Does recovery re-traumatize fawners? 🎧

Recovering with Holly Whitaker

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Does recovery re-traumatize fawners? 🎧

“You want to keep a fawner fawning? Tell them they’re doing something wrong.”

Holly Whitaker

Dec 26, 2025

What if the recovery programs meant to heal you are actually reinforcing the trauma patterns that made you sick in the first place?

The fawn response sees managing other people as a survival skill; recovery culture calls it codependency, disease, and a character defect.

SHOW NOTES

Dr. Ingrid Clayton, author of Fawning, joins me for the fifth installment of her series on how neurodivergence, hormones, and CPTSD reshape recovery. Ingrid shares her journey from getting sober at 21 to decades later finally understanding that her “codependency” and people-pleasing were actually survival mechanisms rooted in complex relational trauma. They explore how fawning develops when other trauma responses are unavailable or dangerous, why recovery spaces can inadvertently pathologize these protective patterns, and what it actually takes to “unfawn”—from building tolerance for being in your body to risking authenticity on social media. It’s a conversation about the difference between performing helpfulness and genuine vulnerability, why relational trauma requires relational healing, and how moving from “something’s wrong with me” to appreciating your protective patterns changes everything.

“I know that my coping was fucking genius, and the only thing available at the time. Stop telling me that it was a problem to solve until you acknowledge the solution that it was.”

—Dr. Ingrid Clayton

TOPICS COVERED

What fawning is and how it differs from fight, flight, or freeze responses; Complex relational trauma versus single-incident trauma; How fawning develops when other trauma responses are unavailable or dangerous; The intersection of fawning with addiction recovery and 12-step programs; Why codependency and people-pleasing language can be pathologizing; How recovery culture’s emphasis on humility and ego deflation harms fawners; The relationship between self-betrayal and relational safety; Why fawning disconnects us from our bodies and internal experience; The unfawning process and what it requires; How childhood experiences of asking for help shape adult fawning patterns; Nervous system regulation in healing from chronic fawn response; Why trauma is about the wound inside us, not the event itself; How relational trauma requires relational healing; The difference between performing helpfulness and authentic vulnerability; Why perfectionism is a brilliant coping strategy; Moving from “something’s wrong with me” to appreciating protective patterns.

"I wasn’t broken — I was surviving. And no one had ever helped me see the difference."

—Dr. Ingrid Clayton

ABOUT INGRID

Ingrid Clayton, PhD, is a writer and clinical psychologist in private practice in Los Angeles, California. She’s the author of Fawning, Believing Me, where she uncovers her personal experience of childhood trauma from a psychologist’s perspective, and Recovering Spirituality: Achieving Emotional Sobriety in Your Spiritual Practice. Ingrid is a regular contributor to Psychology Today. With a Masters in transpersonal psychology and a PhD in clinical psychology, Ingrid has a holistic approach to psychotherapy, incorporating trauma-informed modalities like Somatic Experiencing, EMDR, and other experiential ways of working with the nervous system. Ingrid has been using a relational approach to therapy since 2004, bringing her whole self to the work—including her personal experience, intuition, and education. This enables her to be in real connection and collaboration with her clients.