Description
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From a clinical psychologist and expert in complex trauma recovery comes a powerful guide introducing fawning, an often-overlooked piece of the fight-flight-freeze reaction to trauma explaining what it is, why it happens, and how to help survivors regain their voice and sense of self.
Most of us are familiar with the three Fs of trauma flight, fight, or freeze. But psychologists have identified a fourth, extremely common (yet little-understood) response: fawning. Often conflated with codependency or people pleasing, fawning occurs when we inexplicably draw closer to a person or relationship that causes pain, rather than pulling away.
Fawning explains why we stay in bad jobs, fall into unhealthy partnerships, and seek out dysfunctional environments, even when it seems so obvious to others that we should go. And fawning can serve a purpose it s a protective response to an unsafe situation. But when fawning turns from an emergency coping mechanism into an everyday habit, it stops being useful and starts being a real problem.
The good news: we can break the pattern of chronic fawning for good, once we see it for the trauma response it is. Drawing on twenty years of clinical psychology work as well as a lifetime of experience as a recovering fawner herself Dr. Ingrid Clayton has written a groundbreaking book that brings this emerging concept into the mainstream conversation. Readers will learn WHY we fawn, HOW to recognize the signs of fawning (including taking blame, conflict avoidance, hypervigilance, and caretaking at the expense of ourselves), and WHAT we can do to successfully unfawn and finally be ourselves, in all our imperfect perfection.
A landmark book full of empathy and understanding, Fawning offers trauma survivors the vocabulary to discuss their experiences and, in so doing, gives them the tools to finally heal.
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Dr. Ingrid Clayton is a licensed clinical psychologist with a master s in transpersonal psychology and a PhD in clinical psychology. She has had a thriving private practice for more than sixteen years and is a regular contributor to Psychology Today, where her blog Emotional Sobriety has received more than one million views. She lives in Los Angeles, California.Ingrid Clayton is a licensed clinical psychologist with a master's in transpersonal psychology and a Ph.D. in clinical psychology. She s had a thriving private practice for over fifteen years and is a regular contributor to Psychology Today where her blog, Emotional Sobriety, has received more than 1 million views. She lives in Los Angeles, California.
(Review)
tdoctoral Program for Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis
This is the book on fawning part memoir, part manual, all heart. Clayton doesn t just explain the trauma response; she lived it, named it, and now she s teaching the rest of us how to reclaim ourselves. Patrick Teahan, MSW
