We’ve all heard of fight, flight, and freeze—but the central focus of Josephson’s work is on the fawn response. For some of us, when we face a threat, our nervous system compels us towards appeasement and Josephson challenges us to consider the question: “when did I learn this was helpful or protective?”. Something I appreciate about Josephson’s approach is that she does not reject the feelings that arise or send us into shame spirals over how we should behave. Instead, she reinforces a narrative in which we thank the part of our brain that is trying to protect us before considering next steps.
When we consider fawning behaviours in adult life, Josephson identifies the following: -Constantly worrying what people think of you, if they like you, if they’re mad at you -Overextending yourself, not setting boundaries, and then feeling resentful -Avoiding conflict at all costs -Constantly fearing getting in trouble or being seen as “bad” -Constantly fearing that you are bad and you’re just fooling everyone -Constantly seeking external approval or validation -Silencing your needs for the comfort and happiness of everyone else -Feeling hypervigilant of peoples’ emotions and moods -Overexplaining yourself as an attempt to feel heard or understood -Feeling like everything is your fault and then overapologizing -Being indecisive because you don’t want to disappoint anyone or because you genuinely don’t know what you like or prefer -Not trusting yourself to make decisions -Having trouble identifying your needs and speaking up about them -Never feeling good enough -Feeling unworthy of your accomplishments -Constantly feeling like you’re performing and trying to impress others and prove yourself to them -Feeling like you’re a chameleon in relationships
You can treat this like a quiz in Cosmopolitan and I’ll let you check off your own cues while I add up the 13 I count for myself. Again, I think it’s worth noting that Josephson thanks the brain for its protective habits. They may be maladaptive, but the intention is to keep ourselves regulated.
Throughout the book, Josephson goes through some case studies from her clinical experience. She writes about “Sophie.” Sophie “spent so much of her time and energy meeting her family’s physical and emotional needs that she forgot she had needs of her own.” She discusses being an adult that “overextends herself and then feels secretly resentful.” She “struggles to set boundaries and gets all of her feeling of value from being nurturing and helpful.” I couldn’t help but think back to reading The Cider House Rules by John Irving, Homer’s desperate need to feel “useful,” and reflect on how I should probably not have identified so closely with his sentiment. Josephson then elaborates on Sophie being a parentified child—not everything is relatable directly to my experience. She talks about how Sophie “grew up to be a hyperindependent adult [who] feels like she has to do everything on her own and struggles to ask for help. She’s the therapist friend, the person everyone goes to with their problems, but she feels like her problems and emotions are burdens.” Josephson elaborates on how “Sophie got the message that she could receive love and attention by alleviating other people’s stress but now when she’s stressed or overwhelmed she feels like she needs to hide those feelings.” The passage continues, “No one ever thinks to check in on her because they assume she always is fine and has it together. She unconsciously seeks out romantic relationships in which she needs to mother her partner because that’s the dynamic that feels familiar to her but it leaves her resentful and exhausted.” She has a harsh inner critic that has been a stand-in for parenting and guidance she wasn’t able to get while she was caring for everyone else. Moreover, “she also finds herself being critical of people who aren’t as self-sufficient as she is in part because she’s envious that they didn’t have to grow up so quickly.” Josephson’s list of descriptors is compelling as a kind of character study, but simultaneously hits a bit close to home in some of the mindsets of her clients.
Carter is another compelling case study. Josephson talks about how Carter’s challenging emotions were discouraged or ridiculed by her parents and “she learned to believe that something was wrong with her for having such emotions.” In response, she “adapted by taking on the perfectionist role—she was the high achiever, the golden girl.” One detail in her story could have been lifted directly from my life: “She cried in middle school when she got an A on a history paper, instead of an A.” Just replace middle school with elementary school and history paper with presentation about classical composers. I haven’t engaged in enough self-reflection to really conceptualize this, but it felt true when I read that “she’s a charmer who morphs her personality to match that of whomever she’s with and wants to be liked by everyone, even if that means not always liking herself.” More apt for me is the sentence that follows it: “She’s terrified of making a mistake and of having people find out that she did.” For her, it was about heavy criticism while she was growing up, like when she accidentally broke a glass or missed a goal at soccer practice. Josephson continues: “She feels crippled by any sort of negative feedback because being seen as anything but perfect has felt entirely unsafe” and—here’s the really problematic stuff for me—”she needs people to think she’s always productive and if she hears someone walk through the door, she’ll quickly swap the TV remote for a book so they don’t think she was gasp relaxing. She’s very hard on herself and never feels like she’s doing enough. She walks around with a deep sense of shame for not being the perfect person she expects herself to be.” I think I’m revealing way too much of myself here, but I also bring it up because these characterizations felt like finding connection with these strangers. Josephson also considers the nuances of the catch-22 that Carter “often feels like she’s putting up a front so that people won’t see the messiness underneath” but that “as a result, she feels like people don’t know the real her.” Being flawless is an isolating place to be, but “she learned, ‘I need to be perfect to be loved.’”
One of the fawning responses that I felt was most engrossing was the sense of chasing accomplishment and overextending. I hadn’t considered that drowning yourself in responsibilities is a protective experience, but one that doesn’t serve its victims long term. The fawn response, she says, “is about finding safety by doing more.” Josephson talks about the sense of accomplishment and the sense of relief and considers its implications. She starts off by talking about how “the inner critic, which is trying to protect you, tells you that no accomplishment is enough, because it’s stuck in a time when you had to constantly impress in order to achieve a sense of safety.” It’s a paradox. If you reached a point where you felt “good enough” the protective part would feel scared “because it would mean you could stop trying so hard.” Fawners often struggle with low self-esteem and so “no accomplishment is impressive.” If you are able to achieve it, then it couldn’t have been that hard, and this mindset leads you to “constantly undervalue your milestones.” There is no satisfying the inner critic, “who’s trying so hard to find safety through perfection.”
The reason I was initially drawn to this book is because I saw someone on TikTok post about the relationship between achievement and relief. It was this passage: “Achievements may bring a sense of relief instead of joy, because those achievements were merely an obligation, another milestone you had to complete to continue to prove yourself.” Ouch. Right in the heart. It seems so unfair that achievements can be so stripped of joy. It also creates contradictions for us in that when you receive compliments, it challenges our sense of unworthiness, and to maintain our sense of self, we push away such compliments. Another of Josephson’s figures, Ari, “wants to reject herself before others can reject her. She doesn’t think she’s enough, so it feels absolutely unbelievable to her when someone else thinks she is.” Yet, Ari also “desperately wants to be taken seriously” and “feels frustrated by her inability to accept praise.” The question remains: how can we learn to appreciate and celebrate our own achievements without that sense of guilt or unworthiness?
There’s another passage that feels true about ‘filling our cups.’ Josephson says, “Maybe it was impossible to receive nourishment without also receiving something that didn’t feel good, like being guilt-tripped or controlled.” The notion of receiving care and criticism in equal measure feels awful. Nourishment came with a price, and so we can’t resist nor fully absorb it, and no amount of reassurance or validation will feel like enough. External validation can never satisfy us, though: “True long term safety arises internally through validating our emotions, soothing ourselves, and allowing ourselves to receive validation from someone else.”
I can’t help but feel my review of Are You Mad at Me? has done little more than provide quotations and summarize some of the things I found relatable. I don’t think I’ve done very well considering the book as an aesthetic object. It was an informative one, for sure, and one that I connected with a lot.
Happy reading; happy healing!
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