Are You Mad at Me?
Written by: Meg Josephson, LCSW and published in 2025 by Gallery Books
As someone who has existed across the spectrum of applied knowledge and research findings (from existential-phenomenology to a research PhD), I find myself craving an intersection of the two.
This book explores a licensed mental health professional’s perspective of fawning in her own life and the stories of clients of hers. For anyone unfamiliar with fawning before coming to this book, fawning’s shorthand is ‘people pleasing’. Fawning is used to describe how people respond to experiences of danger (both physical and emotional) that wouldn’t be classified under fight/flight/freeze.
What I found myself desiring from the book is an exploration on the research of fawning. Where did the term come from? Who coined it? Is it primarily qualitative data we have? Is there neuro-imagining similar to fight/flight/freeze research where we can understand it as engaging a certain part of the brain? Has a cultural analysis been undertaken around it?
I found my interest returning there throughout most of the book because would fawning be a useful threat response if people had better conflict resolution skills? What about if people recognized and identified their emotions more? Or if people understood the components of building trust and safety in relationships? Is fawning a behavioral response to a lack of socio-emotional and connection skills?
This is not to say that without research we shouldn’t consider fawning to be a meaningful, impactful, and relevant means of responding to suffering and disconnection and harm in relationships. I know the behaviors that people classify as fawning to be familiar, frequent, and helpful to defusing complex relational circumstances for many people. I also wonder is there is any sort of disservice that we do for people to borrow their trust by alluding to better-explored-through-research threat response systems in our bodies than fawning is right now?
In context with some of my other reads from this year on expertise and communication, combined with the literature review from my doctoral work on the presence of distrust that come from co-occurring collective traumas, I wondered what it would be like to talk about fawning behaviors as the consequences of a society that is underdeveloped in conversational skills, connection, identifying sensations or emotions, and mental health literacy?
Would a book with that framing be given a publishing deal and would it become beloved by readers so quickly? Does it need the biological framing, the trauma response and nervous system language, to be powerful and useful?
The book provides people with language to reframe their behaviors and patterns, and begins conversations through naming these things, that I ultimately believe can support people in healing. We don’t know all the mechanisms of healing and so it’s not to say that without the research there is no use for the stories, language, or support this book provides.
I recognize this as a potentially important resources for many people and I’m glad it exists in the world. More books by practicing mental health professionals!
And I am going to go down a research rabbit hole I think to learn more about how to contextualize fawning.
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The book can be purchased at an independent bookstore of your choosing through this affiliate link: https://bookshop.org/lists/read-in-2025-sydney-conroy-s-reads/ (which has the added bonus of supporting me so I have increased opportunity to write out more thoughts, musings, and considerations)!