Episode 37: Tired of Being Good | Fawning, the Nervous System and Reclaiming Your Body With Kallie Klug

This episode and article contain discussions around trauma responses, fawning, body image, disordered eating, sexual fawning, and nervous system dysregulation. Please engage gently. This content is educational in nature and reflects personal experience and therapeutic perspectives. It is not intended to replace medical, psychological, or mental health support. If you are struggling, please seek support from a qualified healthcare professional.

What if the people pleasing, the over giving, the inability to say no, the way you manage everyone else's feelings before your own, what if none of that was a personality flaw? What if it was your nervous system doing the most intelligent thing it knew how to do to keep you safe?

That's the conversation at the heart of this episode. And it's one I think a lot of women have been waiting for.

Kallie Klug is a certified somatic practitioner, yoga teacher, and author of Tired of Being Good, a nervous system map for reclaiming your body after a lifetime of fawning. Her work sits at the intersection of somatic trauma therapy, the fawn response, and the deeply intelligent ways our bodies learn to survive.

What Fawning Actually Is

Most people are familiar with fight or flight. Some people know about freeze. But the fourth trauma response, fawning, is the one that flies under the radar most consistently. And it's the one that shapes so many women's lives without them ever realising it's happening.

Fawning is the appeasement response. It's the body moving towards the threat, not away from it, to secure safety through relationship and connection. And what makes it different from simply being friendly or easy to get along with is this: there is always an inner tension present. Always a suppressed boundary underneath. Always something that got frozen so the connection could be maintained.

Kallie describes it as not just being nice. There is always this coupling of an inner frozen boundary expression with fawn. And for many women, this response became so automatic, so rewarded, and so consistent that it stopped feeling like a survival strategy and started feeling like a personality. Like who they are.

Good Girl Conditioning and the Nervous System

This is something I see constantly in my work with women around food. The most sensitive, most intuitive little girls, the ones who felt everything deeply, who were told they were too much, too emotional, too sensitive, those are often the women sitting across from me decades later wondering why they can't stop eating, or why they can't stop giving, or why they feel so disconnected from themselves.

Because what happened to those little girls is that their emotional expression got squashed. And fawning, becoming agreeable, becoming palatable, becoming small, got rewarded instead. In families. In friendships. In workplaces. In relationships.

And Kallie makes a point I find so important: this doesn't just shape behaviour. It physically reshapes the body. Any posturing we hold long term, the body is so intelligent that it literally assembles our tissues to support it. Chronic bracing creates issues in the neck, the thyroid, the jaw. The hunched posture of someone who learned not to take up too much space isn't just emotional. It is structural.

Kallie even uses the example of Taylor Swift, and once she said it I couldn't unsee it. Early in her career, hunched, making herself smaller. And now, heart open, taking up every inch of space she deserves. The body tells on you. And when it's safe enough, the body changes too.

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Fawning as Chemical Addiction

One of the most surprising ideas in this conversation is the neurological piece. Kallie references the work of social worker April Dawn Harter, who proposed that enmeshment, that fast, unboundaried, I want to crawl into your skin kind of connection, releases endogenous opioids in the brain. There is a euphoric, numbing quality to it. A high.

And that is why fawning is so hard to step out of. Not because you're weak or codependent or don't know better. But because your nervous system found something that works. Something that creates relief. Something that changes the state.

If you've been following my work for a while, you'll recognise this immediately. It's the same mechanism as reaching for food when you're overwhelmed. Or the wine at the end of a long day. Or the scroll that goes nowhere but you can't put the phone down. It's not about the thing. It's a nervous system looking for regulation using whatever tool it has learned to trust.

Fawning and Freeze

Kallie also talks about the relationship between fawning and freeze, and this is a piece I think gets missed a lot in conversations about the fawn response.

Freeze is sometimes called the saviour response because it saves you from experiencing whatever horror is currently happening. There is numbing. There is dissociation. And very frequently, fawning and freeze show up together. Because if you are interacting with someone your body finds threatening and you are appeasing them to secure connection, something underneath has to be numbed out to make that possible.

And freeze carries so much shame, particularly in a world that overcouples movement, productivity, and mobility with value. When you have a response that immobilises you, it can feel confusing and shameful in a way that fight or flight never does. Kallie holds so much compassion for this, and it comes through in the conversation.

Sexual Fawning

This is one of the most common and least talked about expressions of the fawn response, and I was so glad we got to go there in this conversation.

Sexual fawning is the fawn response showing up in intimate contexts. The orientation shifts from is this feeling good for me, am I present, what do I actually want right now, to how can I move, what sounds should I make, how do I keep this person happy and close. It's not a conscious performance. It's a nervous system doing what it always does. Securing safety through connection. Getting attachment needs met in the only way it knows how.

And Kallie points out something that is both funny and deeply true. There are a lot of men walking around thinking they're really great in bed. We've just been faking orgasms.

The path back isn't about forcing presence or pushing through. It's slow and titrated. It starts with building capacity for pleasure in non-sexual ways first. Kallie references Deb Dana's glimmer practice here, which is essentially putting pleasure down into its smallest possible unit. Noticing that you like how the sun is coming through the window. That this blanket feels nice against your skin. Starting there before working up to anything more.

Honoring the Fawn Response Without Staying Stuck in It

One of the most important reframes in this episode is this: the goal is not to get rid of fawning. It is to honour it as the brilliant adaptation it was while slowly, carefully, titrating your way out of the places it no longer serves you.

Kallie talks about the gap of incongruence. The greater the gap between what your body actually wants to express and what fawning performs instead, the greater the whiplash afterwards. And so unfawning work isn't about suddenly telling your boss to go screw himself. It's about closing that gap a little. Finding the places where fawning isn't really necessary and starting there.

And she talks about what tends to shift last, what tends to be the stickiest. Sexual fawning. Because sex is so often nonverbal, so highly relational, and the body's success is survival. It got you this far. So of course it holds on the tightest there.

If Her Body Could Speak

At the end of every episode I ask my guests the same question. If a woman's body could speak to her uninterrupted, what would it most want her to hear?

Kallie's answer came from David Bedrick's book The Unshaming Way. And it stopped me in my tracks.

What if every single sensation and experience we're having was the utmost intelligence of the body? Jealousy. Anger. Insecurity. Whatever's there is perfect.

I don't know what's there for her. But whatever's there is perfect.

Find Kallie:

Website and courses: https://stan.store/kalisomatics
Instagram and TikTok: @kalisomatics
Podcast: Your Own Medicine Podcast

Book: Available on Amazon Tired of Being Good

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