People-Pleasing & The Fawn Response - Meg Josephson Interview

With the fawn response, we learn that we need to be perfect to be loved, we need to be good, we need to be easy and helpful in order to maintain love and safety. We also need to work really hard to be loved and I think that comes up with emotional neglect: I need to earn it. I need to earn love in some way. We learn that we need to try really hard. We can't just be loved as we are. We need to work for it. And yeah, when we learn that again and again, it certainly forms quite a strong belief over time.

The story of your relationship to your father runs really beautifully throughout your book. Would you mind sharing a little bit about your childhood with him and then how who he was as a parent ultimately led you to this work?

Yeah, thank you for saying that. I appreciate it. I talk in the book about how it's complex and I think it always is. I think when we're doing this healing work, this perfectionistic all or nothing voice wants to decide: was it all good or was it all bad? And it's always more nuanced than that. And so I write about how, you know, growing up I felt and often consciously thought this as a child that he was two people. He was my best friend and he was so funny and hilarious and creative and he was also really scary at the same time and he could flip moods really quickly and he also struggled with addiction throughout my whole life and that was really hard and confusing to navigate. Honoring that complexity of the relationship was really important.

Both things can be true. Those loving moments and sweet moments can be true and the hard ones can be true as well.

And I talk a lot in the book about sort of this subcategory of grief that I don't think is discussed as much. I think we often hear about grief when someone has passed away. But there's another form of grief of kind of grieving what won't ever change. Grieving a relationship of someone who's alive and well and grieving what won't ever be. And that is a really important step in this healing process. We can't just skip to compassion or skip to acceptance without first acknowledging the longing that's beneath that. So, writing about my relationship with my dad was really hard and also very healing. What was the most confusing was I turned in my final manuscript for the book. Three days later, he passed away very unexpectedly.

He passed away due to health-related reasons. And that was really confusing because in the book I talk a lot about grieving my mom, who started showing symptoms of Alzheimer's when I was 19. She was 59. And so I talk a lot about her mortality in conjunction with grieving the relationship that I had with my dad. But that he passed first was so confusing to me and a lot to process. But I think it just shows the complexity of grief and the layers of grief.

And I feel grateful that when I started writing the book, I told him about it and I said to him that I was going to have to, you know, acknowledge some parts of my life and our relationship in order for me to properly write the book. He was really supportive about it.

And like I said, I was really careful about what I was sharing. There's a lot I don't say and a lot of things I don't share, but it felt really healing to write about it and to also connect with other people on those emotions as they were reading the book. So, I feel grateful for the process of it.

How do you think that type of hot cold relationship impacts a child and what should we look for as adults if we grew up with this kind of like two-sided parent?

Yeah, in the book I talk a lot about different dynamics that sort of create this need to fawn. And I think that hot cold relationship is a really common one. It doesn't have to be true for you. You can resonate with the fawn response and not have had that be your experience. But for me personally and what I witness in my clinical work is this constant monitoring. Monitoring your parents' moods. Are they happy? Did I upset them? Are they going to snap into a bad mood?

The sense of hypervigilance is a really key part of the fawn response where we're constantly hyper aware of what's happening externally and then we course correct. We're perfect. We're funny. We're good. We're easy so that we can try to control the behaviors and the moods of our caregiver.

When this is happening again and again and again, we learn that people's moods are my responsibility. It's my responsibility to keep people happy. When someone's in a bad mood, it's my fault and I need to fix it. And we learn to take on a lot of responsibility for reactions and behaviors when realistically those things are not in our control. So as adults, we carry that sense of responsibility with us. That hypervigilance growing up, for my clients and for me, was really useful. Like it was a really helpful thing and we needed that. But as we grow into adulthood, we carry that with us because it worked.

It's been familiar to us, and we end up carrying it into relationships where it's not as necessary. So, we may end up overthinking social interactions with our best friend or wondering if our loving partner is mad at us. Noticing: how has this been helpful, and when am I carrying it into situations and relationships where it may not be as needed? And starting with that awareness. But yeah, that hot and cold dynamic is a really common one that I see and really understandable for why we would always worry if people are mad at us or if we did something wrong.

I think in these explosive environments and relationships as well, a common dynamic that happens is conflict is handled in really big ways. So maybe there was a lot of yelling or screaming, slamming doors, or maybe there was silent treatment and we didn't witness conflict being handled in a safe and regulated way again and again.

And so when that happens, what a child does to make sense of it, when there's no repair, there's no accountability taken, maybe you have a huge explosive outburst with a caregiver and then you go downstairs and then they're like, "What do you want for dinner?" It's just brushed under the rug and that happens continuously. What happens is a child makes sense of it by believing that they caused it to happen. They believe it goes from I did something to make dad upset or I did something to make my mom upset. I did something bad. And when that happens again and again, it forms the belief of I am bad. It goes from guilt to shame.

And so we end up as adults carrying that with us. And that manifests in a few ways. Feeling like we're bad at our core. Feeling like something is wrong with us. Feeling like, "Oh, what if I'm actually a horrible person and I've just fooled everyone into liking me?" Because we didn't witness that coming back together. And so we learn to internalize something must be so wrong with me to make people so unhappy.

And we also learn to fear conflict. And so we end up avoiding it at all costs. And that's because we form this belief that okay, as adults, if I get into a conflict with someone, the relationship is over. It's ruined.

There's no going back from it because we didn't witness that repair. We didn't witness that we can be in conflict with someone and we come back together. So, we learn that conflict means I'll be abandoned and so we learn to avoid it at all costs.

Can you talk a little bit about the physical symptoms that you experienced as a result of your people pleasing and self-suppression and what that taught you about how our mind affects our health?

Yeah, absolutely. And I didn't realize this at the time. And I think, you know, this was my experience and my understanding of how my unprocessed emotions and trauma were manifesting in my body. And know that when I'm saying this, you know, this may not be the case for you or it may just be a sliver of your experience. So, it's not to say, you know, people pleasing equals this, but just that it contributes to our body. And that I think there's a few aspects of it. Anger is really important. Many of us are taught to shove our anger down from a really early age.

Or we witness anger like I discussed in extreme ways. So we learn, okay, anger is scary. Anger is bad and I'm not allowed to feel it. And so maybe our caregivers were allowed to feel it however and whenever they wanted, but when we feel it, it's inconvenient and it's bad and it's wrong. So we need to shove it down. And when that happens again and again, you know, that anger doesn't go anywhere. It just gets stored in our bodies and it manifests as tension and heat. A lot of research has been done on anger suppression and autoimmune disease as well. And just how those suppressed emotions manifest in the body.

And what I noticed within myself is I felt like growing up what was in my control was focusing on my environment. But when I had left that environment, I needed a new thing to focus on.

I needed a new thing to pour that anxiety into. And so I found myself focusing on my body and symptoms that I was feeling in my body. And so I was having a lot of what felt like random issues. I was having horrible acid reflux in my throat for years. I was having numbness and tingling in my limbs, gut issues, dizziness. It just felt like any time something would resolve, another thing would pop up. It created this cycle of anxiety for me where I was just so anxious about these symptoms: what's wrong with me? What's going on with me? And then it would cause more and it would just contribute to the tension.

I really feel like when I look back on that time, this belief of something is wrong with me was just changing forms.

If I grew up believing something was wrong with me, or something was inherently bad, it was now manifesting in my body: something's always wrong with me, something needs to be fixed. And it's interesting to look back on because I really feel like my body started to heal and the symptoms started to subside very slowly and over time once I started to deepen my breath and relax my body and soften my body and look inward and process that anger and resentment and grief that was stored in my body but hadn't been looked at for years.

And so again, this isn't to say that that will be the case for everyone, but that was certainly the case for me. And when I now look back on that time, I think, "Oh my gosh, of course, I was so confused and hurt and angry and grieving and my body was speaking to me."

You write in the book that throughout history, women have always had to be people pleasers in order to survive. How can women in particular free themselves from the people-pleasing tendencies while also living in the world that often still requires it for safety and self-protection? Yeah, It felt so important to acknowledge not just the childhood dynamics of the fawn response, but also the societal, cultural elements of it as well. And I think we all can fawn whatever identity you hold whether you're a woman whether you're a person of color whether you are neurodivergent and you're needing to mask yourself to fit in and men too men fawn in I think different ways needing to fit in into the hyper masculine expectation and shove emotions down or change yourself to belong. And so I think for women in particular, fawning tends to be more active.

The self-neglect is more noticeable: "No worries if not," over-apologizing and overextending ourselves. I think women feel a lot of expectation to be humble and to diminish ourselves. We appease by hiding parts of ourselves and morphing and contorting our opinions and preferences to match whatever the other person wants just so we're easy. And I think women especially, we're told that from such a young age. You're such a good girl. You're so easy. Then we grow up, and it's still reinforced. And I think the fawn response it's the only threat response that we're not punished for. If you were fighting, flighting or freezing at work, there would probably be some repercussion. But fawning, we're applauded for it. We get promotions for it. This is really important to say, whatever identity you hold:

sometimes we need to fawn, whether it's for safety, whether it's to get a paycheck, to survive in the systems that we live in. But when we're fawning all the time, that's when it becomes exhausting. And so I think first step is noticing when am I fawning in relationships and situations that I don't need to be. When am I fawning in situations where I'm actually safe like with a loving partner or with my best friend or with a work colleague that's really safe.

In the book I also talk about this practice of leaning back. And we're not leaving the room. We're not being passive. We're leaning back. We're slowing down. We're releasing urgency so that we can see the situation more clearly. So, for example, if you get a text message from a friend and you feel this need to immediately respond so that they don't get upset or you don't disappoint them, putting your phone down for a second, do I need to respond right now or can I respond? Can I finish what I was doing and respond when it works for me?

So, it's this very subtle shift. It's an internal shift of releasing that urgency. And it's also important to acknowledge the fawn response makes us really hyper tuned, right, to what other people are needing and feeling and thinking and wanting. And so we end up losing connection with ourselves.

So I also think pausing and looking inward. What do I think of this? What do I need? What am I feeling?

You write about this idea of the lone wolf as a response to being raised by parents who emotionally neglected you. Can you describe what the lone wolf is and what people who it resonates with should do or think about?

Yeah. I love talking about the lone wolf because it feels a little different from the other archetypes I have in the book. I have six different archetypes. I have the performer, the peacekeeper, the perfectionist, the caretaker, the chameleon, and the lone wolf. And I think of the lone wolf as being a little different from the other five in that the other five tend to be a bit more anxious attachmentesque where they're leaning in a lot more. They're doing more to be loved. And people, you might be a little surprised to see the lone wolf as an archetype of fawning because it seems more avoidant. It's more pulling back and being in isolation. And so the lone wolf really when there's conflict, when there's any tension, when the lone wolf is in distress, pulls away and finds safety through being alone.

And the reason why this falls in my mind under the fawn response is because the thread is still there of I'm not allowed to have needs. But the lone wolf addresses that through disappearing. And so my needs don't matter. I'm not allowed to have them. But it's so much safer to be alone than to risk asking for help and being let down again.

And so the lone wolf often learns this through emotional neglect because they were let down. They didn't have parents they felt known by. They didn't feel supported or guided by their parents. And so they learn to be hyperindependent and to handle everything on their own. And so they learn when I'm sad, when I'm in distress, when I'm having issues, when I have needs, I'm not allowed to show that. I can only show myself when I'm perfect. I can only show myself when I'm on and when I'm feeling something "bad," I need to isolate.

So the lone wolf really finds safety through intense solitude. But I think what's important to distinguish is this isn't to say solitude is bad. It's really important actually for introspection and for growth. What's important is when the lone wolf actually secretly wants connection, they pull away. So they're craving that connection. They're craving to be taken care of and supported, but they don't trust that they'll get it. Or the disappointment feels way too scary. So, they'd rather not be disappointed. They'd rather not face that and so they pull away.

You have a beautiful line in the book that says, "I miss my mom, I think to myself, even when she's sitting next to me." And then you write, "I'm angry at him"—speaking of your dad—"but I'm angry at her in a different way." What can you say about this feeling of loneliness even when you're physically with your parent and the type of anger that it breeds?

It felt so important to me to have a whole chapter on grief and on this type of grief that I was talking about earlier because I think if you've experienced any sort of emotional neglect, if you've experienced, you know, just not feeling fully supported by or known by your caregivers, this feeling of I describe it as like I want to go home when you're in your own family's house or feeling lonely when you're sitting right next to them like they're quite far away. And it's such a specific feeling, but it also feels quite vague of like it's just kind of this emptiness. It's this need that is never being fully met. And I talk about it in my book with my mom because well, for a few reasons, I definitely have felt that as she's declined with Alzheimer's.

She has just gotten further and further away in many ways. But even before that, like the excerpt you read was from when I was in middle school. So this was before she was showing symptoms.

But I think as a way for her to cope through my dad's volatility, she coped through more of a freeze response and more of dissociation and she always just felt quite far away from me. I feel like I wanted to reach out to her and she just felt far and by no fault of hers like she was so and is so sweet and loving but just felt quite far away emotionally.

And so I think that can feel really confusing to a child because I think we learn or we internalize that: am I not worth knowing? What have I done to cause this emotional distance? Is it my fault that I feel so far away from the people that are supposed to know me the most intimately? And so yeah, it's such a subtle feeling and it's hard to put language to it, but I think if you know, you know, and if you resonate with it, I think you get it.

You said that people don't necessarily need to remember specific events of harm or abuse in order to heal from them. Can you explain how that works and what we can do if we have these blank spots in our memories from childhood?

Yeah, it's so important because well I think for many of us if we are drawn to this concept of people pleasing we might have a tendency to intellectualize a lot feeling like I need to like figure it out in my head and then I'll be fixed or healed. Acknowledging that tendency: we can't trick our way out of trauma. We can't think our way out of trauma. It really happens over time slowly by showing our bodies that we are safe. Showing our bodies that we can be uncomfortable and safe at the same time.

We can be in relationship to people and safe at the same time. And so healing really happens through the present. But also with trauma however it looked whether it was in a singular event big-T trauma or whether it was complex trauma which you know maybe smaller moments that happened again and again over time we didn't have that source of safety to return to again and again.

Trauma messes with memory. It often as a way to protect us blocks out details and memories from our brain. And so many of us, if we've experienced trauma, we don't have those memories to go off of, at least up here. Our body remembers, of course, but it can feel a little daunting of, oh, if I don't remember it can I not heal from it or do I need to like relive it in my brain in order to move forward? And that's certainly not true.

Because our bodies remember, because our bodies know, we can really use what we're feeling in this present moment as a blueprint for maybe what we were feeling then, and as a way to move forward. What's so important is when we're healing from trauma, our body thinks we're in the past. Our body is reacting from a place of past trauma and is almost frozen in time in that place or in that time period. And so using presence in a grounded, safe, and anchored way to heal is so empowering because if our body thinks we're in the past, by coming into the present, we're saying to our body, we're not there. We're here right now. If we were actually in danger, truly in danger in this moment, we wouldn't have time to take three deep breaths. We wouldn't have time to look around and observe everything in our environment in a slow and safe way. This is why I love using mindfulness in my clinical work.

I blend it with trauma informed care because trauma is about the past and mindfulness is about the present. We can use both of those things in relationship to each other to move forward. I think that is such a beautiful thing.

In your experience, can parents who are emotionally immature, absent or abusive actually change? And if so, how often does that actually happen? Can we save our parents?

I think it's nuanced. Healing with any of us starts with awareness and I don't think we are fixed people. But there has to certainly be a level of self-awareness and also willingness and humility to want to be able to change. Adult children would be so willing to overlook so many things in order to have a relationship with their adult parent.

What ends up happening is the adult parent hears that, and they keep repeating the pattern now. It's not that it was happening then, but it's that they're still doing it now. And so, I've also witnessed adult parents being open to listening and having that conversation and understanding each other and having a closer relationship in adulthood. It just takes two. It takes both people to be open, compassionate, respectful listeners. Being willing to understand each other and to take accountability and to be open to repair.

I think the danger comes though when we take on this responsibility to change someone and this can be with parents, this can be with partners, it can be with friends. When we think, and this is very much the fawn response: "If I'm just good enough, if I just try harder, if I'm just better, then they'll change."

"Then they'll be the parent or the partner or the friend that I need." And that is where a lot of grief work, I think, comes in of grieving. Okay, I can't change them. I can't fix them. I can communicate what I'm feeling but I can't actually make them change.

And so I often talk about how when we practice this honest clear communication in some relationships it'll lead to more closeness. If the other person, maybe in this situation it's the parent is willing to listen and also wants that closeness. That discomfort of that conversation can lead to closeness. And if it can't lead to closeness because the other person is defensive or they're not willing to listen or whatever that means on the other side of that, if it's not closeness, it's clarity. Clarity around what you can expect from the other person, clarity around maybe what needs to be grieved and what expectations need to be released.

Either way, when the other person can't change, or won't change, at the very least, what we can do is validate our own experiences within ourselves. I'm allowed to feel angry. I'm allowed to be grieving right now. And this person may not change. They may change. They may not change. But if they do, that's not in my control. And that's a lot. That's a lot to process.

If what we learned growing up was I need to work really hard to be loved, Many of us are unconsciously, key word unconsciously, drawn to relationships that feel like home that remind us of that where we needed to take care of the other person all the time. We needed to prove ourselves all the time or be perfect.

We may unconsciously, this is called trauma reenactment, almost recreate that relationship that early relationship dynamic with our caregivers so that this time we can win and this time we can be good enough and it will fix the wounds the core wounds that we're feeling.

If there's not space for you to be yourself. If you feel you're on edge with the other person. If you feel like you need to conceal parts of you, that's something to notice. Something to notice of, do you feel like you can only be perfect in front of them? Are they quite critical of you?

And you're only allowed to show them the good parts. You're not able to fully relax into the relationship. That's always, I think, a sign from the body if you're sort of on guard a lot of the time. If you find yourself thinking, I'm being careful, I think it's tricky because in some relationships, those people-pleasing tendencies are coming up because it's not a safe relationship. And in other instances, the people-pleasing tendencies are coming up even though it is a safe relationship, but we're just reacting from an old place. So it's important to distinguish that like just because you're feeling those people-pleasing tendencies that doesn't mean they're needed. Only you can know that difference: am I people pleasing because this relationship is unsteady and unsafe and I'm doing so out of genuine safety or is it simply because it's a familiar pattern to me but this person's actually safe and lovely?

I want to be with them. So distinguishing between those two things is really important. And again only you can really know that of that level of safety that you feel in the relationship. Am I drawn to this person because they feel truly safe to me or am I drawn to them because they remind me of past dynamics? They feel familiar to me rather than safe.

I think another really common dynamic that comes up with people pleasing in a relationship whether it's needed or not is reassurance seeking and what that can look like is are you mad at me? Do you still love me? Do you think I'm pretty?

These questions really revolve around content. Then the person might say no, I'm not mad at you or yes, I still love you. Yes, you're pretty. And then we feel this, okay, good. And we feel relieved for a second, but then that anxiety comes back because we didn't actually get to the root of it.

And so in the book, I talk about the difference between reassurance versus validation where validation is it's an opening into a conversation. It's a slowness with what's going on. So maybe if instead of are you mad at me, the validation version of that would be, hey, I'm feeling kind of distant from you. We haven't had quality one-on-one time in a while, and I'm wondering if we can just have some time to be with each other and to talk about it. That's getting to perhaps the same feeling, but in a much more grounded, slow, and open way. If the other person gives validation, it might include some reassurance.

That reassurance might be I'm not mad at you, but it also includes a conversation and an opening to understand each other and to know each other's emotions. So if you feel this need to ask for a lot of reassurance in your relationship, I think using it as an inquiry of am I asking for reassurance because I don't feel safe in this relationship or am I asking for reassurance because this is an old wound coming to the surface.

You have a client story in your book of a woman whose mother used the silent treatment as punishment and once didn't acknowledge her for an entire month.

Silent treatment is quite damaging in that we're communicating to a child, you don't exist to me. And when there is disagreement, when there's conflict, love is taken away from you. You don't, you know, I don't see you. I don't hear you. It's a full just shutting that person out. And often the way that silent treatment resolves is the child is being super super over accommodating to the parent. Oh, look. I did this for you. I did this for you. I did this for you. Are you happy with me now? Or maybe it just ends out of necessity. Like my client example, it had to end because she needed to go back to school.

They needed to talk about logistics. But it really shuts off the opportunity for understanding and to instead allow for hard conversations, to allow for repair to happen, to allow for closeness in seeing each other's differences.

And you know, it's of course it's really important to be clear. We're not expecting perfection out of a parent or a child or anyone. We're all going to say things reactively sometimes. We're all going to say things we don't mean or maybe we give the silent treatment or we slam a door and then while we're doing it, we're like, "Oh, this isn't feeling good. I don't want to do this." And so then we notice that, we break out of it, and we go back to that moment of tension, and we repair it. "Hey, I'm really sorry for yelling at you. I'm really sorry for giving you the silent treatment. That didn't feel good, and I don't want to do that. Let's talk about it."

So, even when we do engage in these reactive ways of conflict, we can still repair and we can still go back to that moment. But yeah, the silent treatment is it's quite confusing for a child and of course when a parent is engaging in it, it's probably what they witnessed growing up or it's what they received growing up. And so it's what they're going off of what they know. But it has quite a lasting effect. What I witness in adults, and how the silent treatment feeds into this "Are you mad at me?" thinking, is we learn that silence is abandonment.

So when someone isn't responding to me, I've done something wrong. I need to figure out what I did wrong and I need to fix it. Because with the silent treatment, there's all this space for us to be like, was it this? Did I do this? Should I be doing this? All this room to overthink.

So as adults, we carry that with us. But when we may not need it, if someone doesn't text us back for four hours, we might start being like, "Oh gosh, maybe I said this," self-analyzing. And often it's just because they're busy or whatever. But our brain assumes it's our fault. And so there comes that self-blame again with the silent treatment because there's no repair happening. There's no accountability. So we learn to make sense of things by believing that we caused it to happen.

And that, yeah, it shows up a lot in adulthood.

Yeah, I think of the freeze response as if we aren't able to physically leave, we do kind of the second best thing by mentally leaving, whether through numbing or dissociation, daydreaming, fantasizing. And it's often when our body is being so overwhelmed with information or to-dos or emotions. It's too much. So, we preserve our energy by kind of checking out. And that can manifest in our daily life as maybe what society would think of as lazy, of having a hard time getting things done, not being able to make decisions, wanting to do something but feeling unable to do it.

I want to do it, but I feel like I can't. Scrolling on social media and wanting to stop but just feeling like you can't put your phone down. That desire is there, that intent to do something is there, but that there's this disconnect. I want to do it, but my body won't let me. I won't let myself move forward. What has led to this response? What overwhelm has accumulated to get to this point in the nervous system where it has to shut down?

And so I don't really think calling ourselves lazy is necessarily ever helpful by any means, but instead maybe viewing it as okay, where's the disconnect? What do I want to be doing? And what is my body allowing me to do? And I think either way, whether you think you're lazy or whether you think you're in a freeze response, the approach is the same, which is first of all, noticing that's happening. Noticing that that freeze, that numbness is occurring in the body and having some softness with yourself. It's okay. Okay.

This is what's here. This is what's happening. And focusing on taking really really small steps because the freeze response is rooted in overwhelm. There's an overwhelm of information. There's excess information and so the body is shutting down. It's so important to take the tiniest micro step to start so that we can show the body, okay, I can take a step and still be safe and not be overloaded with more information.

And so that really is taking the smallest step you can possibly think of. Like if you're needing to send an email that you've been procrastinating on, the task wouldn't be send the email. The task would be get out your laptop. Okay. And now can you open the laptop? And it might feel so silly to walk yourself through these things, but if you're familiar with the freeze response, you are familiar with that feeling of even the smallest tasks can feel quite daunting.

If you grew up pleasing a critical, controlling, or emotionally immature caregiver, their needs probably left little space for you to explore what you love to do.

If you learned from an early age that your job was to make everyone else happy, if you learned that doing what made you happy made other people upset and that felt unsafe, you likely shoved some of your interests aside and did whatever your caregivers wanted you to do. If you continue with this pattern, you might never get the chance to meet yourself. No matter what age you are, it's never too late to reestablish a relationship with your true self.