When Giving Feels Safer Than Receiving

That sentence is closer to a clinical fact than a figure of speech. Trauma researchers describe fawning as a fourth survival strategy alongside fight, flight, and freeze — a body's decision, made below the level of conscious choice, that the safest way through a threat is to make yourself agreeable to it. The therapist Pete Walker gave it its name, and while the term itself comes from clinical practice rather than a controlled trial, it names something the peer-reviewed literature on child maltreatment keeps circling from other angles: the nervous system doesn't just remember danger, it drills a response to it, the same way a muscle drills a motion. 

Somatic Experiencing, the approach developed by Peter Levine, is built on a related premise — that what looks like a fixed personality trait is often an incomplete physiological event, rehearsed until it becomes procedural. Levine's foundational observation, laid out in Waking the Tiger and later in In an Unspoken Voice, came from watching prey animals in the wild: they mobilize enormous survival energy in the face of a threat, and when the threat passes, they discharge it — shaking, trembling, completing the motion that fight or flight demanded — and return to baseline within minutes. Humans, he noticed, often don't. Our capacity for higher-order thought lets us override that discharge, so the activation stays lodged in the body rather than completing its arc. 

Twenty years of hands-on-service work, laid over a childhood that had already taught this same lesson, isn't incidental repetition. It's twenty years of drilling one groove into an already-grooved system.

On top of that, being trans in Texas, and having to tolerate misgendering, transphobia, being called the wrong name. Researchers who study gender minority stress describe exactly this layering: a body that has learned, correctly, that it is safer to stay alert, to read a room before it's read you, to have an appeasement response ready before the threat has even fully arrived. 

That kind of chronic vigilance isn't a personality quirk either — it's measurable in cardiovascular and inflammatory markers over time, the biological cost of a nervous system that rarely gets to stand down. And then there's my family of origin issues, which imprinted service as a survival strategy onto my nervous system.

All of this led to a limited capacity to receive. I could give to others all day long. I have, to make ends meet.

But could I articulate to you what I wanted? Could I even locate what I wanted?

There's a name for that gap, too. Alexithymia is the clinical term for difficulty identifying and describing one's own emotional and bodily states — not a lack of feeling, but a kind of static between feeling something and being able to name it. A 2023 meta-analysis of seventy-eight studies, led by researchers at Stanford, found that of all the forms child maltreatment can take, emotional neglect was among the strongest predictors of alexithymia in adulthood — stronger, in some analyses, than physical or sexual abuse (Ditzer et al., 2023). The researchers' point was a quiet but important one: the forms of harm that leave no bruise are not the same as harm that leaves no trace.

There's a physiological reason the gap is so hard to close alone, too, and it runs directly through the hands doing the massaging. Skin carries a dedicated class of nerve fiber, C-tactile afferents, that responds specifically to slow, gentle touch and feeds straight into the insular cortex — the same region of the brain that tracks the body's internal state (McGlone, Wessberg, & Olausson, 2014). Touch, in other words, is wired to build interoception. Twenty years of giving exactly that kind of touch professionally should have been twenty years of practice in reading a body's internal signals. It was — just never my own body's signals, because the touch was never mine to receive.

Yes. I do know what I want. I am deeply entwined with my own desire and longing.
Growing up, wanting was dangerous. It usually led to disappointment. Especially when it came to the emotional stuff. Affection. Support. Witnessing. Being held.

Everything above is diagnostic — it explains how a nervous system gets wired toward giving and away from receiving. None of it, on its own, rewires anything. But the same research, and the clinical practice built on top of it, points fairly consistently toward what actually does. It is almost never insight alone. It is small, repeatable, titrated practice, usually over a long time, usually with help.

Siegel's window of tolerance — the band of arousal in which a person can feel something and still think, choose, and stay present — is not fixed. Trauma-informed practice widens it the same way physical training widens a muscle's capacity: through small, recoverable loads rather than by flooding the system and hoping it holds. The rule of thumb that shows up across clinical sources is almost comically modest: if five minutes of something feels like too much, try thirty seconds. This is Levine's titration made into a daily habit rather than a therapy-hour technique.

Deb Dana's polyvagal-informed practices, built on Stephen Porges's research, start from the premise that most people never learned to notice which autonomic state they're in — mobilized and defended, shut down and gone, or safe enough to connect — until they're already deep inside one of them. 

Her exercises involve mapping these states and then hunting for "glimmers": small, low-stakes moments of felt safety (a pet's weight against a leg, a particular song, a friend's voice) that a nervous system can be coached to notice and linger in, rather than rushing past on the way to the next demand. 

Dana and Porges both frame co-regulation — borrowing steadiness from someone else's regulated nervous system — not as a fallback for people who can't self-regulate, but as the biological default humans are built to run on before self-regulation is even developmentally possible.

Because emotional neglect and alexithymia specifically erode the ability to notice internal signals, interventions that target interoception directly tend to do better than ones that only ask a person to think about their feelings. Mindful Awareness in Body-oriented Therapy (MABT), developed by nurse-researcher Cynthia Price, teaches this in graduated stages — first simply locating a sensation in the body, then learning to stay with it, then letting it inform a choice — and has shown measurable gains in interoceptive awareness and emotion regulation across several randomized trials with women recovering from trauma and substance use (Price et al., 2019). It is slow, unglamorous work: noticing a knot in the stomach and staying with it long enough to find out what it wants, instead of assuming there's nothing there to ask.

This is the part Betty Martin's own curriculum gets structurally right, whatever its research pedigree: she has people practice the Taking and Accepting quadrants first alone, with an inanimate object, so there's no one else's reaction to manage — feeling a stone or a piece of fabric purely for the sensation of it, nothing owed in return. Only once that's tolerable does a partner enter, and even then in three-minute doses, with an explicit and revocable agreement. 

It's the same logic as the research above: strip away every variable except can I let myself have this, get a felt answer at the smallest possible scale, then slowly add complexity back in. Self-compassion research offers an entry point that doesn't require another person at all — Kristin Neff's work has found that a deliberate self-soothing gesture, a hand on the chest, a self-administered hug, reliably activates the same mammalian caregiving physiology, oxytocin included, as receiving comfort from someone else (Neff, 2023). It's a way of rehearsing the receiving end of care when the only other party in the room is you.

Assertiveness — plainly stating a preference, a limit, or a need — was once one of the most heavily studied interventions in clinical psychology before it fell out of academic fashion; a 2018 review argues it shouldn't have, given its documented effects on anxiety, depression, and relationship satisfaction across decades of controlled trials (Speed, Goldstein, & Goldfried, 2018). 

It's taught the unglamorous way clinical skills are taught: naming the want in one plain sentence, rehearsing it out loud before the moment it's needed, treating the discomfort of saying it as information rather than a stop sign. 

For a nervous system whose "want" muscle atrophied in service of something else, this can feel almost absurdly remedial: sentences practiced in a mirror, in a car, to a therapist, before ever saying them to the person they're actually for. That's usually a sign it's pitched at the right level, not the wrong one.

Eventually, all of the above needs a second nervous system in the room, because so much of what narrowed the capacity to receive happened inside a relationship, and — per both the attachment and the somatic literature — that is largely where it gets rebuilt. Somatic Experiencing, delivered by a trained practitioner, has its own randomized evidence at this point: a 2017 controlled trial found significant reductions in both PTSD symptoms and depression, with effect sizes in a range clinicians consider large (Brom et al., 2017). None of this requires the relationship, or the therapy, to be flawless. What the research keeps pointing to instead is repair:  proof, delivered often enough, that reaching and being met is possible, until a body stops needing quite so much evidence to believe it.