People Pleasing vs. Fawning: Why We Do It and How to Change

0:07Forrest Hanson: Hello and welcome to Being Well. I'm Forrest Hanson. If you're new to the show, thanks for joining us today. And if you've listened before, welcome back. There is a particular kind of regret that I am very familiar with. A situation is maybe getting a bit intense or stressful or somebody's putting even just a little bit of pressure on you to do something that you're not sure if you want to do. and you find yourself saying yes before you've really thought about it, or you're accommodating them when you don't really want to or nodding along maybe, I've done this plenty even on the podcast, when you actually disagree.

0:39Forrest Hanson: And if you're listening to this, you've probably already heard of people-pleasing or fawning, and we know that you've probably already heard of this because we get an awful lot of questions about these topics. So today we're going to try to do something a little bit different and use questions from our listeners as a kind of map for today's episode. We're going to be talking about what people-pleasing and fawning are, how they're different, where these ideas come from, and why that matters, and how to work on these tendencies and hopefully bring an even more authentic version of yourself into your relationships.

1:10Forrest Hanson: So to help us do that, I'm joined today, as usual, by clinical psychologist, Dr. Rick Hansen. Dad, how are you doing today?

1:17Dr. Rick Hanson: I'm good, and I'd say that this topic is like a bright through line that runs through a really large fraction of the issues that bring people to a therapist and that people are grappling with in their relationships, including at work, not just in their kind of intimate family romantic relationships.

1:37Forrest Hanson: I think you're right on. So I wanted to start with the first question that we got. I clicked on one video about people-pleasing, and now my algorithm is full of videos about it. Isn't that the modern experience right there? But I'm still struggling to get a straight answer on some things. How is people-pleasing or fawning different from just being a kind, agreeable person? How do I tell if I'm a people-pleaser versus just being nice? And are people-pleasing and fawning the same thing? So this is a bit of a multi-parter. I'm going to kind of save that last little one for a monologue later in the episode.

2:15Forrest Hanson: But Dad, I'd like you to start wherever you want here.

2:17Dr. Rick Hanson: That's a great question because it really gets at what it feels like to be you in the moment with another person. And what are you doing kind of in a regular way in the stream? And what are you doing when there's a collision of wants? There is a lot to be said for being a loving, kind, moral person. There's a place for all kinds of reasons for good conduct toward other people. Where we tip into trouble is when it becomes less and less authentic and more and more automatic and saturated increasingly with dysphoria, not feeling good. And so we have here these two key elements, volition. Are you at choice?

2:59Dr. Rick Hanson: And what are the consequences? Net, triple net, is it really good for you to keep on doing this behavior? People-pleasing or fawning is when you start tipping into feeling like you cannot be your authentic self with somebody else. And you need to give them what they want to prevent negative consequences for you that you don't want to address head on. So it's an appeasement strategy. It's a preemptive strike. You're trying to prevent something bad from happening. And you're going to say more about the range or the distinction between people pleasing and fawning, I think of people-pleasing as a sort of a moderate version of this.

3:41Dr. Rick Hanson: I think of fawning as rooted in our primate history in which it's a deep submission response that has shame embedded in it as we subordinate ourselves to others.

3:55Forrest Hanson: I would just essentially thumbs up to what you said about the difference between people-pleasing and fawning. We're going to talk a little bit more about this later, but people-pleasing is more about psychology while fawning is more about physiology. People-pleasing is a habit, and it's based on a lot of different factors, right? Like your temperament, the culture you come from, a certain identity you've built over time. With effort and practice, you can catch people-pleasing and intervene around it. Fawning is a stress response. You're managing your assessment of danger by trying to get closer to the big scary thing.

4:29Forrest Hanson: And this then relates to some stuff that we've talked about frequently over the last couple of episodes that we've done about object relations. There's this small sense of who I am and this big, scary other, because the world is a big, scary place with a lot of hierarchies in it, and it kind of makes sense for us to get a little bit closer to the people that could cause us harm. And so that's the kind of distinction I would draw thematically between the two of them. I think a lot of this is functional. What does it feel like? Fawning feels like fear for most people. You know, you're scanning, you're dissociated, it feels very urgent.

5:04Forrest Hanson: People-pleasing tends to feel more like a habit or a behavior. You know, maybe I'm a little reluctant and I'm just kind of doing this and I'm going, oh, why didn't I catch that?

5:12Dr. Rick Hanson: Well, I'm wondering what you think about situations. I love that you said the word hierarchies and you're alluding to power because there's some view that there's an asymmetry of power. People-pleasing and fawning operate inside an object relations, inside a paradigm, a framework in which one is there being more, the other person is more dominant, right? Because if they're not more dominant, you don't need to tip into the inauthenticity and not so good for you long-termness of people-pleasing and certainly that of fawning, right? So there's that fundamental premise. Okay, what do you think about situations, Forrest, in which there really is an asymmetry of power.

5:54Forrest Hanson: Yeah, I think those situations are frequent, which is part of the reason that people have so many questions about people-pleasing and fawning, right? We're constantly surrounded by hierarchies. We have to find our spot in that hierarchy, and we have to either deal with or stay off the radar of people who are more socially powerful than us, who could plausibly be a source of harm or stress or just causing problems in our life. And appeasement strategies exist because they work. Bottom line. Like, this is a very effective way of interacting with the world. And I really want to say something very clearly at the front end of this episode, which is that stressed responses are not bad things.

6:35Forrest Hanson: You are not a bad person for having a fond response. You are not inauthentic and bad for people-pleasing in a situation where you assess that people-pleasing is going to help you solve the kinds of the problems that you're describing here, Dad.

6:48Dr. Rick Hanson: When we're people-pleasing or fawning in the problematic ways we're describing here, there would be naturally an underlying internal sense of self-betrayal. I'm betraying myself. Now I'm doing it maybe because I've got to get through it, but there's a kind of betrayal. At the end of the day, when you review your relationship with a powerful figure in your life, this is kind of where it is. do you wince, sort of? Like you've let yourself down, you know, self-abandonment is a theme you've really carried forward in the podcast, you know, on the one hand or on the other hand, do you look at the situation and just think, man, I've been outnumbered.

7:32Dr. Rick Hanson: They got the votes, they got the guns, whatever, they got the money. I've done really well, things considered, you know. Totally. That's a key difference.

7:41Forrest Hanson: And I think that's a great way to frame it, dad and just that internal feeling of like, does this feel like you're on your own side or not? You can people please from a totally on your own side place. That's what I would say. But let's talk a little bit more about some of the common behaviors or like the symptoms of people pleasing. How do you know you're in the category?

7:57Dr. Rick Hanson: Yeah.

7:58Forrest Hanson: Yeah. What would you throw on this list?

8:00Dr. Rick Hanson: Oh, well, I think saying yes before thinking whether you can actually do something, having issues with saying no. And by the way, this whole people pleasing thing is interesting too. Like, I'm a pretty forthright person, but man, my dad, I could not say no to. And he was a sweet guy.

8:16Forrest Hanson: Yeah, it can be very specific. And we're going to talk a little bit more about that later. There's some questions about that. Another thing I think is chronic apologizing, chronic self-effacement, debasement, when

8:29Dr. Rick Hanson: it's not really necessary to do that. I think there's a skillfulness about going one down. But apologizing when you don't really need to apologize. Yeah, that would be another sign. What else? What else do you think?

8:42Forrest Hanson: I think that a big one is when you get wrapped up in other people's problems because you've been trying to solve them. So somebody comes to you with a kind of issue. There's maybe an ask that's embedded in that issue. Like, would you help me out with this? Would you try to do that? You're like, okay, sure, sure, sure. And then just one thing leads to another, leads to another. And all of a sudden, you've borrowed all of this trouble. I've definitely landed myself in situations like that in the past. Another one, which is not quite a behavior, but I think it's common in fauners or people pleasers, is a really keen awareness of other people's emotional states and a lot of attention to them.

9:17Forrest Hanson: And to be clear, sometimes when we're inferring about other people's emotions, we are dead wrong. You know, we are just making a lot of assumptions inside of our own little mind palace about what's going on over there and that other person. But if you tend to be somebody who just pays a lot of attention to what's going on in the other people in the room at any given moment in time, I think probably more likely than an average person to be somebody who has these kind of people-pleasing or fawning tendencies. The big one for me was resentment after saying yes. This was mine. I would say yes to stuff and then I would get mad about it later because I'd never really decided that this was something that I wanted to do for myself.

9:52Forrest Hanson: I hadn't communicated my own boundaries and limitations. I hadn't really thought about how much energy that I had, so I just ended up kind of overloaded with tasks. And then I would gripe about it inside of myself until I eventually just like exploded. Thankfully, I don't think my explosions were like that volatile on the scale, but still, it was my version of exploding, so it felt like a lot to me. So those are some of the ones that I would flag here. We actually got a question, maybe I can move into it here, about a different presentation of people-pleasing that can help us look at an example of this.

10:20Forrest Hanson: I was a people pleaser through my early 20s, and how I came across to others really depended on who I was around. I've worked on those tendencies and gotten a lot better about them. And with people I've met since, I feel free in a way I never did before. But with my older friends, the ones I made while I was still deep in it, I just slip right back into those behaviors. They're great friends, and I want to keep being friends with them, but it just feels so automatic and habitual to slip back into that way of being. When I do try to stop it, I end up just going quiet or shutting down. How do I bring the new version of me to those old friendships?

11:02Forrest Hanson: So what do you think about this, Dad? Would you say it's more people-pleasing or more fawning? I think this is probably more people-pleasing. It doesn't sound like a threatening situation. This is somebody who's dealing with people who like them, doesn't really seem like a stress response to me. They are suggesting a certain amount of volitional control over their behavior that all kind of flags people place onto me.

11:26Dr. Rick Hanson: In a funny way, it reminds me of going to Finland for a year when I was 14 and 15, my junior year in high school. And because I could step into a world in which nobody knew me, I felt really free of the scripts that I'd been living, the object relations I'd been enacting back in West Covina High School. And so the question then becomes how to help yourself not slip back into those ways of being, right? And this is a person who does seem to be kind of a shapeshifter and really quite affected. There's a term in psychology called demand characteristics. If I were to do a demonstration, you and I are, you know, we're kind of meeting and I stick out my hand.

12:12Dr. Rick Hanson: And it's almost automatic. Yeah, you want to stick out. Yeah, you want to do it. Yeah. Yeah. So paying attention to the so-called demand characteristics of a situation that suck you into old scripts and realizing that it's not a demand, actually, and you can be different. Now, of course, as you know from your work and guests in family psychology, that systems resist change, right? And so if you go back to your old friends and you're just not completing their sentences like you used to, and you're not letting them talk over you. You just keep on talking if they try to interrupt you. These examples of domination behaviors, just in casual relationships, you stop doing that, it destabilizes things.

12:53Forrest Hanson: Yeah, it really messes with the whole system.

12:55Dr. Rick Hanson: Totally. It's interesting what people do to punish you for creating changes, and then they enlist allies to try to maintain the original status quo. And then you see over time, do you want to keep those old friends. And I do think as an observation, having lived long enough to be able to say this, I really wonder what you think about this. I think we go through cycles every X years. I don't know if it's Saturn return. It's certainly within every seven years or so. Stop. Stop.

13:24Forrest Hanson: One of the running jokes on the podcast that I enjoy the most is you needling me about astrology. It's truly like, it gives you such glee. I can just see on your face how happy it makes you every time you get me with it. I'm just like, oh my God. Anyways, keep going. Keep going. Sadrugger and bully. Yeah.

13:41Dr. Rick Hanson: Okay. Okay. Okay. For whatever reason,

13:44Forrest Hanson: we go through these cycles, maybe going to a new school or moving or shifting out of an old. I think relationships are a big example of this. An example I gave for a long time was that your next partner is the person who benefits from all the learning you did in the last relationship, just because it's really hard to apply it inside of the current one. Yeah.

14:02Dr. Rick Hanson: Super well said. That's right. Right. So we go through these cycles in which we shed two-thirds of our previous friends, and we just don't see them very much anymore. And most of them kind of wither in our life.

14:16Forrest Hanson: And some of this is situational. If you have a friendship that's more about like a hobby you do together, you move away from that hobby, you're probably not going to have that friend as much.

14:22Dr. Rick Hanson: Or a new job or a new city, da-da-da-da. And to me, the real friends are the ones we carry along through each of these cycles, these normal cycles. And with regard to this thing, if you yourself go through a big personal growth experience, maybe this person, as this person is saying, they realized some new things, or maybe you go on retreat and you come back or whatever. You realize you're just not gonna get drunk a lot with your friends anymore. Well, not all those friends are gonna come along with you as you move into greater degrees of sobriety. And those are the ones you can really count on over time.

14:58Forrest Hanson: A piece of this question that I want to highlight, because I think you're right on here, Dad, is the frame of, I want to keep these people and I like these people. So, okay, we're in the world of how do we make this work, given that we don't want to just kind of shed these relationships. And I think you're totally right that there are a lot of relationships as we move through life that, you know, you grow and you change, you're both different people. It's really okay. And sometimes it's, I think more often than not, that's not a personal thing. It's not me of saying, oh, this is like not a good person over there anymore.

15:28Forrest Hanson: We're just, we just gotten different and it's all okay. But if you want to keep them, what do you do? First thing I would wonder about is can you actually enlist your friends as part of this process? What happens if you're really honest with them about, hey, this is what's going on for me. That's kind of an unusual conversation for people to have with each other in American culture to like talk about that level of internal process. So, okay, it could be a little bit of a yellow line in relationships, but maybe you have a kind of relationship with these people where you can actually do that. Can you say something like, hey, I've noticed this happened and I'm working on it.

16:02Forrest Hanson: Like, do you mind helping me out with it? Or like, hey, could you maybe go out of your way a little bit to ask me what I'm thinking or what I'm feeling about something? Because I actually have a really hard time volunteering that. No, you're putting a little bit of pressure on other people. You're making an ask, which already is not a very people-pleasing thing to do. So we're getting a little exposure therapy in here, right? We're trying something a little bit different. So could you work that in? And that would be just a general question I would have. What do you think about that, Todd? I think it's great to ask people who are appropriate to help you be the person you want to be,

16:37Dr. Rick Hanson: you know, to help you kind of be, make this little shift. I think that's really great. And then it gets very interesting what they do. Totally. Yeah.

16:46Forrest Hanson: I'm not saying it's going to go well. I'm just saying you could do it. Yeah. Are you thinking back to like 18 past moments in relationships right now, Dad? I just see you. I see your eyes glazing over. My life is flashing before my eyes. Totally. Yeah.

17:02Dr. Rick Hanson: Well, it gets you a larger topic and maybe we'll do a pot on it about basically what can I give you so that you'll give me what I want, right? It kind of gets at that. And yeah, where it would really help me to X if you did Y, you know, it's that kind of reciprocity thing. So sometimes it's framed like that. You know, you're really also getting at something that I have a bee in my bonnet about lately. So a rump for rump. This is a preemptive rump. See where we're going here. We'll see where it goes. I just am really struck by how infrequently people are easily and appropriately supportive of each other.

17:41Forrest Hanson: You've mentioned this a few times on the podcast. Yeah.

17:43Dr. Rick Hanson: They just don't a lot.

17:45Forrest Hanson: Now, you're unusual in that regard. I really appreciate it. My friend group's also unusual. It's like half of it's therapists, so.

17:51Dr. Rick Hanson: Yeah, maybe that's part of it. And people also, I think, who've been wounded in their childhoods, many of whom then become therapists, many therapists have that history, can particularly appreciate the simplicity of little moments, little grace notes just kind of dripped in to the ordinary conversation, just sprinkled in, of supportiveness, including supporting the growing edge of another person, the good that they're growing into, the new ways of being and that they're establishing for themselves. Like, yeah, let's do that. And let's appreciate the good in other people, you know, as it's coming out more and more.

18:30Dr. Rick Hanson: And the courage it takes to change your typical MO, to drop a little of that mask, you know, to try on some new moves. Good on you. That's one thing that's blown me away when I've watched swing dance videos, including those, I mean, super fun to watch you and other extremely good people. It's a lot of fun, actually, to watch these YouTube clips of more beginners, let's say, or early intermediate, because they're out there. It's not world class. And you know what? The room erupts in applause in any case.

19:04Forrest Hanson: Sure. Yeah. It's a very validating space for that kind of thing. Totally. Totally. Yeah. Yeah, like novice contests or more beginner contests in West Coast Swing, there's often a lot of crowd buy-in. No, I think that's a great point, Dad. And maybe the little point inside of what you're saying is when you find people or environments like that, support those relationships. Keep on doing what you can to search for people like that or who are giving you that kind of support. One of the things that I would say practically about this is just to appreciate the impact of context in all of our behavior, right?

19:38Forrest Hanson: One of the big findings in the literature on habit formation and how to change a habit is that habits are cued. We go into them based on familiar situations or people, times of day, the environment that's around us, all of that kind of stuff. So if we change the cue, we can change a lot of the habit. So does this mean that talking or meeting up with some of these people one-on-one lets you explore a different kind of behavior with them? What if you are in a different setting than you guys are normally in when you hang out? What if you're doing a new activity together than you're normally doing when you spend time together?

20:10Forrest Hanson: So all of those are just different ways that we can explore like a slightly different way of being that might feel a little easier for us. We'll be back to the show in just a minute, but first a word from our sponsors. As Being Well grew, I didn't have the time to stay on top of everything. But we also weren't in a position to hire full-time employees. That's where our sponsor, Upwork, came in. I've hired all of our audio, video, and transcription help through Upwork. That small team of great freelancers is what's allowed us to continue making the podcast every week for the past eight years. You can look at a freelancer's profile and past work, get help scoping the role if you're not sure what you're looking for yet, and contracts and payments all get handled in one place, which is super convenient.

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23:50Forrest Hanson: Now, back to the show. I want to get us back to the people-pleasing topic, because that's most of what we're doing today. And I'm going to do that by trying to answer the end of this person's question, which is, are people-pleasing and fawning the same thing? This took me down a total rabbit hole here. This is probably going to be a bit of a monologue, which I apologize for, given already how all over the place we've been so far. But there's actually a really interesting history here, and understanding it better helped me understand the differences between these two things and why these differences are actually important.

24:24Forrest Hanson: And it also actually gets to some of the grumbling I've heard you do in the past, Dad, about old wine and new bottles. It's a phrase that you've liked from time to time. Old psychological ideas that are given this fresh coat of paint for modern social media, and you kind of go like, well, why don't we just use the old terminology? And so, hey, let's talk about that a little bit. So let's start with people-pleasing. Again, we can go back to what I said at the beginning of the episode. People-pleasing is a little bit more about behavior or psychology, while fawning is more about physiology. You can find references to things like people-pleasing going all the way back to Aristotle, right?

24:59Forrest Hanson: He talked about obsequiousness as a vice, and he described it as those who praise everything and never oppose. That's basically a version of people-pleasing. And he said that these people think it's their duty to give no pain to the people that they meet. Then he had the opposite of it, which he called churlishness, those who oppose everything and care not a whit about giving pain. So he's got these two extremes. Then he goes on to say something really interesting, which is that we don't have a good word for the thing in the middle. So we've got this target for people, but we don't have like a pithy word for it.

25:32Forrest Hanson: And this, I think, leads us to some of the things you'll see people do when they're told to not people-please. You know, you can either be a doormat or an asshole. We don't really have a great middle path version for when we're balancing these things in a kind of situational way, including how you're describing, Dad, like complex situations with power, needing to deal with an overbearing boss. You know, if I people-please to them, am I being not a moral and ethical person? All of the more complicated stuff, like we don't really have a great word for it. If we really fast forward to Western psychology in the 1940s and 50s, You'll see psychoanalysts introduce ideas like people-pleasing into topics related to neuroses.

26:12Forrest Hanson: In 1945, Karen Horney, a German psychoanalyst, wrote Our Inner Conflicts, a Constructive Theory of Neurosis, and she proposed that there were these three basic strategies for handling anxiety. You can move toward people, move against people, or move away from people. And moving toward people is again, basically people pleasing. Then in the 80s, this goes into more of the pop psychology world with the book Codependent No More, which popularized codependency and then starts talking about people pleasing. And then early 2000s, there's a book titled The Disease to Please, which is the first example that I could find of people pleasing being like its own topic in a book.

26:53Forrest Hanson: And the author of that book framed it as a kind of approval addiction. This is important because addictions are behavioral in nature, right? So we've got this line here that's about character and psychology. Starts as a kind of moral vice with Aristotle, then goes to a neurotic style, and then gets turned into a kind of vague syndrome. That's not a real diagnosis, but it sounds a little bit like a diagnosis, right? Then let's look at the other line. This other line fawning, where does that start? We actually have to start in a very different place, which is the study of animal behavior. So you can see dominance hierarchies all over the place in animal behavior.

27:29Forrest Hanson: And appeasement behaviors are typically when an animal is trying to signal to a more powerful animal that it's not a threat, right? Now we got to remember, humans are big monkeys. And in the 70s and 80s, a psychologist got pretty into this. And they started applying ideas about dominance hierarchies to people. This is where something called social rank theory comes from. I've talked about it on the podcast in the past. And it's the idea that feelings like anxiety and depression are a natural consequence of perceiving yourself as being lower down the totem pole from other people. And I've heard, I think that I got the phrase entrapment and defeat from you years and years ago, dad.

28:08Forrest Hanson: It's one of my favorite phrases. Defeat refers to kind of a failed social struggle. So you weren't able to go up the totem pole. And then entrapment is the idea that you're stuck. can't do anything about it. So of course you would feel anxious or depressed or whatever, right? And one paper on this came out in 1987, and it framed depression as a yielding behavior. This then gets to work by people like Paul Gilbert, the creator of compassion-focused therapy and a friend of yours. And his idea is that low mood and submissive behavior are involuntary yielding responses to defeat. So when we're defeated, we go into these behaviors in an involuntary way.

28:47Forrest Hanson: We are forced into them by our physiology because it was evolutionarily adaptive for the loser in a conflict to have their aggression inhibited. If they kept fighting, they died. They were killed by the other bigger, stronger animal. So actually, who ended up passing on their genes? It was the losers in conflicts who were able to stop fighting. And that's appeasement behavior. That's the fawn response. So this whole line here is about biology and threat response. Nothing in there is about character. This is involuntary. It's a thing we just do. Now, if you are really paying attention, you might notice that I have not said a word yet, which is trauma.

29:32Forrest Hanson: These two lines, people-pleasing and fawning, merge in the early 2000s. Pete Walker, who we've had on the podcast, wrote an article titled codependency, trauma, and the fawn response. There we go. They're combined now. And it kind of merges codependency, which is tied to the people-pleasing line, and then attaches it to the threat response line, right? Which is that more of line two. And his frame is developmental. The fawn type develops in a person when a kid learns that fighting escalates abuse, and fleeing isn't available to them. So what do they have left? Appeasement. They've got that third option.

30:10Forrest Hanson: Now, this was a pretty specific and narrow definition of fawning. The problem is that when mental health content blew up online in the 2020s, fawning and people-pleasing started merging together in how people used them. So this means that a term that started describing as an involuntary threat response in abused kids, fawning, now routinely gets applied to the habit of saying yes a little bit too often. And this is a big problem because I would give somebody totally different advice for the habit of saying yes a little too often than I would for this traumatic pattern that has been developed based on awful experiences that a person goes through.

30:54Forrest Hanson: And I think that this is a great argument against some of the worst tendencies of like online social media discourse, how it is so flattening of this kind of complexity. So, okay, I will stop my monologue there. Do you have any takes on anything I've said so far, Dad? Wow. That was extraordinary,

31:12Dr. Rick Hanson: world-class. I learned a ton from Aristotle to Pete Walker to neurosis to addiction to psychopathology. Like, wow. Two things come to me just to comment on. One is the ways in which, and this is very close to Paul Gilbert's work and that of others, that depressed mood is adaptive if we want to get little monkeys or big humans off of the battlefield. In other words, depression fosters submission and withdrawal. And it's really weird to kind of appreciate the ways in which the more you start sliding from a fairly cognitive-ish people-pleasing style into more physiological, as you said at the beginning of the show, fawning approaches, that that slide is going to tend to foster a depressed mood, kind of automatically, baked into the blueprint, thank you Mother Nature, to serve an adaptive response of withdrawal.

32:20Dr. Rick Hanson: That's quite haunting and important to track. Second, when we appease, when we please, when we fawn, we are both expressing certain behaviors and we're pushing to the side other feelings and other desires. So what gets pushed away and where does it go? Because very often what we push away is our anger. Hell yeah. Is our anger, our sense of injustice, feeling wronged, being aggrieved, reproachful, gets pushed away, but it doesn't disappear. It comes back, the return of the repressed that Papa Freud would talk about. I'm sure he would love you referring to him that way with his own variety of complexes.

33:04Dr. Rick Hanson: Sometimes I think about Coach Buddha, and these are honorifics in both cases.

33:09Forrest Hanson: I think this is a great point you're making here, Dad. and this idea also of temperament, which you talk about often on the show. Do you have a temperament that's more of a fawning temperament? Do you have more of a fighting temperament? Do you have more of a fleeing temperament? We did a whole series on the stress responses that I would refer back to here. Something I do want to hammer here for people is that you do not need to be a traumatized individual in any sense of that word to have appeasement behaviors. Monkeys have appeasement behaviors. Dogs have appeasement behaviors. We are a big social manimal.

33:45Forrest Hanson: Appeasement is a part of what we do with each other, okay? The fawn response, the way that it was initially set up by Pete Walker and has since been used by other people, is it typically intended in that pretty narrow sense of trauma. But we can see these kinds of pleasing behaviors in people in general, and these behaviors are actually perfectly rational in a world that is jam-packed of spooky hierarchies of various kinds and all kinds of powerful forces that really are trying to mess with you in a variety of different ways. And so these two things are different. They're intertwined. They've got a relationship between them.

34:22Forrest Hanson: But I think that understanding the differences here can then help us deal with them. And I would love to actually get to our next question here, which is going to get a little bit more functional with some of this because I think it's going to get more into fawning than people-pleasing. I am a people-pleaser and probably anxiously attached, and I'm also in a complicated relationship that's fraught with conflict. So now my fond response alarms are going off. A lot of the advice about people-pleasing frames it as an old script that doesn't serve you anymore. I've heard you guys say similar things, but when I step back and reflect, I think it does apply.

34:57Forrest Hanson: My people-pleasing is only activated when I feel unsafe for very valid reasons, like if I'm being bullied. This leaves me with a tough question. Are my attachment behaviors, like anxiety or people-pleasing, a result of those conflicts, or is that conflict a result of my attachment style? For starters, I think we already spoke to a little bit of this and some of the setup we did around like, is it rational to fawn or people-please or not? And I'd say like, Yeah, if you're under threat, absolutely it can be. What else do you think about this question, Dad?

35:31Dr. Rick Hanson: Well, I like how you're flagging implicitly on the spectrum, if you will. And we kind of move back and forth of people pleasing to fawning. The more that a person feels threatened, in other words, the more that there is a differential of power and the more that the stakes could be devastating and mortal, well, then that's going to tend to drag someone more toward fawning, both as an adaptive behavior and also triggering that ancient physiology. So we got that here. So it makes me wonder about the degree of this conflict, you know, in this ongoing relationship that this person is dealing with. And then the question becomes, of course, well, what to do about it, right?

36:13Dr. Rick Hanson: Is there an opportunity if you were searching for that one word that would give the person the middle way? I have three from Tied for First Place, my favorite proverb in early Buddhism. The proverb goes, one is truly wise, not because they can recite the scriptures. One is truly wise, who is peaceable, friendly, and fearless. And those words together, to me, speak about a sweet spot for someone to be in, you know, in their situations. And it also kind of raises a question. If you consider yourself to be insecurely attached, let's say anxiously insecurely attached, what kind of selection processes are you going through with the people you end up with?

36:57Dr. Rick Hanson: And is there some way in which, Papa Freud again, the repetition compulsion, that you seek situations in which you can enact familiar scripts in which they yell and you withdraw or they grumble and you placate? right? Maybe that's familiar for you. So I would raise that question as well.

37:17Forrest Hanson: I think you're right on. And it's not really possible for us to answer the last part of this person's question because these things reinforce each other. Like we don't really know. It could be either, it could be both. They probably both contribute in different ways. That said, I think that this person might be able to answer it by trying some things on or asking themselves a couple of questions. Does this show up everywhere or just here? Is this confined to this relationship or not? Does the other person respond to your distress by trying to soothe and support you or by raising your distress?

37:49Forrest Hanson: Do you feel more yourself around them or less? This is one I got from you, dad. Do you feel bigger or smaller when you're done with this interaction with this person? And are you able to talk with them about these issues? If you are looking at all of those and going, hmm, tough to essentially all of them, it sounds like this is a tough situation. And And it sounds like the person that you are in a relationship with or some kind of, they're not specific here about the nature of this relationship, but whatever that relationship is, I would have some real questions about it and whether or not it was a safe and supportive place for you to be.

38:23Forrest Hanson: And if it's not a safe and supportive place for you to be, then I would start asking a very different set of questions about what you can do to either make that situation a little safer or exited and what would be involved in all of that. And there are a lot of completely understandable reasons that people have for not exiting relationships like that. And I just want to be real about that. There could be kids involved here. There could be significant safety issues. So hey, be thoughtful about all of this. But to kind of go back to the middle of this person's question, yeah, if you're people pleasing or fawning when it's activated and valid and the other person is doing some real shit that's nudging you into those behaviors, I don't see any problem with it.

39:05Forrest Hanson: if you are doing it from a place of trying to support yourself. Anything else you would like to add here, Dad, or finesse anything that I've said?

39:12Dr. Rick Hanson: I really like your own finesse about this and the nuances. And it kind of makes me think about your notion from Aristotle of the middle way and two extremes. On the one hand, if a person maybe is really quite skillful at people-pleasing and fawning, they might quietly think that they can keep managing a toxic situation and a potentially...

39:36Forrest Hanson: Just by giving more and more and more. Yeah, great point here.

39:40Dr. Rick Hanson: And they might overestimate their effectiveness in preventing a big blow up. And this topic kind of edges into a really big separate topic around what to do with people who keep returning to or staying in a really abusive relationship. Seriously, if even physically violently abusive, they kind of think, well, if I only do X, Y, or Z, I can prevent this the next time. So that's a pitfall on one side. To go the other way, it's really interesting. Like I want to flag this person's use of the word bullied. Now, maybe there really is bullying. I don't know. Maybe it really is a serious issue there.

40:25And when we really think about the problematic sense of the word bullied.

40:29Dr. Rick Hanson: Okay. On the other hand, this goes back to object relations. If you tend to frame the self as appeasing, placating, and fawning, beings who are more powerful and negatively powerful. Because we don't fawn or people, please, in the sense of it here, people who are wonderfully powerful and generously towards you, right? It's they're negatively powerful. Well, if that's your frame, you're going to tend to, you know, frankly, write them into your script. You're going to cast them in familiar roles in your object relations, self and other scripts. And so it's kind of useful to check yourself at the door a little bit.

41:13Dr. Rick Hanson: Is this person really being a bully? Is this person really being abusive? Is this person really being over the top? Or are they just -

41:22Forrest Hanson: Or are they just more powerful than you in having an opinion? Yeah. Back to the show after a quick break. This episode is sponsored by Huel. Out of every sponsor we have ever had on the show, I think that Huel is the one that Elizabeth and I have used the most. It's always been tough for Elizabeth to eat enough protein, and she's been trying to build some muscle recently. And, well, we're both busy during the day. It often feels easier to just grab something rather than taking the time to make something that's actually healthy, but what if you could do both? Huel, that's spelled H-U-E-L, has solved that problem for us.

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42:42Forrest Hanson: New customers only. Thank you to Huel for partnering and supporting our show. Pink Panther is here. Coach and Spotify are teaming up to bring music and style together, and they want you to be part of it.

42:56Dr. Rick Hanson: Grab your friends and head to the Tabby Tour, hitting cities around the country with live performances from special artists, exclusive experiences, and personalized products.

43:04Forrest Hanson: And discover custom playlists on Spotify, built just for you based on who you are and how you listen. Live your story with Coach.

43:12Dr. Rick Hanson: Learn more at coach.com.

43:18Forrest Hanson: Now, back to the show. So, okay, I want to go on to the next question here, Dad. I'm in my 60s, and I now know that I am a people pleaser and a flaunter. Lately, I've tried to be more assertive about my needs and desires with other people, and it seems to surprise or upset them. They're used to me conceding, and if I push back, I feel like I'm being mean. But if I stay quiet, that also feels wrong. How do I break this pattern without blowing up my relationships? So I think we've come to the very practical question here, Dad. So if you have any practical thoughts about it, that would be great.

43:55Dr. Rick Hanson: I think there's a place in relationships for not going head-to-head with someone who has no learning curve about that particular issue. And you concede that. You just quietly let them rent about what the quarterback should have done, or you just kind of put up with and then change the topic when they get onto politics or something. or you just realize they're just never going to acknowledge something or other in your history, and you just work around that. Now, is that people-pleasing or is that resizing the relationship? I think it's more resizing the relationship. But if there is something in which, in an ongoing way, that person is problematic for you and you have to talk about it, and then if there's not reasonable give and take about that, well, then sometimes you have to disengage more broadly from that particular relationship.

44:50Dr. Rick Hanson: And so to me, there are kind of questions along those lines. If, for example, you would blow up the relationship for you to, let's say, after someone has finished speaking, express a different opinion about a significant political issue or a moral issue, like abortion, let's say, or capital punishment, would that really blow up the relationship? But if it would, that tells you something about the kind of relationship you have. I don't know. What do you think?

45:19Forrest Hanson: I think that if I remember correctly, the context of this question was this was family relationships. So with this person's family more broadly, they felt like they had a certain kind of pattern and role. And inside of those relationships, if you want to keep them, I think this is a big issue for people for sure. Like, how do you navigate becoming more assertive, becoming more who you are when you're in a context and you don't want to change that context so much in the ways that we were talking about before? I think that takes us to some of the behavioral questions about this. So people-pleasing is, again, a behavior.

45:52Forrest Hanson: It's a habit. Where can we intervene in habits? Typically before they're activated, as early as possible. So how far upstream of whatever your behavior is can you go here? Can you work on a kind of appraisal or thought that you have about other people? Like the thought that I have to solve other people's problems. Is that a belief that we can kind of interrogate and create a plan for when you feel yourself going into problem solving for other people mode? You know, so you have something ahead of time that you've planned out. Okay, when I feel myself starting to do this, I will fill in the blank.

46:27Forrest Hanson: I also wonder about the capitulation bit that you also kind of flagged here, Dad, this idea of conceding and capitulating. combined with the feeling of meanness if they don't? Because this suggests that they're in double bind territory. They're damned if they do, damned if they don't. The inner critic is going to complain either way. So what can we do to make the inner critic's voice a little bit smaller and make some kind of more of a nurturing or supportive voice inside of ourselves a little bit bigger? This is a huge part of your work. We've done a bunch of episodes on topics that are related to this, including the previous ones we've done on phoning, which I've been focused on how to build up that stronger sense of who you are inside.

47:06Forrest Hanson: Those are all things I would ask about. Also, just general tact. Can you communicate this is something that you're working on? Can you have a conversation with them about it in an off-the-field kind of way? The worst time to work on a problem is when you're in the middle of a situation with it. Unfortunately, that's the time when most of us feel like we need to work on our problems. When things are going well, we don't want to bring up the hard topic because that's going to make things go less well. That's a big lesson I've had to learn myself.

47:36Dr. Rick Hanson: What would you consider to be sentences that a person, this person might imagine saying and maybe even actually say? Kind of short, sweet sentences that are generic, but relate to this kind of situation, including in, let's say, family systems.

47:56Forrest Hanson: I think that formats like NVC can be helpful here. So that's nonviolent communication. You don't need to follow the exact structure. It's more about the spirit of the thing than the letter of the law. But the basic idea is when I'm in this kind of a situation or when you do X thing, I feel Y because Z. Now, when you do X is already a little loaded because when you do X is whenever you're a f***ing asshole, I hate it. You're not going to get very far there, right? So you need to kind of think about how to frame things to people. But speaking in terms of your own feelings can be helpful. Like, wow, that was really tough.

48:33Forrest Hanson: Like, wow, I felt like I disagreed with you and you immediately shamed me for it.

48:36Dr. Rick Hanson: Now, that's a sentence.

48:37Forrest Hanson: You know, maybe that's coming in a little hot for many people's relationships, but...

48:42Dr. Rick Hanson: I always like it when you come in hot because you tend to be so polite, you know?

48:46Forrest Hanson: I think there's a place for getting real about stuff if you're in a safe environment. Again, this is, you know, you got to be in a safe environment. By just kind of naming things in an honest way. Huh, you know, I feel like whenever I disagree with you, I'm the one who ends up compromising. Whoa, that's great. And is that, again, a little universal? I mean, be careful about words like never and always because you want to be really right if you're going to use that kind of language. but I would wonder about that.

49:15Dr. Rick Hanson: That's great. I would add two.

49:17Forrest Hanson: Yeah, give me the actual clinical psychologist. Oh, no, no, no. You nailed it. As opposed to by... You nailed it.

49:22Dr. Rick Hanson: I'm just thinking also, you know, I think boldly, act cautiously, right? That's kind of a motif for me.

49:31Forrest Hanson: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. No, I'm going to give a finesse on what I just said, okay? Those are phrases that you should start with, but maybe not end with. It may or may not be what actually comes out of your mouth. That could be the think boldly. And the act cautiously might be more what you're talking about here. Yeah, I don't know.

49:47Dr. Rick Hanson: So acting cautiously, preserving a long-term relationship, thinking about, you know, play the long game to win. That's another personal phrase. One thing I find quite helpful is sentences like, hmm, I'm not so sure. Hmm. I like that. Yeah. Or, huh, I don't know. or, hmm, I wonder what would be fair. That's a good one.

50:15Forrest Hanson: I was going to say some version of even, again, I think that enlisting other people as part of this process, even in less functional situations, like the one that this person is describing, can be interesting. And a version of that could be something like, well, what do you think would be fair? Well, what do you think would be fair here? Okay, and then they say whatever it is. And you go like, hmm, yeah, I feel like on this time and that time, we actually did the thing that you wanted to do in the past. And what do you think about doing this thing that I've sort of put on the table here? Oh, okay, what's your reason for that?

50:49Forrest Hanson: Could you explain to me what you mean by that? Has become one of my favorite phrases when dealing with random commenters on the internet. Because most of the time when they actually need to explain what they mean by what they're saying, some worldview stuff emerges pretty quickly that tends to explain why they're complaining about whatever it is that they're complaining about. So that can be also a good one. And you're just like natural, oh, what do you mean by that?

51:15Dr. Rick Hanson: Creating buffers. They push, you concede, using the concede word. And well, what if they push and that push kind of Aikido Jiu-Jitsu goes into a buffer and you're still in your own ground. And how do we create those kinds of buffers between us and others? And not knowing is a wonderful buffer. You know, I'm thinking of this great book of Suzuki Roshi's talks. It's just a classic. It's fantastic. I think the title is maybe so, or not always so. Maybe it's even more like that. Anyway, not knowing, maybe so, don't know, beginner's mind, so forth. That's a really nice buffer. It preserves your options and it's not aggressive or contentious.

51:59Forrest Hanson: Love this, in part because, again, we're talking about habits here. And habits are normally about a kind of calcification. And what helps us work with something that's become really calcified? Well, beginner's mind. Being a little bit less certain about who I am, who the other person is, what my habits and patterns are, all of that. Just opening up some space about it if we can. Okay, one other question. It's scary to realize my relationships were built on the people-pleasing version of me. I'm the friend and the family member who listens, consoles, supports, and encourages. It's rarely reciprocated.

52:33Forrest Hanson: If I step out of that role, will people still love me, or will they feel like they've lost their confidant? How do I even ask for reciprocity? What do you think, Dad?

52:44Dr. Rick Hanson: Well, I think my heart feels heavy just hearing it. It's really sweet. It makes me think also about it's often our strengths, our virtues that get exploited by others, if you will. Or even if others are not so-called exploiting, they're just moving into a space you create for them. And they think, well, you seem happy in this confidant, listener, consoler role. So I guess we'll just keep doing in my mind, kind of, sort of. So it's poignant here. So I think that what you said earlier about habits, and you kind of implied this for the previous person, it's interesting to do very small tests so that you won't blow up the whole relationship if it doesn't go well.

53:34Dr. Rick Hanson: But on the other hand, you'll see what other people do. And then maybe they'll adapt to your small nudge. Like maybe right now the relationship is 80-20. They're talking 80 % of the time. You're talking 20 % of the time. They're taking 80 % of what's there. You're getting 20%. Okay. Maybe you nudge it to 22%, 78%, 22-78. And then that goes okay. Then you move on to 25-75. And then you keep going. And maybe you're happy if it kind of settles at 40-60, which is a world of difference from 2080. There's that part. Also, I just feel poignantly in my kind of heavy heartedness here about, wow, this person is not getting much feedback that all of them is cherished, that other parts of them are cherished and prized.

54:29Dr. Rick Hanson: And there's a doubt, there's a wonder. If you see all of me, will you love me? And do I really matter to you as who I am, not just some kind of function I serve for you?

54:42Forrest Hanson: I love what you said there, Dad, about little tests, because I think that's the smoothest way into this. As time has gone on for me, I've become increasingly a who knows, let's find out in terms of my orientation toward a lot of the issues that people have. Maybe that's been influenced by more of the coaching work that I've been doing, we're just having that beginner's mind about it, that, oh, I don't know, maybe mind about it, can actually be very softening. Because what I see here is a prediction. Like we've done a lot of episodes about predictions recently, and about either figuring out that a prediction is true, and that we have to deal with something being problematic, or figuring out that actually there's more space in a prediction than we realize.

55:21Forrest Hanson: And hey, maybe you can be more of yourself. And everybody else is like, yeah, great. Love it. Cool. There was this line in the conversation that I had with Sonia Lubomirsky recently, to be loved, we must be known. And yes, your relationship with people has been a little bit built on wearing a kind of mask. And it will require some effort and some changes to drop that mask and become a different person. In part because they've bought into a relationship with a certain kind of person. and now you're telling them, ooh, I'm actually a little bit different than that. They are allowed to say, I actually kind of liked the person you were before, and I'm not sure if I want to be in a relationship with this kind of person.

56:03Forrest Hanson: But then you've got to ask yourself, well, do I want to be in a relationship with somebody who doesn't actually want me, who doesn't want the full version of me, the real version of me, who just wants the people-pleasing version of me, that instrumental relationship you were talking about there, Dad? I wouldn't want that. And yeah, I think that a lot of this work is kind of grief work. There's a kind of grieving process associated with coming to terms with what's happened in the past and building a new deal with other people these days.

56:36Dr. Rick Hanson: That's beautiful. And you can hear both of us. Our voices are dropping. We're more and more in our bodies right now. We really felt this here. when I've tried to shift things in relationship, sometimes I've discovered that another person has a serious agenda, they're deliberate about how they're being, and they ain't going to budge. And then the question becomes, all right, how do I resize the relationship? What are my values and goals and long-term plans here? They're not going to budge. On the other hand, I think about the degree to which many people are not that intentional in their relationships.

57:16Dr. Rick Hanson: They just kind of fall into patterns. And so I can imagine a scenario in which, let's say, a person is just a great listener and likes being a listener. I would say that I like being a listener. It's a very safe role for a temperamentally kind of shy person. And I'm really interested in people. So I'm a listener and they kind of fill the void and the space. And so I'm not attributing to other people this kind of nasty agenda to dominate me by speechifying. And if we end up in about a 70, 30, they talk, I talk situation, I like that. I'm fine with that. And if I wanted to make it more 50-50, they would probably blink a little bit like, oh, this is a little different, but then then they'd accommodate the new way of being.

58:02Dr. Rick Hanson: In other words, sometimes we attribute intentionality and deliberateness and bad intent to other people when often they've just sort of fallen into an interaction pattern with us that we've opened up for them. I think that's a great point, Dad.

58:19Forrest Hanson: And particularly that idea about, well, maybe they actually like feeling like more of a helper. Is that something they would actually be kind of open to. Maybe exploring like, ooh, what's me being the one who does the thing and kind of where I get to feel good about myself now for being the one who does the thing and all of that. Like, that's an interesting question. And again, I think it goes back to these tests. You know, how sure are we about any of this? And can we have more like openness to possibility here? So this takes us to a final question that I wanted to ask as part of this episode.

58:53Forrest Hanson: I grew up emotionally neglected. I'm 30 now, and I still see myself as broken and bring that shame-drenched version of me into my relationships, instead of meeting people on equal footing. I also struggle a lot with finding goals for myself, as I've never really let myself listen to my wants and needs. Feeling aimless just makes me feel more shame. How do I finally move on from viewing myself as damaged? And I included this question because I think this territory of wants and needs that this person is describing has a lot of overlap with people who have more people-pleasing or fawning tendencies.

59:33Forrest Hanson: People can easily move into more pleasing behaviors because there's a lot of fear about what others will see or how people will relate to them if they see the person they really are. And some of the previous two questions actually got to that as well.

59:47Dr. Rick Hanson: I tend to hold forth on this kind of a question. I'm just really interested for us. What's your take?

59:53Forrest Hanson: I think this is actually another Paul Gilbert. We've been mentioning him a fair amount during this episode. Grief, not shame. And I also talked about that a little bit at the end of the previous question. Kids need to make a really awful choice if they are in situations that are more fully abusive, for sure they have to do this, but even just neglectful, not as supportive, the person mentions emotional neglect, where they need to decide, is my parent behaving this way because they're the problem? Or is my parent behaving this way because I'm the problem? It is painful to realize that it is psychologically healthier and psychologically safer for the kid to believe that they are the problem.

1:00:42Forrest Hanson: Because you can do something about it when you're the problem. If the parents are the problem, you're stuck, and you're screwed, and there's nothing you can do about it. So kids decide, I am the problem. And this can lead to a lot of shame. There is a saturation of our earlier experiences with a negative view of the self, because that self was kind of internalized through often social messaging, whether that's coming from parents or social group or whatever's going on for the person. And I think that this is where this phrase from shame to grief comes in. You are going back through and reevaluating earlier experiences from your position now as an adult.

1:01:25Forrest Hanson: And hopefully you're doing this while working with somebody who can support you through this process, and they can reflect to you the person that you actually are today and the person that they see. I often view my job as a coach as helping somebody else learning to believe in themselves as much as I believe in them. I'm trying to be this model of unconditional positive regard, deep belief, enthusiasm, excitement, possibility, and the hope is over time the person internalizes that and is able to self-direct in a way where they no longer need the coaching relationship. And yeah, they might still keep going with it because they like to get some advice from time to time, but they've built that inside of themselves.

1:02:09Forrest Hanson: And I think that the first step for that a lot of the time for people is forming a coherent narrative and letting that movement from shame to grief happen. And it's a long process. Again, we're more in kind of the fun response world here because we're talking about early experiences and traumatic experiences. emotional neglect, things like that. So it can be quite the process. Elizabeth really works with people on these kinds of issues, and she's been working with some people for years and years. You know, it can take a while, in part because you're building the ability to want. You've never really evaluated, like, what do I care about in that kind of way?

1:02:44Forrest Hanson: That's a thorny question for this person, because safety was derived from figuring out what other people cared about. So of course you look inside and you don't see a lot there, right? Then okay, Like, how do we start assessing that? Small stuff. You know, one of the things that I like is this idea of the difference between avoiding oo and approaching oo. You know what I mean? A lot of the time, people orient themselves around avoiding oo, but they don't have much of an approach tendency like inside of themselves. So then we start figuring out what our oo's are. What food do you like? What chair do you want to sit in?

1:03:21Forrest Hanson: What room feels good to you? What environments do you like? What music, when you play it, do you really vibe with? Okay, and then you get a somatic sensation. This feels like this in my body. This, oh, I like the thoughts I have when I listen to that music versus that music. And you just start to explore that in a more natural way in your life. And you can really build a pretty cool taxonomy of it. You can start writing it down, start journaling over the things you like, start journaling over the things you have that kind of feeling about. And you can really internalize that over time. So what do you think, Dad?

1:03:52Dr. Rick Hanson: really lovely touching just a small build on your ooh i think that it's actually really helpful for many people in general but in particular this kind of a person here with this question to engage in physically juicy and alive and energizing and powerful activities because as you do that, you reclaim your own body. Our natural body meets others on an equal footing, and our natural body has aims and wants and desires. So getting more in touch with that vitality of your natural body is really on a good path there. And it also starts building up a sense of moxie, particularly if you're inclined to do certain things like competitive sport or rock climbing or fencing, different kinds of things like that, just martial arts certainly, you start having that more of a, okay, hey, I'm here.

1:04:52Dr. Rick Hanson: I'm not against you and I'm for me. And my feet are on the ground. My eyes are on the heavens and, you know, hello world. Like I just, I think there's a lot about that that's really quite helpful. And part of it goes to this material when working with children sometimes, that sensory motor integration or motor integration altogether can be obstructed by sometimes their psychological or emotional issues, as well as sometimes by other temperamental factors. So there is some stuff about therapies that address more emotional issues by starting to have people re-capitulate. If you go back and reenact some of those early movement patterns of childhood, like crawling or cross-crawling or standing or doing things like that, it starts freeing up more psychological capacities as well.

1:05:49Dr. Rick Hanson: So there's maybe something there along these lines too for someone who's trying to reclaim those capacities.

1:05:55Forrest Hanson: It's a really interesting idea, Dad. I hadn't really thought about it like that. Yeah, including in that almost regressive way of going back through and thinking about these as missed developmental moments and what can we do in adulthood to kind of reclaim these missed developmental moments. I'd be really interested in what's out there on that. I'm sure that there are approaches to therapy that are built around that that I'm just not familiar with.

1:06:16Dr. Rick Hanson: You're reminding me of Peter Levine, who we've had on the show, of course, about what was entrapped and defeated when you were young. It couldn't be enacted, including in traumatic situations. And now can you enact it? So maybe there's a place for this kind of a person to imagine being in settings in which they felt really squelched and neglected. Nobody was hearing them and they didn't have their own wants. Their own wants didn't have standing. what would it be like to do some behaviors where you're letting yourself do as a 50 year old you know what would have been great if you'd been allowed to do as a seven year old like pound your fists on the table and say i want dessert now or whatever it is or get out of my room or give me my toy back or whatever it might be with you know the physical gesturing and you know enactments around that.

1:07:12Dr. Rick Hanson: Oh, that can be kind of cool. I'm getting energized just thinking about it.

1:07:15Forrest Hanson: Yeah, it's an interesting idea. I would be, again, this is something I would have to really look at and be like, what have people done on this? And what's the stuff that just sort of feels interesting versus the stuff that people have gotten some real benefit out of? I know that art-focused therapies can be really helpful for this kind of stuff. Expressive writing, even going back to some of the gifted child stuff that we were talking about in a previous episode. a lot of Alice Miller's own process was actually about expressive art therapy, essentially, where even though she was trained as a psychoanalyst, when she explored this material, her own material with this stuff, her way through it was like 10 years of just expressive painting.

1:07:51Forrest Hanson: And she really felt like that was actually the thing that helped her long term. So really interesting stuff. We could keep on talking about this endlessly, I suspect. And I'm sure that there are three other questions just waiting for me in our contact folder about this. But we've already been doing this for a little while, so I'm going to put a bow on it for today's episode. If you want to ask a question to be answered on the podcast in the future, we are doing our mailbags a little bit less frequently, but we still do them from time to time. And you can find us at contactatbeingwellpodcast.com.

1:08:21Forrest Hanson: Also, just really curious, did you like this format? Any feedback you got about this episode? Anything else that you would like to hear Rick and I do an episode on that kind of touches on this mailbag-adjacent format? Let us know. Any thoughts at the end here, dad? You're awesome. I think you're awesome too, buddy. I really appreciate you. Thanks again for doing this with me. And again, thanks to everybody who takes the time to listen to these episodes. We just really love that we get to do this.

1:08:54Forrest Hanson: I really enjoyed today's conversation with Rick about people-pleasing and the fun response. I also really meant what I said at the end of the episode. We are very curious about the different formats and structures of the show that people like listening to. So if you liked this format, if you'd like the kind of combo episode mailbag, let us know and we'll do more like this in the future. We started today's episode by talking about the differences between people-pleasing and fawning. What are these things? How are they different? How are they the same? What's going on here? Big picture, when we're looking at behavior, we're really looking at two different variables.

1:09:28Forrest Hanson: First, how much volition do you have? Are you choosing your behavior or not? And then second, what are the consequences that are associated with it for you? One of the things the very first question asked was, what's the difference between being a people pleaser and just kind of being a nice person? In short, we generally choose kindness. We also get a lot out of it. We feel good. Other people feel good. It feels like this nice, mutually restorative thing. People pleasing in some ways and fawning definitely are forms of appeasement strategy. You're trying to solve a problem. Other people are big and scary and threatening, so if I keep them happy, I will stay safe.

1:10:04Forrest Hanson: This is particularly true with fawning behaviors, and Rick really brought in the dimension of power. He asked a question about, hey, if you move into pleasing or fawning behaviors and it makes your life easier or it's to navigate some kind of a difficult situation with your boss or something like that, is it a bad thing? And he talked about being on your own side. If you are doing something like a pleasing behavior from a stance of being on your own side, well, it's probably not so bad. You're choosing that behavior, you're doing it to get through something difficult, and it might even be a smart choice.

1:10:35Forrest Hanson: We then talked a bit about common symptoms of people-pleasing. This could include saying yes before thinking about whether or not you can actually do something, general difficulties with saying no or holding firmer boundaries with people, chronically apologizing, focusing on avoidance rather than disagreement, and trying to solve other people's problems, and sometimes getting wrapped up in them. We then got to the second question, which was from somebody who was trying to change their people-pleasing behaviors. They'd really worked on it, but they kept getting sucked back into those behaviors inside a particular group of people.

1:11:07Forrest Hanson: And this was a big theme throughout the episode, the idea that the groups who are a part of really resist change. Homeostasis is this feature of every system to resist change. Systems do not want to change. When we change, we start putting pressure on the other individuals inside of those systems, and all of a sudden they have to start acting differently, and they don't really like that so much. An important part of that particular question was that the person wanted to maintain those relationships and liked those people. That suggests to me that they're likable people, and if they're likable people, they're probably more likely than average to be pretty responsible when somebody says, hey, I'm trying this new thing on, or hey, I've got this tendency myself that I'm working on.

1:11:48Forrest Hanson: Do you mind supporting me in it? For people who have more of a people-pleasing tendency, that itself is already a form of exposure, because you're needing to do something that you're probably a little bit uncomfortable with, which is state your needs in clear ways to other people. I then went into a bit of a monologue about the differences between people-pleasing and fawning, and where each of these two lines of thought come from, the simple way to think about it is that people-pleasing is more about psychology or maybe behavior, whereas fawning is more about physiology. It's based on the stress response.

1:12:21Forrest Hanson: And I traced the history of people-pleasing back to Aristotle. You could probably go back further than that. And I talked about fawning as being based in appeasement strategies, which are more of a biological stress response. The important part of this is that fawning and people-pleasing, because they come from different places and operate at different levels of severity have different kinds of strategies associated with them. It's also really important to keep in mind that we tend to associate these things with trauma, but appeasement behaviors are just a natural social mammal thing, as near as we can tell.

1:12:53Forrest Hanson: So if you have pleasing behaviors or you have appeasement behaviors, it doesn't mean that there's something wrong with you. It means that you are a normal mammal in a world full of scary hierarchies. This then took us to another question from somebody who was in a relationship that they described as being full of conflict, and they were asking whether or not it was okay to people-please inside of that kind of a situation. We said, for starters, this sounds more like fawning because of the heavy dose of stress and conflict, but then, yes, absolutely. The whole point of the animal research on appeasement is that appeasement is adaptive when you're under real threat.

1:13:32Forrest Hanson: Saying yes to your boss when you wanted to say no is not an appeasement strategy or people-pleasing. It's having a job. It is a perfectly rational, normal thing to do that we all have to navigate to some extent. An appeasement that resolves an issue is, again, doing its job. Appeasement that you have to repeat every day that never resolves anything, that's awful. We then talked about how to start to move out of these kinds of behaviors and into a more authentic version of who you are. Rick talked a lot about exploring past history, and has talked about that on previous episodes of the podcast as well.

1:14:12Forrest Hanson: Like, what were the really wonderful parts of you that you had to push away or disown in different kinds of ways in order to have the people-pleasing aspect be the main part of your personality? because that people-pleasing or that fawning was probably an attempt to solve whatever problem was going on in your environment back then. And then you got to ask, are those same problems present for you today? Can you try on different kinds of behavior? Can you make little bids with other people? Can you start really, really small, small forms of self-expression, small forms of saying now? Try them on, practice, see what happens, and frankly, see who's responsive to it.

1:14:50Forrest Hanson: Who are the people who are going to support and validate you when you do that? Who are the people who really freak out when you do that? We then close the episode by talking a bit about wants and needs and what could help this kind of person really explore what they want when they've spent so much time focusing on other people's wants. I hope you enjoyed today's episode. I had a great time doing it with Rick. If you made it this far and you somehow haven't subscribed to the podcast yet, please subscribe. It really helps us out. You could also leave a rating and a positive review. You can find us on Patreon.

1:15:20Forrest Hanson: It's patreon.com slash beingwellpodcast. For just a couple of dollars a month, you can support the show and get a bunch of bonuses in return. And if you'd like to consume even more content from me, you can also find my writing on Substack. So until next time, thanks for listening, and we'll talk to you soon.