Fawning is not a personal flaw. It is a relational trauma response, a language learned when safety depended on pleasing, performing, or staying agreeable. Drawing from Ingrid Clayton’s workshop, this reflection explores how shame begins to loosen and unfawning starts with noticing.

Many of us carry something unfinished with our families, a regret, a hope for an apology that never came, a relationship we're not sure how to touch without making it worse. Samantha Duggan and Tian Dayton sat with us in June to talk about reparenting. Here's what stayed with us.

Some help is built to keep people alive but not to help them get well. Staying alive matters, more than anything. But when that becomes the whole goal, something quietly drops out of the picture: the hope that we can actually get well, and that recovery is worth building toward.