Can you talk me through how you realized this was something you wanted to sort of specialize in and help people with?

Yeah, so I started therapy in 2019.

So I was working with my therapist.

We're doing EMDR therapy, which is under the umbrella of somatic therapy.

It's focused on eye movements.

So with her, I had started to identify a pattern in myself of people pleasing.

And we kind of named it as people pleasing.

No, me too, actually.

Where do you think in the book you talk about growing up as a kid, where a lot of this came from, but in general, as a society, What can you point the finger to that you say this is a system or a person or an organization that drills into us that we need to be good? Yes,

I love pointing the finger.

Point the fingers.

Okay.

Where to begin? I think it is really systemic.

I think from a very base level perspective.

And I talk about this in the book of the level of somatic psychology of the fact that we live in animal bodies.

Can you give us a quick rundown of what sexual fawning is?

And how does you see that disconnection show up and what does that actually feel like from the inside or in the body?

Yeah.

So fawning is very coupled with the physiology of the freeze response.

I love freeze because, and I love talking about freeze because it's, There's often a lot of shame coupled with freeze, like in fight and flight, especially in our world that really over couples mobility and movement and productivity with our value when we have this response that immobilizes us.

It can feel really confusing and shameful for the person experiencing it.

But it's, I mean, and holding space for the truth of that, and also it's just this incredible, they call it the savior response, because it basically saves you from experiencing whatever horror it is that is currently happening.

And so there's numbing, there's dissociation, and...

So what do you see is on the other side of this? Because I think this is all interconnected.

I'm also curious if you can kind of define fawning just in case there's anyone out there that's wondering what this actually means.

Yeah, I'll define fawning first.

So fawning is the – or the fawn response is the fourth trauma response.

So we have fight, flight, freeze, which are more well-known, and then fawn.

And fawn is the body's biological stress response that looks like people-pleasing.

And what it is is it's the body trying to find safety through relationship or appeasement.

And so in an acute scenario like this, you might think of, you know, you're walking through the street and then some guy comes up to you with a knife and he's like, give me your wallet.

the villain stuff.