🦌 On Fawning and Performing Therapy (Part Three)

Just-here-brushing-up-a-few-soft-spots-of-my-psyche-but-otherwise-totally-fine-and-functional-thanks!

Catch up on part one and part two first:

🦌 On Fawning—and Why I Was Wrong About My Most Toxic Trait, Part One

Photo by Raphael Mittendorfer on Unsplash

“We all walk in shoes that are too small for us.”

—Attributed to Carl Jung, via James Hollis’ A Life of Meaning

Three p.m. on a Tuesday. I apply Violette “Bisou Balm” matte red lipstick, purse my lips, and wipe the salt water already spilling from my eyes. Are they bloodshot? Hopefully the therapist won’t notice I was crying before our session. What kind of neurotic person does that?

And: Why did I just put on lipstick? The thought flashes, briefly, as I stare at my video feed in the virtual room before he joins, before we meet for the first time, matched by a random roll of the TalkSpace dice.¹

Why do I care what he thinks I look like?

Our first session went well enough. I even felt relieved afterward, proud of taking the tiniest of baby steps toward trying therapy again, no matter how it shakes out with this particular person. I know I won’t give up this time. I will keep looking until I find a good fit.

It wasn’t until days later that I realized part of why I felt so satisfied afterward. I felt heard, yes, but I also performed well.

That’s what therapy is, right? A performance!

A performance of goodness, of being fine-just-fine-thanks! Just-here-brushing-up-a-few-soft-spots-of-my-psyche-but-otherwise-totally-fine-and-functional; a little stressed about a few things, but otherwise totally and completely in control!

In hindsight, my unspoken goals heading in were:

• Come across as self-aware but not arrogant

• Be friendly and build rapport

• Make sure he likes me

• Demonstrate my openness to the therapeutic process, even alongside trepidation

• Express my needs—the ones I should already know about—clearly and articulately

• Don’t ramble.

• Smile.

• Don’t criticize or judge; don’t create an impossible bar no professional could meet

• If you cry, make it elegant; brush tears away quickly

• Demonstrate flawless introspection

• Complete any homework assignments with gusto

• Don’t have a victim mindset, use “I” statements, take full ownership of my life

• Make sure he’s not getting too tired or bored listening; an hour is a long time

• Be mindful of seeming too self-absorbed; ask about his family, his city, his life

• Perform goodness, perform togetherness, perform pliability

Perform, perform, perform.

While my goal in scheduling the session was to turn over stones I was too afraid to do alone—to heal, whatever that means—during the first session, that primary goal was unconsciously hijacked. It subtly morphed—instantaneously and imperceptibly—back into wanting to be liked, to be seen as good; to be seen as reasonable, spiritual, self-aware, and smart.

Shoot.

Breaking this pattern would require slowing down . . . way, way down. And swallowing yet another heaping dose of humility, admitting I don’t have it all figured out, or anything close.

In The New Yorker’s “The Pain of Perfectionism,” the article that I mentioned in part two, Leslie Jamison writes (emphasis mine):

“Once a patient surrenders the notion that being perfect is a viable solution, another problem can arise: the patient may become perfectionist about getting rid of her perfectionism. She may try to be an exemplary patient, never showing unregulated emotions and coming up with insights that demonstrate how readily she has internalized the message.

But exactly the opposite needs to happen: the patient needs to enact her struggle in the room, to be messy, irrational, resentful, out of control. Progress comes when the patient reveals her ugly imperfect side and learns that, as [psychologist Paul] Hewitt puts it, ‘the therapist isn’t repulsed—the sky doesn’t fall.’”

Given the sometimes porous nature of fawners and people-pleasers, especially those prone to empath-narcissist dynamics (as I was for a decade in my twenties before building awareness around this), it may be the case that we’ve opened up to the wrong people in the past, raising hackles and inhibiting our willingness for future vulnerable contexts, including therapy.

In another one of her New Yorker essays, “So you think you’ve been gaslit?”, Jamison outlines why sensitive, introspective people can be easily hooked by stronger personalities that tend to induce a Fawning response (emphasis mine):

“Gaslighting essentially turns its targets against themselves, [Kate Abramson] writes, by harnessing ‘the very same capacities through which we create lives that have meaning to us as individuals,’ such as the capacities to love, to trust, to empathize with others, and to recognize the fallibility of our perceptions and beliefs.

This last point has always struck me as one of gaslighting’s keenest betrayals: it takes what is essentially an ethically productive form of humility, the awareness that one might be wrong, and turns it into a liability. Any argument in which two people remember the same thing in different ways can feel like a terrible game of chicken: the ‘winner’ of the argument is the one less willing to doubt their own memories—arguably the more flawed moral position—whereas the one who swerves first looks weaker but is often driven by a more conscientious commitment to self-doubt.”

Part of my UnFawning process (as

Dr. Ingrid Clayton

calls it) is not letting this propensity to take in others’ feedback override deeper intuitive truths, as I tend to do. It also includes not allowing my fawn response—protecting me from people I don’t yet trust by getting them to like me—to get in the way of a therapeutic process. Part of my unfawning will involve slowly learning how to lower my defenses, and it will require working with someone who isn’t shaming or blaming—I have heaped enough of that onto myself already in this lifetime.

“For too long, people have talked about the behaviors associated with fawning like something is wrong with us, like we should just get over it, grow up already, stand up for ourselves, set boundaries, and grow our self-esteem,” Dr. Clayton writes. “Those phrases have just kept our defenses UP. We must lower the bar to lower our defenses. That’s the only hope for real change. Getting to see how we make sense NOW.”

At the start of my second session, I fessed up. After the therapist asked what’s been going on since we first met, I told him that I realized only days after hanging up that I was performing therapy during our first meeting.

“As in, you know, just trying to be a good client—fine and agreeable,” I said. Of course, the fawner in me added, “It’s nothing you did or said.” I did a gut check. It really wasn’t him—in our first session, he was kind, patient, and insightful.

I explained how I felt pressured to show up in this type of context as a “good” student. My natural desire to build rapport morphed into a form of hiding. Even with friends or family, I sometimes work hard to make sure I sound fine, without revealing my true state of mind. I can’t bear potential reactions of disapproval, judgment, or worry, so I preemptively make sure I won’t have to. The cost of this—performing my life instead of fully living it—is a price I’m tired of paying.

At least this pattern is moving toward the front of my awareness now. This is where the work starts for me, and for the first time, I’m finally excited to do it.²

❤️

Stay tuned for part four on Wednesday for more on the fifth F—flop.

1. World Mental Health Day was yesterday, October 10. Here are resources in the U.S., Canada, U.K, and Australia (apologies for all the countries I’m leaving out! These are where we have the most Doh readers :)

2. 👉 If you enjoyed this post, you might also appreciate:

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