When Survival Becomes a Pattern: Trauma, Fawning, and Learning to Trust Yourself
It’s not you, and someday somebody’s gonna believe you.
Sometimes the things we think are weaknesses are actually the ways we learned to survive.
People-pleasing. Staying quiet. Reading the room. Keeping everyone happy. Making yourself smaller. Trying to anticipate what someone else needs before you've even had a chance to ask what you need.
In this episode of Spiritual Friction: A Space for Deep Feelers, I sit down with Laurie Hardie for a conversation about trauma, survival responses, self-trust, feeling seen and believed, and what can happen when we begin looking at our patterns with curiosity instead of judgment.
Laurie is a longtime Seattle radio personality, speaker, life and recovery coach, host of Interrupted: Act 2 — Reinventing Your Legacy, and author of Did Not See That Coming: hope for the single parent. But our connection began much more simply: we met last summer at the Music Healing Many Festival in Kalama, Washington, where I was helping sponsor the event through SoulBody Wellness.
We became friends, and eventually I had the opportunity to join Laurie on her podcast. Now, I get to welcome her onto mine.
What if the thing you dislike about yourself once kept you safe?
One of the places our conversation goes is the nervous system's survival responses.
Most of us have heard of fight or flight. But Laurie talks about recognizing another response in herself: fawning.
At first, she didn't like that realization. She wanted to have been the fighter.
But then she began seeing fawning differently.
Rather than evidence that she was weak, it was evidence that some part of her had learned how to preserve safety and connection.
Laurie describes beginning to recognize the difference between automatically fawning because her nervous system perceived danger and consciously choosing how she wanted to respond in the present.
That distinction matters.
A response that protected us once doesn't necessarily need to run our lives forever.
And we don't have to shame ourselves for having developed it in the first place.
So where do we begin?
At one point, Laurie turns the conversation toward me and asks:
“What are first steps of doing this?”
My answer begins with something simple:
Acknowledging what we're feeling and experiencing. And then becoming curious about it.
Healing doesn't always begin with knowing exactly where we're going.
Sometimes we don't know what safety feels like yet. We don't know what we want. We don't have an anchor.
And that's okay.
Sometimes we begin by recognizing what we don't want anymore.
We go slowly.
We notice.
We become curious.
And we look for the people, places, animals, relationships, and environments where we feel safe enough to be seen and understood.
From there, we can begin listening inward.
“Someday somebody's gonna believe you.”
Toward the end of our conversation, I ask Laurie to imagine going back to the younger version of herself.
What would she want that little girl to know now?
Laurie's answer brings us directly to something at the heart of this conversation: what it means to have your experience believed.
She talks about surviving childhood experiences she couldn't fully understand at the time and the importance of eventually finding someone who listens.
Her message to that younger version of herself is simple:
“Hold on. It's not you, and someday somebody's gonna believe you.”
There is something powerful about finally being seen.
But there is also another layer to this conversation.
Over time, healing can become the work of learning to see ourselves differently, too.
To recognize that the responses we once judged may have had a purpose.
To notice when we're repeating an old survival pattern.
To become curious instead of immediately trying to fix ourselves.
And little by little, to discover that we have more choice now than we may have had then.
Listen to the conversation
In this episode, Laurie and I explore trauma and survival responses, fawning and people-pleasing, self-trust, safe connection, feeling seen and believed, storytelling, nervous system patterns, and what it can look like to begin choosing differently.
🎧 Listen to the full episode of Spiritual Friction: A Space for Deep Feelers.
If you're looking for a place to slow down, connect, and have conversations like these in community, you're also warmly invited to join the SoulBody Wellness Healing Circle, held on the first Tuesday of each month at 6:00 PM PT.
Connect with Laurie
Website: http://www.coachlaurie.com
