it was talking about the self work and how I treated it like a phobia, you know, And I. I remember one time I was coaching a woman who was saying, I, I have trouble negotiating. I'm a terrible negotiator. I can't stand up for myself, those type of things. And I knew she had children. And I said, if somebody was treating your children inappropriately, would you have trouble stepping up and saying something? She's like, no, I would not. I said, okay, see, it's not an issue of not knowing what to say. And there's something inside of you that's holding you back from saying what needs to be said, you know, and. And for the people who are listening and say, okay, well, damn. I was hoping for some quick tips on how to set boundaries. Now we really realize we have to. We have to change our perspective and figure out how do we put ourselves on this journey to becoming the person that we need to become. He can step up and say what needs to be said when it's time to say it.

Yeah, well, I think, listen, I think even this conversation so far, even though people may not recognize it, has already given them so many tips and tricks. Because what I'm basically saying is when we understand truly where these behaviors come from, it reduces the shame. And when the shame can be reduced, we suddenly have already so much more access to. To being in the world and doing things differently. Right. Because what keeps the fawn response in place is this feeling of shame. We're mired in it. We're broken. You use that language. This is what almost every client comes into my Office saying, like, there's something wrong with me. I'm fundamentally broken. So it's reducing the shame. And then in small but mighty ways, it's about, if we're talking about growing this internal sense of safety, I often will just literally put my, I have a dress that allows me to do today, literally put my hand on my heart. But skin to skin, like you do when a baby is born, right? You take a baby and you put it right on your chest when they're born because it releases oxytocin, it creates this bonding hormone, the sense of connection. The same thing we can do by ourselves, for ourselves. You put your hand on your heart. Skin to skin. It's the self compassion, it's I am here, I exist, I. And immediately I feel the change. Even just talking to you as I'm, as I'm doing this and these types of practices of slowing down and noticing, I'll tell you, I'm using the language noticing and I do it intentionally. In every trauma training I've ever been to, we don't say, what do you think about that? Tell me your opinion. We say, what are you noticing right now? What are you experiencing? This type of language already brings us out of this, like disconnected, over analyzing, like intellectualizing headspace down into the body. And the body might be going, oh, I feel nervous in my belly, or I feel numb, I feel disconnected. And these, this is the lens that's going to allow us to connect with ourselves differently and start to build connectivity, this internal capacity. So just even noticing, it's mindfulness, essentially, right? Noticing even when you're driving and you're in the world, what does the steering wheel feel like in my hands? What am I feeling right now in my body? And along those same lines, this is from Peter Levine's work in Somatic Experiencing. He's done this amazing research on trauma and trauma responses and taking, you know, our lot of our knowledge about, about fight, flight and freeze come from the animal kingdom, right? We all share these same patterns, these same instincts. And what animals also have is this deep connection to their environment through the senses, right? They're always connected to the earth. They're scanning the horizon and they're listening, right? They notice what they see. And the senses are the language of the nervous system, so we can practice these same things. Honestly, how much are we all in autopilot and, you know, scrolling on our phones and all of this? It's just, even in this moment, maybe for the listener, look around your room and just notice what you see. Notice if Your eyes want to linger in any particular place. And what you're experiencing in your body, this brings us into present time and place. Okay, so for someone who's stuck in a complex trauma reaction, it's like part of me still 13, back in that hot tub, going, it's not safe. But when I scan my environment and I even hear literally right now, I wouldn't have noticed a moment before, but the trash collector's coming and he's picking up the trash. I go, oh, that's where I am in time and place. That's right. He didn't come yesterday because it was a holiday. Right. Like, I move into present time and this is what lets my body know that I'm safe because I can feel, I can feel experientially that I'm safe. It's not a like, well, come on, Ingrid, you know, no one's coming to harm you right now. Sure, my, my brain knows that, but my body is bracing all the time. So feeling the chair underneath me, it's like I can sink into myself. Right. So these are sort of practical tips and tricks, but they, they function and feel a little bit different depending on the person, because we all have a different body, different nervous system, different personality. I'll suggest something to one client and they'll be like, oh my gosh, that feels amazing. I can feel into myself and someone else is like, yeah, I don't like that. You know, And I just go, okay, cool, we're moving on. We're gonna. It's, it's a practice. It's. It's more like an experiment than it is do these four things because I've told you to do them and, you know, then you'll be free.

I like how. I like your prescriptive voice. That's great. And so a couple things coming to mind for me. I'm thinking this sounds a lot like interoception, right? The, the bill, like the body knowledge. Also reminds me of that book, why Zebras don't get Ulcers.

Oh, I've only heard of the title, but I haven't read it.

Yeah, well, same with me.

So.

Because essentially there's good stuff in there. Oh, for sure. And I think the central thesis is the idea that when zebras every day, their life is in danger and they would just have a life threatening event with a cheet or a lion, whatever it happens to be, and then a second later, like they are just, you know, eating grass like nothing ever happened. They're just completely fine. And it's an Example of what it means to truly stay in the moment. Because you're right, there's so much of our time is spent time traveling, either just creating, fearing what could potentially be or being re traumatized through the the room. Continuous rumination of what happened in the past and the ability to just tap into the present and connect with our body is so fundamental. But I feel as though as humans have evolved as, as a species and we think about society and technology, we have maybe evolved as, as a species, but kind of devolved individually where we're our percent yes. It's like our goal is to be less human.

Yes. The other thing that that zebra likely does, and you can see this for the dog owners out there, right when, when you see your dog get spooked and it's terrified, what it does probably right after is a full body shake, right head to toe. Just like it gets it out of the body. This is a part of what restores it back to a sense of like, okay, I'm fine, right? For the zebra to go back and just start eating grass, that's what we have overridden. That's why we're at the top of the roller coaster all the time. We can't come down. We're not processing what happened. We're like moving on. And quite frankly, there are a lot of things that support us staying at the top of the roller coaster. It's like this perpetual sort of toxic positivity. Like, come on, that's no big deal. Just buck up. Like you got this. We're not allowing people to drop into the actual pain or the grief or the overwhelm to feel it and process it. We're like wanting to override it even with this, you know, overly positive sort of mindset. And no one can be positive all the time. That's not real, it's not human. We do this with spirituality too. My very first book, a million years ago, was on spiritual bypass. Right? This idea that if you use all the right spiritual practices or ideas, you can kind of transcend the human condition and always lean into forgiveness and acceptance and okay, I would love to live there all the time, but quite frankly, I've not met one human being on this planet who can. And so offering these things as a prescription, it's keeping people stuck. You know, there was this, there was an article in the New York Times this last week and the title was something like, is self help really just turning us all into a jerk? And they referenced my book Fawning. And I was like, oh, well, thank you for the nod. And not in the spirit of my work at all. Because if you look at what we're talking about right now, I would love if I had a magic wand that allowed everyone to just sort of effortlessly move on and be unscathed and not have a negative feeling. But the problem is, actually, we've been trying to do that for too long. And so am I encouraging people to be a jerk? No. Am I encouraging them to drop into the full human experience, which might include finally being able to say something like, ouch, that hurt, or I didn't like that, or I wish you wouldn't have said, said that. Like, we're restoring a full sense of self. And yeah, I think this. This conversation sort of highlights the need for why.

Yes. And let's talk about toxic positivity, because I can think about. I'll be honest with myself. There are times where I realize, okay, being positive is good. But that was. That tipped towards the toxic positivity side, either with myself or with other people, because at some point we just are, you know, meanies who invalidate the opinions and feelings of other people. You know, when. When I'm. When I'm trying to offer support and my support negates the experience of somebody else. Right. So. So let's talk about this, because it's. We. We have to have a little bit of positivity. There's nothing wrong with positive thinking, but there are. There's certain times where we cross the line, where it becomes really, really problematic. So what. What is the difference between, between positivity and toxic positivity?

Well, in terms of responding to someone, you know, in that relational example that you gave, I think rather than giving a positive spin, we can say, how can I be helpful right now? What would be supportive? Are you wanting solutions? Are you just wanting me to listen? We can be really curious about what the other person needs. Most of the time they know. Know. Most of the time they know. So when we rush in with positivity, like, I got it, you know, often we don't got it at all, and we're robbing the person of having the process that they're actually wanting to have. And, you know, I think internally, because I do this to myself, right? We take this, this language from the culture and we go, well, I shouldn't feel bad and I should rise above and come, you know, pick myself up, buy my bootstraps and all of the things. And if you are doing that and you are finding that you're not actually experiencing the freedom that you're longing for. If you still feel depleted and terrible all the time and not healthy in relationships, it like, it's a sign, right? To look at. Where might I be curious? Right? Where might I be using these solutions that sound empowered, but they're actually robbing me of even having my own internal process. Like, well, like I said, well, that really hurt or that felt bad, or that was a deep loss. Have I allowed myself to grieve? Oftentimes we want to race to the finish line as though that's even a thing. And then we're stuck in this perpetual leg chasing our tail kind of a feeling. So you can be curious. You can be curious. Self gaslighting is the same going like, well, they have. You know, that person had it so much worse. What do I have to complain about? It's like, it's not a competition, people. You have a body, and you're allowed to be in your body and your experience. I don't care what anyone else on either side of you has experienced. Can we just be with you and notice what your body might be telling you right now without. Without analyzing or defending or running circles around it?

Ooh, ooh. Listen. My brain did not like that. I think you're. I think you're. I want to be clear. The higher level, Kwame, 100% agrees with you. 100%. And I know psychologically you are correct. And I wanted to note that because if I'm feeling that, I think other people felt that because I said to myself, so wait a second. I'm just going to sit here and just feel. I got work to do, Ingrid. I got things to do. People are relying on me. I got to get up. I got to do stuff. And so it's the. The advice is 100% sound. And I know that if. If I felt that type of instant resistance, other people are so. So let's talk through that resistance. Why is it so important for us to allow ourselves to feel without jumping in and gaslight ourselves or trying to immediately fix ourselves? What is this? Is. This is the most quality question, like what?

I experience the same exact thing as does every one of my clients. We do not want to feel the tough stuff. Who does? Right? But here's the point. I have tried every other method, and they have all failed me. If it worked, Kwame, if you and I could sit here and be so super smart and figure it all out, I mean, I would do it. Sign me up all day long. And that led to chronic pain, burnout, overwhelm. Right? It's like, that's the why. It's because over time, these things don't work. So part of. And here's the other why, because we've sort of touched on this at different points in this conversation. But I really believe this is true. It's my bias, but it's. I believe that it's true. When we even drop in and feel the actual feelings, what comes out of that even isn't just the skill set. It's the actual capacity to be productive in these ways. Like, like, come on, Ingrid, I got shit to do. It's like, yes, you want to do it from a place of wholeness and balance and all these things that we're striving for. Well, don't try to rise above what your gut is telling you all the time. Go into yourself. And when we can, I think what comes out of that is the richer, fuller experience that we're all longing for. It's like I said this recently, I don't know if this will make sense to you, but, you know, this month in September, I will be 30 years sober. So I now have in my actual waking life because of this work, I believe the experience that I was ultimately seeking in drugs and alcohol, in other words, that, that high or that, like, elation or that sense of, I don't know, being in the world differently in a way that felt less overwhelming. I now have that in my day to day life because I didn't override the experience, even with drugs or alcohol, but because I came into my body and my body can now hold the complexity and the feeling. And it's not like we linger in the tough stuff all the time. I wouldn't be here if that were the case. Right. I, I'm saying these things because as we become more embodied and process the real stuff and move through it, we have access to, I think, a life beyond our wildest dreams. That's. That's real.

I agree 100%. This is, this is great. Oh yeah, I agree. I, and I agreed from the beginning. I was like, there. What is that thing inside of me that disagrees? Because I at least wanted to point it out, you know, because I think about all of those times where I've. I've kind of pushed through that gut feeling. I was always very heady, you know, And I remember when I was, my, My degree was in psychology, undergrad degree. It's it. We were focusing on bias reduction and almost getting that skepticism of the gut response. And then of course, as a lawyer, it's in it's incredibly heady. You know, we didn't. We barely talked about emotion at all in law school. Just right, wrong, deep analysis and everything. And I think about those times where I felt like I needed to slow down, and there was that instant skepticism of that. It's like, hey, see, that's the weakness inside of you. Or that's the bias. Whatever it happens to be, I would this. I would just push it to the side. But now, looking back, there may have been times where I pushed that aside and muscled my way through it. I can look and see the checkbox of accomplishments. But it's funny, like, I don't even. For some of them, I don't even like those accomplishments because of the feeling that was associated with it. And I was just taking the. I was relinquishing control of my emotion management because I was saying, no, I'm going to pretend like this isn't legit. I'm going to just bully through it. But it just led to an inevitable, like, breakdown or burnout that was not within my control and not on schedule. Like, it was just more inconvenient, too. And it's funny because what you're saying.

Yes.

Yeah. I feel like we. We often avoid. Avoid the thing that we need the most. And the thing that we avoid is not just what we need, but what will give us what we. What we ultimately wanted.

But let me put this back in the context of fawning, because I think it'll help it make sense. Okay. So avoiding the thing that we need. Well, maybe the thing that we need is to feel the depth of our pain. Maybe the thing that we need is to have a voice. But here's the thing with fawning. This is. It's this appeasement. It's this caretaking. It's this override of self to make sure you're okay so that I'm okay. Okay, now go back to the origin story where I told you in the hot tub, I couldn't fight back. It would have made things worse. Basically, we are enlarging access to a healthy fight response. A healthy fight response is speaking up, having a voice, engaging in conflict, setting boundaries. Right? But what we're asking the body to do from this very primitive, simple, sort of, you know, nuts and bolts of it all, is we're asking the body to lean back into a fight response that probably it did for me, for a lot of people, got them burned. When I try to have a healthy fight response to Kwame, it made things worse. This is a story that is not just my story. So many of us. So when you go back to this idea that we make sense, it's not just avoidance from a. Like, I don't want to feel the tough feelings. It's avoidance from a survival. From a survival perspective going, no, no, no, no, no. Those other responses never worked. They're not available to you. You have to go in this direction. So this avoidance is real. It is pointing to the depth of both, in my experience, my relationship to fawning, what kept me safe, and my relationship to the things that did not. So, of course my body, if I'm asking it to go and do things differently, is going to go. You. You literally can't do that. I'm asking people to walk into fire. And we have to know that, right? Even in terms of feeling the hard feelings, if I'm going to acknowledge that you hurt me, oh, my gosh, it's like. It's terrifying. Part of fawning is I'm going to soak up the shame for the whole system because connection is protection. So now I'm sacrificing that feeling of alignment and connection. That sense of my safety resides in your body. I'm going to sacrifice that if I actually feel the depth of how you harmed me and hurt me time and time again. So in other words, oh, my gosh, I. I really get the avoidance and the override. And why we would even turn to things like spiritual bypass and toxic positivity is because we are ultimately terrified. And I would say we come by that honestly, and that's a part of the process, is to acknowledge this stuff feels like life or death, and we can literally laugh it off. Like, oh, my gosh, is it really. I'm just trying to ask for a raise or whatever it is. And it's like your response, what your body's telling me right now, is that your body's experience, we are just like the animal kingdom. We are just like those animals out on the prairie, feeling like we're going to be eat, you know, eaten or whatever. So can we honor and acknowledge that and build from there? And in my experience, when we do, and only then can we stop overriding to your point, maybe we can muscle through. I have a lot of people in my practice, too, that have experience with that, and they have the same results. It never returned them to a sense of self. It never. It didn't restore. Like, I know who I am, and I'm living in accordance with my values, and I have, you know, the balance and the drive that I'm Longing for. They're like, no, I'm not even present in my own life. I might have success, I might have a title, I might have these things, these goals that I was trying to achieve, but I don't have me. Right. This is the path to me of having yourself in your own life finally.

It's powerful. And you're. You're so right on this. And I also think, too, when it comes to the person who says, all right, I'm going to step up, I'm going to have that tough conversation, I'm going to set that boundary. It helps them to realize, hey, that feeling that your body is. Is. Is feeling where it feels life or death, that's part of the process, too. That, too, is normal. Right? Because I think when you feel that you're like, oh, there's something wrong with me. This is clearly, I. I'm just going to back off. But knowing that the. The way. What is it? The way past is through, as they would say, I think that that's really empowering, too.

Yes. To let people know it's going to feel terrible. I think that's the other toxic positivity thing. There's this, like, you go, girl. You got this. You can do it. As though this work feels like a victory lap. And I'm like, this does not feel like a victory lap. This feels like crap. This feels like death. And if I'm feeling those things and I'm still inching forward, not to override myself, but from a place of, okay, I'm leaning in, and this is really hard, and it feels really overwhelming, chances are I'm finally moving in the right direction when it feels that hard and terrifying. Hmm.

You know, and this is an incredibly selfish question. What. I'm preempted with this. So. So for me, I always thought about it for myself, and I would talk about it to others through the lens of confidence, confidence as a learnable skill. And I'm wondering where you think the term confidence comes in and where it could be problematic and then also kind of juxtaposing it to the potential of using confidence versus courage.

It's a great question. I don't get so tied up in the semantics of those two things. I almost want you to make it more personal, if you will, because that'll give me more meat on the bone to kind of connect with the question.

Yeah. So, okay, so the first book is Finding Confidence in Conflict. And the idea is if you were able to build up your confidence first, then it would be the key to unlocking your skills. Because if you understand what to say, but there's something that's holding you back from saying it, that might be a confidence issue. So I approached it more through the psychology of confidence. But I'm thinking as I'm hearing this, I should. And maybe it's not an either or, but more of a both and. But talk about the need for courage, too, because I think there's a perception that there's a feeling of confidence where I feel untouchable, which is not true all the time. But if you recognize no, this requires courage, then you're actually accepting that fear is part of the process, and it's a signal that you're actually on the right track, doing the right thing, too.

Yes. Yes. I think you answered your own question. I'm going to just extend it one more layer out. It's a yes and. And yes to the confidence. Yes to the courage it takes to actually show up. But I would say, and again, my bias is that we can't pretend. Let's go back to the lot, to the animal kingdom and look at, like, the. The lions, for instance, right? King of the jungle. They have access to, like, these are my boundaries. Like, I'm going to roar. Get the heck out of here. They can be confident and courageous all day long also because they are the king of the jungle. I think we have to look at the context that people are living in and stop pretending like we're all on an equal playing field, because the reality is we are not. So I absolutely feel like it's crucial to include a systems perspective. We cannot put everything in the individual body because it's a lie, right? My body lives in context. I walk out the door. My body knows I'm a woman in a patriarchal, patriarchal society, right? So I'm on the street and the man's coming at me this way. I feel a bit of a threat response that's real. So I think you always have to look at, are we sending meerkats into the lion's den and being like, come on, just have a voice. Just have some. Just have the courage to face that lion. It's like our bodies also know where we reside all the time in the pecking order. And the body chooses, not us, what response is going to get us out as unscathed? The body prioritizes survival all the time, and that includes relational survival. So it does not care about our opinion of, like, how much we want to, like, show up differently. So to me, this is just why context matters and showing up from this bottom up perspective. Because then the meerkat still gets to be a meerkat. And it's like, hey, actually, confidence for me means I'm not going inside, but I'm going to be on the outside of that lion's den and I'm going to like, you know, with my meerkat, clever ways, whatever, it's going to bring something else to the table that's going to be unique to that specific body and that specific situation. It's not going to put itself in harm's way in order to prove some level of like. Now I'm confident that would just be my extension on that model. I'm curious how it lands.

Oh, it was great. I'm already thinking about book ideas. The meerkat and the lion's den. No, it's great. And it's funny, too, because for me, I've there. There have been times where I've developed. This is going to sound. Yeah, this is the first time I've described it this way. A little bit of imposter syndrome with the people pleasing because I don't feel it as much. And then also because I've taken a lot of time studying the psychology of status and presence and bias and persuasion and all of those things. And I've worked hard to develop a very persuasive presence. And as a result, I realized that the skills that I needed to get to this place are no longer necessary because my presence and status does the majority of the negotiation for me.

Wow.

And I realized, I remember one time I came into a negotiation, a big one. I was almost going to say, I thought it was a big one. No, it was a big one. And 30 minutes into the negotiation, I said, I literally don't know what to negotiate for. You've given me everything that I would have asked for had I even had the chance to ask, you know, and people have said before, I, well, man, I'm negotiating with the king of negotiation. I kind of went in here expecting to concede, you know, and so it's. The imposter syndrome comes from the fact that the skills that got me to this place are no longer really required in the same way to. For me to get the. To the next level. So I feel very rusty.

That is so fascinating. I'm just letting it wash over me. And so it's actually making me reflect on my own. My own personal experience of, you know, before I wrote this book, fawning, I wrote a memoir, and I never sat down to go. I think it's A great idea to write a memoir on childhood trauma. I think I'm just going to linger there for five years and just do this deep dive. My body needed to do it. It got me up in the middle of the night time and time and time. Every time I wanted to let it go, it wouldn't let me shake it right. And this led to such a connection to myself that I eventually sort of went online. Not just as a therapist, as like an expert on whatever Instagram or TikTok telling you what to do, but really as a survivor and even as someone who can be silly and playful and you know, kind of has a dark sense of humor at times. In other words, all of the parts of me were in one place at one time. And I thought for sure that this would actually tank my career, right from this perspective of like, you gotta present this bold face and this marketing and all of this stuff that I've been told my whole life, right, you gotta sort of shape shift in this particular way in order to be successful. It felt terrifying to go, but I'm actually all of these things at one time. But the need for me to be me was stronger than anything else. And so I genuinely felt the terror, the terror of I'm going to lose any credibility that I've worked so hard to get to my private practice, all of it. And yet I need to bring my full self. And ultimately what that led to was this opportunity to write a book proposal for Fawning and to go after self publishing my memoir. No agent would sign me. Big Publishing wasn't interested, but I said, my story matters. I'm going to honor me in a way that feels so important I don't even care if anyone else reads it. All of this led to a place where I'm meeting with every major publisher in the United States, not from this place of like, I'm here to sell you something. Let me tell you why I came to every publisher going, listen, I'm not going to write a traditional self help book if that's what you want. I'm not the author for it. I'm not going to perpetuate, like I said, the same problem where I'm the expert telling people how to live their lives. I'm interested in showing people through lived experience, through my own and through my clients. In other words, I got to this point of success that I ultimately wanted what feels like through this crazy back door back here that no one could have prescribed. It felt like, you know, the weirdest way ever. And yet it was my Way it was necessary in order for me to, like you're saying, just naturally embody confidence, but not by saying, hi, I'm Dr. Ingrid Clayton. I'm here to sell you a book. I was like, hi, I'm Ingrid Clayton. I'm a survivor of trauma, and I've spent decades climbing and crawling out of it. I'm no longer ashamed of that, and I want to help, help other people do the same. It was a different presentation, but it was an authentic one. I think that's the word. Right? There's an authenticity that just comes online as an extension of this stuff, which you can't fake. You can't muscle your way through. It's like the secret sauce.

Yes. And what's funny is, let's put a negotiation lens on this too. Because a simple way to determine power leverage. The person who needs the deal the most loses. Is a classic way of saying it, because if I need the deal more than you, and you don't really need it that much, then I'm willing to concede more in order to entice you to say yes. Right. And you don't feel the need to make those types of commensurate concessions because you're already in a good place. So the person who needs the deal the least has the most leverage at the negotiation table. And what you've done is you found a way through the power of authenticity, to give yourself leverage at the negotiation table that the person can perceive. Because you're not coming here saying, I'm willing to make these adjustments in order to make this work for you. You're saying, this is who I am. This is how I want to do it. If it works for you, great. If it doesn't, that's fine. And that gives you a leg level of swag and confidence that is perceived. That makes you more enticing because humans can pick up on that, too. So this is really fascinating how being willing to sit with these really strong feelings, understand yourself, and then be willing to say, you know what? I'm not following anybody else's blueprint. I am the blueprint. This is who I am. Take it or leave it.

Yes, yes. And the blueprint. I think we're often trying to override the blueprint as though it's supposed to be different. Like, no, no, no. I'm supposed to have a second story, and it's supposed to be whatever. And yet my blueprint was, no, I'm, like, irreverent and silly, and I'm never going to be the smartest person in the room. And guess what? All of that, as it hung together, it works. It works for me. It allows me to be in my life. I've never been more helpful to people coming from this place than from the place where I'm supposed to have it all figured out. Like that voice that I did at the beginning. That's exactly it. Like, be your blueprint. Loud and proud.

Amazing. I love this. This is great. And let's bring Simone in, because I always have Simone ask a question, and so this will be included into the podcast episode itself. So he's always listening. He. And. But he'll never tell you this, but he has the number one Spanish negotiation podcast in the world. And so he's exceptionally powerful, like a brilliant mind. So I always want to give him a little spotlight so he can ask a deeper question. We'll weave it in, and then. And then we'll wrap it all up. I have a question about blame, the role of blame for the traumatized person. What's the relationship between the traumatized person and blame? Because sometimes they feel guilty, you know.

Yes.

Or I am not traumatized, so I don't understand, but that's what I feel. Right.

Yes. Yes. So it's such a great question. Thank you for it. I think what tends to happen, especially when you think about childhood trauma or complex trauma, relational trauma, and you think about fawning, which is like, who do I need to be for you so that maybe you can finally show up for me? We not only soak up all the shame in the system, we soak up all the blame, which is why we feel I'm fundamentally broken. This is also why part of healing, an important part of healing is like, taking all of that blame off of our plate, and it's like, you know, putting some of it back where it belongs. And this is not to say that it's all about pointing the finger and making people the bad guy or that it doesn't come with nuance, but, you know, it makes me think again of that New York Times article about, you know, am I teaching people to be jerks? I can see why you would think that me taking all this blame that I've been holding my whole life, trying to metabolize the blame and shame for a whole system just through my body, Right? As though we can. We can't, by the way. And finally going, I need to get some of this off me and put it where it belongs. Someone might say, well, you're just pointing the finger, and now you're just blaming everybody else. And now everybody else is toxic, and now you're a jerk. Right. But actually, it's responsible, restoring a sense of balance. It's restoring a sense of reality. This is the reality. Right. One plus one equals two. This is what happened. This is what it did to me. This is your part in that equation. So I think blame becomes a tricky word. It's sort of like. It's like a hot potato. I don't want to hold it. I don't want you to think I'm asking you to hold it. And yet it tends to be a vital part of restoring a sense of balance and healing in your own body and in the systems in which you're navigating. We have to look at what belongs to you and what belongs to me. Yeah. It doesn't mean I don't hold any blame either. Right. There's. There's an aspect of living, even in a chronic, fawning response, where I go, well, I haven't been as genuine as I would have liked, and, you know, I've been saying yes when I wanted to say no, and then resentful at you at the end of the day. So there's also a part of restoring, like, what is my part, and how can I do that differently? So it goes in both directions, I guess.

This is great. And, Simone, this reminds me of Sheila Heen with the Crucial Conversations book. One of the things that they brought up was the distinction between blame and contribution, where blame, it feels like there is just an either or 100% you or 100% me. Then we treat blame like a disease. I don't want to catch it, so I'll do whatever I can to make sure you get it and not me versus contribution, which is recognizing, yes, they contributed this to the challenge. I contributed this to the challenge. It might be 99 to 1%, but then it makes it easier for us to parse that equation because it doesn't feel all or nothing. And then the other thing that I'd like to bring up, and, Ingrid, I'd like to get your perspective on this, is because, Simone, I. I know your story, and you might not be traumatized, but I do know you have experienced trauma. He's talked about this on the podcast, so I'm not airing out dirty laundry here. Just. I'll just, in one sentence say, simone grew up in Hugo Chavez's Venezuela, you know, so that's. That's not easy. So semantically, when it comes to identity and identifying with these terms, I think this is an important distinction, too, because we have somebody who might identify as being traumatized. But I would say that everybody to a certain degree has experienced some level of trauma. Whether it gets to that point of, like, PTSD type of trauma is. Is a different thing. But how do we, you know, wrestle with the semantics of this?

Oh, it's such an important point. So most of the people that come into my practice don't sit on my couch and go, I'm here to reprocess my experience of trauma. They come into my practice saying, I can't stop drinking or I'm depressed or I'm anxious all the time, or, you know, I can't find a healthy relationship. So it's really important that we take the definition of trauma off of the traumatic event itself, because first of all, 10 different people can experience the same event. Maybe half of them walk away with trauma, half of them don't. So it's not just about the event itself. What lets me know that someone has unprocessed trauma is more related to their symptoms. And even then, and I have case presentations like this, in fawning, someone says, ingrid, like, I don't have trauma. I hate that word. The word alone just inspires all kinds of things. And I'm like, okay, I get it. We don't even have to use the word. But it's important for me as a clinician to use it, because when I understand. Understand that the origins of your symptoms, you're coming to me with these symptoms. When I understand that the origins of those symptoms are unprocessed trauma, I bring a whole different set of tools to the party. Right? I'm now going to be looking at things like nervous system regulation and the need for reprocessing. And then once they have been working with me for a while, they suddenly go, feel better and freer, and they go, oh, okay, I can use that word now. Right. But I think a lot of us are like trauma. And maybe it's overused. I don't know, maybe it's underused. To your point, I think we all. We have a body. I have a body. I have a nervous system. I'm always going to live in context that to some degree, can feel overwhelming. And in fact, that is the definition of trauma. When these experiences or ongoing experiences overwhelm and override the nervous system. That's it. So it's an important point. It's one that I think it requires a bigger conversation. Right. Again, the difference between an acute event and ongoing experiences of being unsafe. But I get it. A lot of people don't like to identify. I didn't identify that way for years and years as a trauma therapist. I didn't have real trauma error quotes. Right. It was like, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. Now I, like, say it outright. Yes, I'm a childhood trauma survivor. It was foundational to my upbringing. It informed every single thing about my upbringing, day in, day out. Yes. That. That is what happened. And it had effects that have stayed with me to this day that will stay with me probably until the day that I die. And that lens and language has saved my life. It has freed me. So at. Now I'm like, call it what you call it. But it's the thing that allowed me to get free knowing that that's what.

That's so powerful. I appreciate this. Yeah. Because I wanted to shout that out too. And I also think there's a gendered part of it too. My family's from the Caribbean. I'm so. I'm first generation Caribbean American. Like, my mom's from Guyana. So we're. We're neighbors. Simone and I are neighbors originally, you know, and I realized that there is. When it comes to gender and culture, there can be a little bit of machismo that kind of gets in the way of even accepting that term applied to you. And the. This is one of those interviews where it's extremely frustrating because it has to end and I just want to keep on going and going and going. But this is. This is fantastic. Ingrid, I. I know I got a lot out of this. And if you were to summarize everything and encapsulate this in one takeaway message, in addition to the message of. By fawning and in addition to the message of working with you and checking out your website, all of which we will have in the description of the episode, what would be the key takeaway message for everybody?

Gosh, in one sentence, I always return back to where we started, which is that you make sense. And when we look at ourselves through context and we look at ourselves through our physiology, it makes it even more abundantly obvious. I hope that people can feel a sense of. They make sense and find more freedom. That's my hope.

Ingrid, thank you so much for joining us. Really appreciate this.

This was an amazing conversation. Thank you so much for having me.