May 21, 2025 • 15 mins
George Noory and psychologist Dr. Ingrid Clayton discuss the technique of fawning to become more appealing as a protective reaction in a traumatic relationship, the importance of being honest in relationships instead of always being agreeable, and why the survival technique is often mistaken as simple people pleasing.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Now here's a highlight from Coast to coast am on iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:05):
And welcome back doctor Ingrid and Clayton with us, George
Nori here with you. So Ingrid, my father saw my
name pop up on credits at this television station and
all of a sudden went from hating my switch to
the broadcast curriculum to loving it, and he became my
biggest booster for the rest of my career.
Speaker 3 (00:24):
I love that for you, and I have to say
it brings a little heartbreak because of how many people
had such an opposite experience that when they took that
leap and they chose themselves and they said the thing
or did the thing, you know, a lot of people
really lose those vital and important relationships or it really
(00:46):
makes things worse. That fawning often happens because our fight response,
our ability to advocate for ourselves and be authentic has
been snuffed out. Right, We're talking about real consequences for folks. So,
you know, I love this experience that your dad was
able to sort of come full circle and applaud your success. Right,
(01:08):
and yet oftentimes we have to be the only person
that's going to have our own back that's going to
validate us and say, I get it, you did.
Speaker 4 (01:18):
The right thing.
Speaker 3 (01:19):
And that's why fawning often, you know, I talk about
it as choosing safety over self and in this case,
you leaned in and you said, I got to choose me.
Speaker 4 (01:29):
I got to choose me. And ultimately, of course I
want everyone to be.
Speaker 3 (01:32):
Able to do that, but we also have to honor
that we live in real contexts, in our families, in
our workplace, you know, friendships.
Speaker 2 (01:41):
You name it is fawning a defensive move. Uh.
Speaker 3 (01:45):
Yeah, you could refer to it as a survival mechanism,
A defense mechanism.
Speaker 4 (01:49):
A yeah. Trauma responses are all about survival.
Speaker 2 (01:53):
How many people are aware of this?
Speaker 3 (01:56):
Well, fawning is pretty new to the even the trauma lexicon.
I mean, I feel like trauma in itself is still
in its infancy in the mental health field. It's only
really in the eighties that we first started looking at PTSD,
even for veterans. And then Judith Herman came along, Doctor
Judith Herman, and she saw that the way that survivors
(02:18):
of domestic violence, for instance, were experiencing their symptoms that
really mapped out exactly over what we were seeing for
the veterans, and that's so long standing. Complex trauma was
presenting sematically in the same way that we were seeing
for vets and for single incident acute traumatic events a
car crashes and natural disasters. And so you know, that
(02:42):
got PTSD into the diagnostic manual here in the United States.
But the truth is, we still don't have a diagnosis
for complex PTSD, which is really more of what I'm
talking about, which is the relational trauma piece. We don't
have that diagnosis here in the United States. The World
Health Organization finally added CPTSD to their ICD I think
(03:06):
eleven and I want to say twenty and eighteen. But
so the fact is, you know, especially when I was
in grad school, starting back in two thousand and five,
we weren't having these conversations. So even though I went
and I sat on a lot of therapist couches and
I talked about my history and I knew what happened
to me, and I could tell it, you know, backwards
and forwards, no one could give me this lenser language,
(03:29):
and so ultimately it kept me feeling even more stuck,
even more broken. Here I am trying so hard to
overcome my past, and I feel like I'm on this
hamster wheel, and so it's part of my mission now
to be honest. Right So here, I am now in
my fifties going no one should have to live this way.
And when I learned about fond response in particular, it
(03:52):
just it allowed me to make sense to myself right here.
Speaker 4 (03:56):
I am.
Speaker 3 (03:56):
I'm an educated person, I'm a lifelong seak. I want
to grow, I want to change, and yet I was
so stuck in this thing that I didn't even know
what it was. And so now we're learning, we're learning
more about the fun response. You know, one day all
the models said fight, flight, freeze, and now suddenly we
(04:17):
have fawn up. There is the fourth f and I'm
excited about that. I'm excited to empower other people so
that they can they can make a choice similar to yours,
which is, first of all, who am I?
Speaker 4 (04:29):
Anyway? What do I like?
Speaker 3 (04:31):
What do I want? A lot of times we don't
even know. But when we start to uncover those pieces
right to be able to have our own backs in
some ways no matter what, and lean in and say
I have to choose me. I'm going to choose self
this time?
Speaker 2 (04:49):
Is it called fawn and ingrid if the person just
agrees with his or her boss all the time.
Speaker 4 (04:55):
Yes, yes, wa was Yeah, I would say that's the
faun response.
Speaker 3 (05:00):
Yeah, there's no sense of self, there's no opinion there,
there's no even self respect.
Speaker 4 (05:05):
No one agrees all the time.
Speaker 2 (05:08):
I agree with you on that. Yeah, how do you
overcome it?
Speaker 3 (05:16):
Well, I think part of it is doing what you
and I are doing now, which is normalizing it and saying, hey,
there's this other option that the body has when it
feels unsafe, and it's called fawning. And when we put
it back in the body, we can start to go, oh,
I'm not just someone walking around with low self esteem.
I'm someone with a body that has hardwired operating instructions
(05:39):
that jumps in on my behalf when I'm feeling threatened.
So just that information alone, I feel, is so powerful.
But then we can take a look at well, if
I feel like I've been living in this chronic trauma response,
that means I might have some trauma in my background.
And again, we're just continuing to learn more and more
all the time about what trauma is. It's not about
(06:02):
a specific event, right, So it's not like there's some
trauma measuring stick, and so many people do this.
Speaker 4 (06:08):
I see this in my practice all the time.
Speaker 3 (06:10):
They're like, but my experience wasn't as bad, and my
cousin had it worse, and you know, all of these
people we want to kind of measure our experiences against others,
and most of us find that we fall short on
the measuring stick and we go I can't call it trauma, right,
So it's not about an event. It's about what the
event did to your nervous system, that it overwhelmed your
(06:35):
nervous system. And once we can start to recognize, oh,
this is what trauma is, this is why I got stuck,
then we can avail ourselves of some of the tools
and resources that we have in the trauma therapy landscape,
things like EMDR or internal family systems, therapy, somatic experiencing,
(06:57):
body work, regulating our nervous system. There's a host of
things that we can avail ourselves of if we cross
that threshold into going oh yes, that label applies to
me too well.
Speaker 2 (07:09):
With doctor Ingrid Clayton, her website is her name linked
up at coastncoastdam dot com. Her book is called Fawning
would you say, ingrid that those who fawn are generally
nice people narcissists? What are they?
Speaker 4 (07:26):
Yeah, I think it's a great question.
Speaker 3 (07:28):
I think fauners tend to be very empathetic. We tend
to really look at what everyone else is going through
and try to understand and have compassion for why they
do what they do. We tend to have a lot
of hope and faith in the fact that other people
can change and they don't mean to.
Speaker 4 (07:50):
Be so hard on me.
Speaker 3 (07:51):
And so there's this big heartedness that I see a
lot with people in a chronic faun response.
Speaker 2 (08:00):
Where does honesty come into this?
Speaker 3 (08:04):
Yeah, that's such a good question. There's a section in
my book called to Tell You the Truth because, to
use some of your examples, right, if someone walks in
with this heinous outfit and you're like, you look amazing, right, Like,
that obviously is not honest. And yet if you grew
up in an environment where you know, I talk about
(08:27):
this that for people that lived in really dysfunctional homes,
abusive homes, even something like saying good morning ends up
being dishonest because.
Speaker 4 (08:38):
There's something good about it at all.
Speaker 3 (08:41):
You end up performing a life rather than living a life.
There's this sort of curated kind of shape shifting thing
that can happen in a chronic faun response. But I
hesitate to say that it's dishonesty or it's lying again,
because those are consciously motivated. So some people, and I
(09:02):
see you know, in the online discourse in particular, they
talk about fauners as though it's conscious manipulation, And in
my experience and all of the clients that I've worked
with for I don't know decades now, that has never
been the case. So yes, it leads to dishonesty, and
(09:27):
that was never our intention. And so if we lead
with this idea that you're doing something wrong and you're
a liar, in other words, shaming people for these behaviors,
all we're going to do is keep the behaviors existing
because the shame is so high they can't actually do
the work that needs to happen in order to free
(09:48):
themselves of.
Speaker 4 (09:51):
Living in this trauma response.
Speaker 2 (09:53):
If that makes sense, Can you on fawn without coming
across as uncaring that you don't give a darn about something?
Speaker 3 (10:01):
I think so, and I think sometimes it's messy. We
have to give ourselves some grace. It's a bit of
like the pendulum swing that if you've lived all the
way on one side, and this is for any behavior, really,
it tends.
Speaker 4 (10:15):
To swing all the way to the other side.
Speaker 3 (10:17):
So if you didn't have any healthy fight response ever,
and you're practicing having a voice, it can come across
as you're kind of a jerk. But I say, tell
people that you're trying to unfond tell them that you're
trying to have a voice, that you're stepping into your
agency and advocacy, and that it's new and that it's awkward,
(10:38):
and you know, particularly people that are close to you,
like ask them to give you a little grace. But
over time I find that what we can get you
as a sense of balance and boundaries.
Speaker 2 (10:52):
Who's a better friend the person who tells you something
direct or the person who kind of sugarcoats things to
make you feel good.
Speaker 3 (11:01):
Well for me personally, obviously I want the person that's
going to be more direct, but I also know that
I'm a safe place for that kind of direct communication.
Speaker 2 (11:13):
There's really nothing to negative to say about you.
Speaker 4 (11:18):
To say about me, right, So I mean.
Speaker 2 (11:20):
As somebody who was your friend, Oh, they're not sugarcoating
anything because you are who you are.
Speaker 3 (11:28):
Yeah, And I am a human being, so I'm going
to make mistakes.
Speaker 4 (11:32):
I'm going to put my foot in my mouth.
Speaker 3 (11:34):
But hopefully the people that are close to me can say,
you know, hey, that hurt my feelings or that I
wish you would have done that differently. And you know,
as a person who's healing from relational trauma, there's a
saying wounding happens in relationships and healing happens in relationships.
And I'm a big believer in that that it's how
(11:55):
we show up now and we do things differently that
makes such a huge difference.
Speaker 2 (12:01):
I mean, I've had some friends who've been at tables
at restaurants and places like that, the ingrid who've said
some inappropriate things, not intentionally to hurt, they just say them,
and I've pulled them aside and said, look, that was
pretty inappropriate to say, not at this table there are
kids here, this or that, And then the would a
(12:23):
faun or have lied about that, Well.
Speaker 4 (12:26):
They probably wouldn't have said anything.
Speaker 3 (12:28):
Right, So we tend to be very conflict avoidant because
it invites tends to invite more harm. Right, if having
a voice made things worse, the last thing you want
to do is go stir something up with someone across
the table.
Speaker 4 (12:43):
You know.
Speaker 3 (12:43):
That's another sign I think of a chronic fauner is
when you can't address anything directly, but it still builds
up in your body. And so a couple of things
tend to happen. Either you're full of resentment, right you're
kind of just seating on the inside, like that jerk
and they said that thing.
Speaker 4 (13:00):
Or they're never.
Speaker 3 (13:01):
Stepping up and helping out and I'm doing all of
the work. Or you gossip and you tell someone else
who you know will be able to hear it.
Speaker 1 (13:13):
Right.
Speaker 3 (13:13):
So I tend to look at your patterns of gossip
in your life, and that might be an indication that
you have a chronic faun response where you're not able
to be more direct to.
Speaker 2 (13:24):
The recipient of a fauner. Person who gets it, do
they generally like the faun or did they come across
as pleasing as opposed to somebody who doesn't fonn.
Speaker 3 (13:36):
Let me see, you're saying to the person who receives
the fawning behavior, do they.
Speaker 2 (13:40):
Like it as opposed to somebody who tells them the truth?
Speaker 3 (13:44):
Yeah, I'd say it depends right that you mentioned the narcissist.
I think the narcissist fauner pairing is a very very
common one, And in that case, you would say absolutely,
the narcissist loves that you are going to merge with
their expectations. You're going to sort of go with their
flow at all time. You're not going to have a
(14:05):
voice unless it's the voice they want you to have.
That's why that pairing works so well. But for other
people that have a healthier sense of self, it's annoying.
It's infuriating to try to connect with someone who doesn't
have their.
Speaker 4 (14:21):
Own opinions, you know.
Speaker 3 (14:24):
So it depends on who the other person is in
their relationship.
Speaker 2 (14:27):
Given a choice to fond or just to stay quiet
and not say anything, which would you prefer.
Speaker 4 (14:34):
It's all context dependent.
Speaker 3 (14:36):
I was sharing with my social media following on Instagram
the other day. I had encountered this person at my
son's baseball game. He was loud, and he was aggressive.
He was yelling at the coaches, he was yelling at
the kids, and my body instinctively fond. In other words,
I knew he needed to be the expert and the
(14:57):
big man on campus and I I deferred. I was
managing that relationship in a way that I was propping
him up. And you know what, it worked. He didn't
yell at me, he didn't yell at my son. That's
not to say that there weren't any consequences. I was
also managing what was essentially a toxic relationship instead of
(15:21):
turning to these healthier, reciprocal relationships that could have been
happening with other people at the ball field. But I
guess it's to say we don't ever get rid of
our trauma responses. I want to have it when I
need it. I don't want to live there twenty four
to seven. Okay, that is living in survival mode and
(15:42):
it's not healthy for anybody.
Speaker 1 (15:45):
Listen to more Coast to Coast AM every weeknight at
oneam Eastern, and go to Coast to coastam dot com
for more
Now here's a highlight from Coast to coast am on iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:05):
And welcome back doctor Ingrid and Clayton with us, George
Nori here with you. So Ingrid, my father saw my
name pop up on credits at this television station and
all of a sudden went from hating my switch to
the broadcast curriculum to loving it, and he became my
biggest booster for the rest of my career.
Speaker 3 (00:24):
I love that for you, and I have to say
it brings a little heartbreak because of how many people
had such an opposite experience that when they took that
leap and they chose themselves and they said the thing
or did the thing, you know, a lot of people
really lose those vital and important relationships or it really
(00:46):
makes things worse. That fawning often happens because our fight response,
our ability to advocate for ourselves and be authentic has
been snuffed out. Right, We're talking about real consequences for folks. So,
you know, I love this experience that your dad was
able to sort of come full circle and applaud your success. Right,
(01:08):
and yet oftentimes we have to be the only person
that's going to have our own back that's going to
validate us and say, I get it, you did.
Speaker 4 (01:18):
The right thing.
Speaker 3 (01:19):
And that's why fawning often, you know, I talk about
it as choosing safety over self and in this case,
you leaned in and you said, I got to choose me.
Speaker 4 (01:29):
I got to choose me. And ultimately, of course I
want everyone to be.
Speaker 3 (01:32):
Able to do that, but we also have to honor
that we live in real contexts, in our families, in
our workplace, you know, friendships.
Speaker 2 (01:41):
You name it is fawning a defensive move. Uh.
Speaker 3 (01:45):
Yeah, you could refer to it as a survival mechanism,
A defense mechanism.
Speaker 4 (01:49):
A yeah. Trauma responses are all about survival.
Speaker 2 (01:53):
How many people are aware of this?
Speaker 3 (01:56):
Well, fawning is pretty new to the even the trauma lexicon.
I mean, I feel like trauma in itself is still
in its infancy in the mental health field. It's only
really in the eighties that we first started looking at PTSD,
even for veterans. And then Judith Herman came along, Doctor
Judith Herman, and she saw that the way that survivors
(02:18):
of domestic violence, for instance, were experiencing their symptoms that
really mapped out exactly over what we were seeing for
the veterans, and that's so long standing. Complex trauma was
presenting sematically in the same way that we were seeing
for vets and for single incident acute traumatic events a
car crashes and natural disasters. And so you know, that
(02:42):
got PTSD into the diagnostic manual here in the United States.
But the truth is, we still don't have a diagnosis
for complex PTSD, which is really more of what I'm
talking about, which is the relational trauma piece. We don't
have that diagnosis here in the United States. The World
Health Organization finally added CPTSD to their ICD I think
(03:06):
eleven and I want to say twenty and eighteen. But
so the fact is, you know, especially when I was
in grad school, starting back in two thousand and five,
we weren't having these conversations. So even though I went
and I sat on a lot of therapist couches and
I talked about my history and I knew what happened
to me, and I could tell it, you know, backwards
and forwards, no one could give me this lenser language,
(03:29):
and so ultimately it kept me feeling even more stuck,
even more broken. Here I am trying so hard to
overcome my past, and I feel like I'm on this
hamster wheel, and so it's part of my mission now
to be honest. Right So here, I am now in
my fifties going no one should have to live this way.
And when I learned about fond response in particular, it
(03:52):
just it allowed me to make sense to myself right here.
Speaker 4 (03:56):
I am.
Speaker 3 (03:56):
I'm an educated person, I'm a lifelong seak. I want
to grow, I want to change, and yet I was
so stuck in this thing that I didn't even know
what it was. And so now we're learning, we're learning
more about the fun response. You know, one day all
the models said fight, flight, freeze, and now suddenly we
(04:17):
have fawn up. There is the fourth f and I'm
excited about that. I'm excited to empower other people so
that they can they can make a choice similar to yours,
which is, first of all, who am I?
Speaker 4 (04:29):
Anyway? What do I like?
Speaker 3 (04:31):
What do I want? A lot of times we don't
even know. But when we start to uncover those pieces
right to be able to have our own backs in
some ways no matter what, and lean in and say
I have to choose me. I'm going to choose self
this time?
Speaker 2 (04:49):
Is it called fawn and ingrid if the person just
agrees with his or her boss all the time.
Speaker 4 (04:55):
Yes, yes, wa was Yeah, I would say that's the
faun response.
Speaker 3 (05:00):
Yeah, there's no sense of self, there's no opinion there,
there's no even self respect.
Speaker 4 (05:05):
No one agrees all the time.
Speaker 2 (05:08):
I agree with you on that. Yeah, how do you
overcome it?
Speaker 3 (05:16):
Well, I think part of it is doing what you
and I are doing now, which is normalizing it and saying, hey,
there's this other option that the body has when it
feels unsafe, and it's called fawning. And when we put
it back in the body, we can start to go, oh,
I'm not just someone walking around with low self esteem.
I'm someone with a body that has hardwired operating instructions
(05:39):
that jumps in on my behalf when I'm feeling threatened.
So just that information alone, I feel, is so powerful.
But then we can take a look at well, if
I feel like I've been living in this chronic trauma response,
that means I might have some trauma in my background.
And again, we're just continuing to learn more and more
all the time about what trauma is. It's not about
(06:02):
a specific event, right, So it's not like there's some
trauma measuring stick, and so many people do this.
Speaker 4 (06:08):
I see this in my practice all the time.
Speaker 3 (06:10):
They're like, but my experience wasn't as bad, and my
cousin had it worse, and you know, all of these
people we want to kind of measure our experiences against others,
and most of us find that we fall short on
the measuring stick and we go I can't call it trauma, right,
So it's not about an event. It's about what the
event did to your nervous system, that it overwhelmed your
(06:35):
nervous system. And once we can start to recognize, oh,
this is what trauma is, this is why I got stuck,
then we can avail ourselves of some of the tools
and resources that we have in the trauma therapy landscape,
things like EMDR or internal family systems, therapy, somatic experiencing,
(06:57):
body work, regulating our nervous system. There's a host of
things that we can avail ourselves of if we cross
that threshold into going oh yes, that label applies to
me too well.
Speaker 2 (07:09):
With doctor Ingrid Clayton, her website is her name linked
up at coastncoastdam dot com. Her book is called Fawning
would you say, ingrid that those who fawn are generally
nice people narcissists? What are they?
Speaker 4 (07:26):
Yeah, I think it's a great question.
Speaker 3 (07:28):
I think fauners tend to be very empathetic. We tend
to really look at what everyone else is going through
and try to understand and have compassion for why they
do what they do. We tend to have a lot
of hope and faith in the fact that other people
can change and they don't mean to.
Speaker 4 (07:50):
Be so hard on me.
Speaker 3 (07:51):
And so there's this big heartedness that I see a
lot with people in a chronic faun response.
Speaker 2 (08:00):
Where does honesty come into this?
Speaker 3 (08:04):
Yeah, that's such a good question. There's a section in
my book called to Tell You the Truth because, to
use some of your examples, right, if someone walks in
with this heinous outfit and you're like, you look amazing, right, Like,
that obviously is not honest. And yet if you grew
up in an environment where you know, I talk about
(08:27):
this that for people that lived in really dysfunctional homes,
abusive homes, even something like saying good morning ends up
being dishonest because.
Speaker 4 (08:38):
There's something good about it at all.
Speaker 3 (08:41):
You end up performing a life rather than living a life.
There's this sort of curated kind of shape shifting thing
that can happen in a chronic faun response. But I
hesitate to say that it's dishonesty or it's lying again,
because those are consciously motivated. So some people, and I
(09:02):
see you know, in the online discourse in particular, they
talk about fauners as though it's conscious manipulation, And in
my experience and all of the clients that I've worked
with for I don't know decades now, that has never
been the case. So yes, it leads to dishonesty, and
(09:27):
that was never our intention. And so if we lead
with this idea that you're doing something wrong and you're
a liar, in other words, shaming people for these behaviors,
all we're going to do is keep the behaviors existing
because the shame is so high they can't actually do
the work that needs to happen in order to free
(09:48):
themselves of.
Speaker 4 (09:51):
Living in this trauma response.
Speaker 2 (09:53):
If that makes sense, Can you on fawn without coming
across as uncaring that you don't give a darn about something?
Speaker 3 (10:01):
I think so, and I think sometimes it's messy. We
have to give ourselves some grace. It's a bit of
like the pendulum swing that if you've lived all the
way on one side, and this is for any behavior, really,
it tends.
Speaker 4 (10:15):
To swing all the way to the other side.
Speaker 3 (10:17):
So if you didn't have any healthy fight response ever,
and you're practicing having a voice, it can come across
as you're kind of a jerk. But I say, tell
people that you're trying to unfond tell them that you're
trying to have a voice, that you're stepping into your
agency and advocacy, and that it's new and that it's awkward,
(10:38):
and you know, particularly people that are close to you,
like ask them to give you a little grace. But
over time I find that what we can get you
as a sense of balance and boundaries.
Speaker 2 (10:52):
Who's a better friend the person who tells you something
direct or the person who kind of sugarcoats things to
make you feel good.
Speaker 3 (11:01):
Well for me personally, obviously I want the person that's
going to be more direct, but I also know that
I'm a safe place for that kind of direct communication.
Speaker 2 (11:13):
There's really nothing to negative to say about you.
Speaker 4 (11:18):
To say about me, right, So I mean.
Speaker 2 (11:20):
As somebody who was your friend, Oh, they're not sugarcoating
anything because you are who you are.
Speaker 3 (11:28):
Yeah, And I am a human being, so I'm going
to make mistakes.
Speaker 4 (11:32):
I'm going to put my foot in my mouth.
Speaker 3 (11:34):
But hopefully the people that are close to me can say,
you know, hey, that hurt my feelings or that I
wish you would have done that differently. And you know,
as a person who's healing from relational trauma, there's a
saying wounding happens in relationships and healing happens in relationships.
And I'm a big believer in that that it's how
(11:55):
we show up now and we do things differently that
makes such a huge difference.
Speaker 2 (12:01):
I mean, I've had some friends who've been at tables
at restaurants and places like that, the ingrid who've said
some inappropriate things, not intentionally to hurt, they just say them,
and I've pulled them aside and said, look, that was
pretty inappropriate to say, not at this table there are
kids here, this or that, And then the would a
(12:23):
faun or have lied about that, Well.
Speaker 4 (12:26):
They probably wouldn't have said anything.
Speaker 3 (12:28):
Right, So we tend to be very conflict avoidant because
it invites tends to invite more harm. Right, if having
a voice made things worse, the last thing you want
to do is go stir something up with someone across
the table.
Speaker 4 (12:43):
You know.
Speaker 3 (12:43):
That's another sign I think of a chronic fauner is
when you can't address anything directly, but it still builds
up in your body. And so a couple of things
tend to happen. Either you're full of resentment, right you're
kind of just seating on the inside, like that jerk
and they said that thing.
Speaker 4 (13:00):
Or they're never.
Speaker 3 (13:01):
Stepping up and helping out and I'm doing all of
the work. Or you gossip and you tell someone else
who you know will be able to hear it.
Speaker 1 (13:13):
Right.
Speaker 3 (13:13):
So I tend to look at your patterns of gossip
in your life, and that might be an indication that
you have a chronic faun response where you're not able
to be more direct to.
Speaker 2 (13:24):
The recipient of a fauner. Person who gets it, do
they generally like the faun or did they come across
as pleasing as opposed to somebody who doesn't fonn.
Speaker 3 (13:36):
Let me see, you're saying to the person who receives
the fawning behavior, do they.
Speaker 2 (13:40):
Like it as opposed to somebody who tells them the truth?
Speaker 3 (13:44):
Yeah, I'd say it depends right that you mentioned the narcissist.
I think the narcissist fauner pairing is a very very
common one, And in that case, you would say absolutely,
the narcissist loves that you are going to merge with
their expectations. You're going to sort of go with their
flow at all time. You're not going to have a
(14:05):
voice unless it's the voice they want you to have.
That's why that pairing works so well. But for other
people that have a healthier sense of self, it's annoying.
It's infuriating to try to connect with someone who doesn't
have their.
Speaker 4 (14:21):
Own opinions, you know.
Speaker 3 (14:24):
So it depends on who the other person is in
their relationship.
Speaker 2 (14:27):
Given a choice to fond or just to stay quiet
and not say anything, which would you prefer.
Speaker 4 (14:34):
It's all context dependent.
Speaker 3 (14:36):
I was sharing with my social media following on Instagram
the other day. I had encountered this person at my
son's baseball game. He was loud, and he was aggressive.
He was yelling at the coaches, he was yelling at
the kids, and my body instinctively fond. In other words,
I knew he needed to be the expert and the
(14:57):
big man on campus and I I deferred. I was
managing that relationship in a way that I was propping
him up. And you know what, it worked. He didn't
yell at me, he didn't yell at my son. That's
not to say that there weren't any consequences. I was
also managing what was essentially a toxic relationship instead of
(15:21):
turning to these healthier, reciprocal relationships that could have been
happening with other people at the ball field. But I
guess it's to say we don't ever get rid of
our trauma responses. I want to have it when I
need it. I don't want to live there twenty four
to seven. Okay, that is living in survival mode and
(15:42):
it's not healthy for anybody.
Speaker 1 (15:45):
Listen to more Coast to Coast AM every weeknight at
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for more
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