How to Recover from Caring Too Much
In Clayton’s and Josephson’s hands, though, the fawn response becomes something more pliable, less a sign of acute threat than a broadly anxious orientation to the world. “For some people, fawning is about being more of who they are—smart, generous, successful, funny, or beautiful,” Clayton writes. “For others, it’s about being less: vocal, ethnic, creative, self-assured, or able to set boundaries.” Fawning wears various faces: perfectionism, promiscuity, self-deprecation, workaholism, overspending. (“We can’t show up as an authority in our financial lives any more than we can anywhere else,” she adds.) The fawner, scarred by past experiences of rejection, courts not just individuals but people in the aggregate—a monolithic other, dangling validation like a carrot.
A refrain running through the books is that fawners don’t feel real to themselves. While shopping for bath towels for her first apartment in New York, Josephson realizes that she doesn’t know what her favorite color is, and contemplates checking Instagram to see which colors other people like. “Am I even real?” she recalls thinking. “Or am I just a medley of other people’s personalities and preferences?” Clayton and Josephson cast their gazes over the social order, dismayed by constellations of inauthenticity and self-erasure. Some fawners are prone to approval-seeking behaviors, like pursuing prestigious but soul-sucking careers. Others take on last-minute babysitting gigs for friends and feel their pulses quicken when someone calls in distress—reactions that might look, to the untrained eye, like ordinary kindness. Wearied by the myriad inconveniences and injuries that come with other people, the authors wonder whether all this adds up to one big, unacceptable compromise. They look, as Mr. Rogers once instructed, for the helpers. Then they ask them: Wouldn’t you like to be free?
If fawning involves one kind of hypervigilance—“walking on eggshells, being preoccupied with the worst case scenario, not sleeping well, startling easily,” per Clayton—unfawning requires another, in which your every motivation merits inspection, then reinspection. Clayton invites her readers to examine whether they truly wish to give to charity or are simply trying to purge trauma-induced feelings of low self-worth. “We aren’t being generous if it’s at our own expense,” she explains. When a client, whom she calls Lily, a “perpetual babysitter, party thrower, cheerleader,” agrees to watch a friend’s nervous dog, Clayton is incredulous. “Lily, do you even like dogs?” she exclaims. “Would you say yes to such an impossible task if she asked again?”
During the unfawning process, Clayton writes, “we practice not being the first one to volunteer, to offer to pay, to jump in to help, or to rescue another person when things go wrong.” Nor should the recovering fawner be faulted for actions she took in the throes of her anguish. “Lying to ourselves and others in fawning is not a moral indiscretion,” we learn—in part because trauma has overwritten the victim’s relational playbook, instilling reflexes that hurt her at least as much as they hurt you. Narrating how one of her patients feigned a heroin addiction to gain sympathy, Clayton notes that the fabrication was an unconscious response: “She didn’t set out to lie. The lies were involuntary, reflexively spilling out.”
The fawner depends on others to prop up her self-image; the unfawner knows when to discard them entirely. “Fawning enmeshes us with our environment, with the people around us,” Josephson warns. The books, reversing a once ubiquitous pop-cultural injunction to empathy, pick up on an ambient suspicion that we’d all be better off if we could just keep our eyes on No. 1. On social media, we scroll past pastel-hued infographics about securing our own oxygen masks first, past flowery defenses of cancelling plans, past ads for A.I. companions which urge us to find friendship and contentment in enchanted mirrors. In the political sphere—an arena that’s increasingly entangled with social media—figures such as Elon Musk decry empathy as an emasculating plague. Some right-wing Christians, including the pastor Joe Rigney, the author of “The Sin of Empathy,” have wondered if “an excess of compassion” is leading believers astray. The sentiment’s reactionary appeal is obvious: if our softheartedness is to blame for feelings of helplessness or misuse, then the berserk strongmen running roughshod over the world (not to mention their fawning associates) are in the clear.
