The One Day Challenge: A Liberating Practice for People-Pleasers and Fawners
As a Somatic Practitioner, I work with adults to resolve chronic stress, cultivate mindfulness, and empower an inner sense of agency. Agency is important because many of the people who come for support deeply struggle with self-assertion and boundaries. This is the spectrum of people-pleasers, codependents, and chronic fawn responders (this is also my background, so everything I share related to the healing of this pattern I have personally worked with.) I see many, many clients who weigh others’ input in drastic measure over their own and are debilitated by the impact of feeling no center to their own gravity. To feel no center of gravity means you are constantly pulled in other directions, that your attention is consumed by concern over what other people think and feel.
In the body, people-pleasing generally comes with a “suppressed fight response,” which means an unconscious impulse to protect oneself and fight back, but little to no practice or confidence in doing so. The body may even carry tremendous rage, or hold muscular tension associated with trauma such as raised shoulders, clenched fists or solar plexus, etc.
A mental symptom of chronic fawning (and this goes beyond “imposter syndrome”) is the tendency to monitor, criticize and question one’s own behavior, feelings and thoughts…
