🦌 On Fawning and Perfectionism, Part Two

Who is therapy for, anyway? It’s not for me. Therapy is for people braver than me.

Catch up on part one first:

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

“. . . by Monday morning everything would be fine, or almost everything, or almost fine.”

—Vincenzo Latronico, Perfection

Several times these past few years, my husband Michael would catch me spiraling and gently say, “You need therapy.”

What he meant: “It would probably be helpful for you to talk with someone, the way it is for me.”

What I heard: “There is something wrong with you.”

And secretly, there are cracks in your capability facade. Get it together and glue them quickly before anyone else notices.

This is where Fawning by

Dr. Ingrid Clayton

returns as vital coda.¹ None of what I am sharing here would be possible without her book. This series is merely my testimony based on insights from her story (and those of her clients), paying mine derivatively forward in case it sparks even a fraction of similar insights for you.

Books do help build awareness, but they cannot alone heal relational wounds that, by definition, require engaging in the messy (terrifying) work of communicating needs and handling conflict. For this, I also thank my husband, without whom none of this healing would be happening.

Dr. Clayton’s book is one of the only reasons I recently allowed myself to wade cautiously back into the therapy pool twelve years after my previous failed attempt. I turn forty-two tomorrow, the end of a nine-year numerology cycle, and I am embarrassed to have reached middle age without developing the patience to persevere through therapist musical chairs.²

This is a convenient excuse; I was too afraid of what they would reveal to me about myself, anyway. I’ll reject them—the whole therapeutic enterprise—before they can reject me.

Who is therapy for, anyway? It’s not for me.

Therapy is for other people.

Therapy is for people who have the courage to go.

Therapy is for people braver than me.

Therapy is for people willing to be shown all the ways they are deficient and wrong, who are willing to study their blind spots without falling apart. Therapy is for people who have the safety to fall apart.

Therapy is for people who don’t lose their patience with professionals who forget the name Byron Katie and suggest her first book after an hourlong session, without knowing I already obsessively read her entire oeuvre and did The Work to change my life nine years ago.

Therapy is for people who are not afraid to tell their family members they are in therapy, assuming they will cringe at the word. Or is that just an ungenerous projection? I don’t know, I’m too afraid to mention it and find out.

Therapy (and Twelve-Step programs) are for people who have the courage to say their name out loud in those rooms, and who are willing to feel the rush of shame they have been holding at bay for decades.

Therapy is really for Gen Zs who grew up on TikTok (or anyone who raised in New York City), already fluent in therapy-speak.

Therapy is for people who have had much worse childhoods, not for people whose therapists will silently judge them for being so inexplicably fragile when they’ve seen so much worse.

Therapy is for people whose parents weren’t doing the very best they could, not ones who loved their kids as much as mine.

Therapy is for people who can’t figure it out on their own by reading self-help books.

Therapy is for people who don’t have close friends who are professional coaches, trained in deep listening and powerful questions.

Therapy is for people who have the energy to interview therapists, who don’t get exhausted by the search.

Therapy is for people who are ready to make big, scary changes in their lives.

Therapy is for people who aren’t afraid their therapist will presume to know what’s best by dishing out demanding advice, judging them, or telling them what to do even if their body does not agree.

Ostensibly, therapy is for people who want to feel free.

Could therapy be for me?

I am only now learning why working with the wrong therapist can be so disorienting for fawners, perpetuating the very relational patterns and problems they need to heal.

“Fawners are in fact looking for ourselves, outside of ourselves, and it makes us dizzy, confused, and incredibly anxious because there are as many opinions as there are bodies,” Dr. Clayton writes. “For fawners, internal safety is always reliant on the condition of external safety, so it remains at arm’s length: in someone else’s body or ideology, in their perception or story. Merging with distorted views erodes our self-trust and our sense of self altogether.”

If a therapist feels unsafe or overbearing, Fawners will continue hiding, pleasing the professional in the room, merely putting on the appearance of working on themselves.

“Perfectionism is anxiety masquerading as discipline,” Dr. Clayton says. “It aims to keep us relationally safe by ensuring we are ‘perfect.’ We achieve in order to please.” So, we quickly revert to the more familiar work of pleasing our therapist or coach, privileging that over any chance of healing ourselves. It does not feel safe to do so.

In her New Yorker article, “The Pain of Perfectionism,” Leslie Jamison (who wrote one of my favorite recent reads, The Recovering) describes similar challenges therapy poses to perfectionists, parallel to the ones in Fawning. Jamison summarizes psychologist Paul Hewitt’s research (emphasis mine):

“It’s difficult for [perfectionists] to submit to a dynamic that continually obliges them to expose their vulnerabilities and shortcomings. Many also have an intense fear of relinquishing their perfectionism, which feels like the only thing that is holding them together. A lot of the time, what prompts a perfectionist to go to therapy is an issue such as chronic anxiety or depression, with perfectionism only gradually revealing itself as an important force.

The precipitating incident may be a tangible failure that the patient is struggling to get past, but sometimes the larger problem is success—specifically, that success has not delivered the expected dividends of happiness and self-worth. For this reason, middle age is often a time of crisis in the life of a perfectionist, though the affliction manifests at all ages.”

For me, middle age brought increased complexity that outstripped and outpaced my old coping strategies. Be careful what you wish for, as many of my dreams have come true: I own an apartment in my soul city, am married to a loving husband, we have a dog we adore, and I’m in my fourteenth year of running a creative business.

I have always known the universe talks to me through money; if I were meant to have more right now, I would. I’ve been earning through side hustles since I was nine years old. Intellectually, I know how to balance my books. But some rebellious force within me is not allowing it . . . yet. Instead, while the financial tides have gone out so far I can barely see them, a dawning new awareness has washed ashore. If I were earning abundantly right now, I guarantee you I would not be willing to see it.

I am lucky. I got to watch Michael go first. In 2019, he had the courage to interview therapists (just as he did a decade prior before we met), engaging with several across multiple platforms until he found the just-right one.

For the last two years, I overheard in random snippets evidence of his latest therapist's warmth, humility, and compassion. I saw how much progress they were making, even though any given session’s results might have sounded “slow” to my judging, coach-approach mind.

His therapist, A., didn’t rush or shame him; he patiently pointed out where Michael was being unkind to himself. “Whose voice is that?” became a common refrain in our household. When A. suggested Michael do The Artists Way, I did it too. When A. suggested Michael attend CoDA meetings, I looked them up for myself, too.

This all tracks. Given the rule I made in childhood, it is okay if others in the household get the outside help they need. I, on the other hand, should figure out how to go it alone. The household needs me to be strong; I don’t have the luxury of falling apart in therapy, nor the energy to pick myself back up.

Instead, I could (codependently) lurk, asking Michael how his sessions went, secretly absorbing whatever clues I could at a safe remove, without having to show up and be vulnerable myself. But a quiet voice, one that squirmed when I read a spate of memoirs where authors casually mentioned their therapy sessions (Ugh, is therapy a new requirement for writing memoir or something?!³), that little whisper still wondered:

Could therapy ever be for me?

There is only one way to find out, and now my old protective mechanisms are tired enough to take the risk. They are creaking under the weight of a heavier load, if not fully snapped in half. That might just be the biggest perk of a prolonged Flop Era: one’s usual defenses are down; mine stopped working years ago. What a blessing.

Thanks to Dr. Clayton, and to hiding around corners observing my husband’s progress, I can finally see how therapy works when it works well. I can finally see what’s possible.

Booking the first session last week, terrifying as it was, felt like someone—I—finally opened a window to let fresh air into a stale room.⁴

❤️

Stay tuned for part three on Saturday to hear how it went . . .

1. 🎧 Dr. Clayton and Our Whole Childhood host Patrick Teahan address why fawners have a hard time with therapy in this episode. Counterintuitively, it’s often the patients who seem to be doing fine that aren’t. Ingrid suggests therapists ask, “What are we not talking about?”

2. 🪑 My friend

Clare Egan

wrote a wonderful guide to doing just that:

Ask Clare: How to find a good therapist

3. 🐈‍⬛ This is my inner scaredy cat judging again. What memoirist wouldn’t be aided by good therapy? Both involve curiosity, introspection, brave self-excavation, and a willingness to dig to ever-lower layers of the awareness lasagna, as

Cheryl Strayed

would say.

As

Jennifer Leigh Selig

writes in Deep Memoir:

In some ways, the answers you discover matter less than the questions you pose.

. . . Answers are for self-help books, while questions are for memoir—the former is written by an author who’s telling you the answers, while the latter is written by an author who’s telling you the story of how she grappled with the questions, and what meaning she made in her journey toward answering them. Self-help books typically are tidy while memoirs are messy, and we love them for the mess because we too are messy human beings bumbling forward and backward and in all manner of circles with two left feet at times.”

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

🙏 Why aren't you enlightened yet?

🙃 Are You in Your Flop Era?

🔮 Calling Reassurance: What I Wish the Psychic Would Say to Me