Let’s Talk Love brings you advice and insights from trusted experts to help you expand the ways you love, relate, and communicate. Real Love Ready founder and host Robin Ducharme invites guests into conversations that get to the heart of what makes relationships joyful, challenging, and fulfilling. Together, we dive into the big questions around relationships—including all the messy, sexy, awkward, complicated parts of love. New episodes drop every other Thursday. Don't forget to subscribe so you don’t miss a conversation.
Let’s Talk Love brings you advice and insights from trusted experts to help you expand the ways you love, relate, and communicate. Real Love Ready founder and host Robin Ducharme invites guests into conversations that get to the heart of what makes relationships joyful, challenging, and fulfilling. Together, we dive into the big questions around relationships—including all the messy, sexy, awkward, complicated parts of love. New episodes drop every other Thursday. Don't forget to subscribe so you don’t miss a conversation.

What does it mean to fawn—and how can we begin to heal this trauma response?
In this episode of Let’s Talk Love, Robin sits down with licensed clinical psychologist and author Dr. Ingrid Clayton to explore the fawn response, a survival pattern that develops as a way to stay safe in unsafe environments. Drawing from her professional work, therapy practice, and lived experience, Dr. Ingrid shares how fawning shows up in relationships through people-pleasing, over-accommodating, or losing your voice—and how understanding this trauma response, often rooted in complex trauma, can help us move from self-blame to self-awareness, personal growth, and healing.
Robin and Dr. Ingrid share personal stories and insights as they unpack how early experiences and attachment wounds shape the ways we seek love, safety, and connection. They talk about the process of“unfawning” by noticing your body’s cues, rebuilding self-trust, setting healthier boundaries, and learning what safety feels like from the inside out. This conversation reminds us that healing begins with awareness—recognizing how the patterns that once kept us safe can also hold us back, and how seeing them with compassion can open the door to new ways of showing up for ourselves and those we love.
We want to hear from you! Please send us your anonymous questions for the Podcast as well as our weekly IG Live Ask The Experts Q&A. https://realloveready.com/submitaquestion
Links:
Book - https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/779579/fawning-by-dr-ingrid-clayton/
Website - https://www.ingridclayton.com/