You know that moment when you realize you’ve been silencing your own truth for years? When your efforts to be nice or helpful weren’t kindness…. they were survival? There’s a trauma response many of us never learn to name… and even fewer learn to heal. It’s not fight. It’s not flight. It’s not freeze. It’s fawning.

On this episode, we’re honored to welcome a woman who didn’t just name this often‐hidden response — she brought it into the light for thousands of survivors to see themselves.

Dr. Ingrid Clayton, clinical psychologist, author, trauma expert, and a voice for the unseen parts of our nervous systems.

Dr. Clayton’s new book, Fawning: Why the Need to Please Makes Us Lose Ourselves — and How to Find Our Way Back, is already shifting how trauma is understood. Drawing on nearly twenty years of clinical practice — and her own lived experience — she shows us how chronic fawning operates beneath our awareness, how it becomes baked into identity, and how we can “unfawn” and reclaim agency. 

She doesn’t just write — she tours. Her book events have appeared at prestigious venues like 92NY in New York City, where she joined author Laura McKowen to discuss Fawning and hold space for deep transformation.  She brings her wisdom into public conversation through dozens of podcasts, major media outlets, and columns for Psychology Today, where her writing has built an audience of tens of thousands. 

When the noise and pressure to appease crowd in, when you find yourself saying yes when every part of you wants to scream no…this is not weakness. This is survival. 

Dr. Clayton will guide us through how we got here, where fawning shows up in relationships and work and self…and what it truly looks like to step back into your voice.