Description
Do you find your attention leaving your own body and traveling toward someone else’s face, voice, silence, anger, disappointment, or possible withdrawal? Have you learned to become agreeable, useful, pleasing, or easy to digest, especially when someone has more power, more volatility, or more need than you do? Do you know the ache of being socially skillful and emotionally responsive, while also being disconnected from your own desires, boundaries, refusals, and aliveness? Would you love to know what it feels like to have your energy belong to you again?
Fawning is a relational survival strategy rooted in the nervous system. It emerges when safety depends on appeasing a perceived threat, often someone with more power, and coordinating ourselves around their emotional state. When we are fawning, we are quite literally strategically mobilizing our own nervous system to keep somebody else calm and happy.
In this state, we may appear warm, fluid, generous, responsive, relaxed, delightful, and easy to be with. Inside, there may be vigilance, calculation, loneliness, bracing, and a very careful monitoring of what will be acceptable. Fawning asks us to shape ourselves into the version of ourselves that is most digestible for the person or system that has more power than we have. It is often a brilliant response from the nervous system to environments where directness, refusal, need, anger, or authenticity have carried danger.
In Unfawning the Nervous System, we will work with fawning as an intelligent adaptation. We will explore how fawning lives on in the body, for decades after the original threat is gone. We will acknowledge the way that it organizes attention, how it recruits social engagement, and how it can become a lifetime of emotional labor in which our own signals, desires, boundaries, longings, and aliveness become hard to find.
This class will draw on Jaak Panksepp’s work with the systems of emotion and motivation, and Sarah Peyton’s integration of the SEEKING, FEAR, RAGE, CARE, SEXUALITY/EMERGENCE, DISGUST, GRIEF, and PLAY circuits. Together, we will look at what happens when FEAR organizes the body around appeasement, when CARE becomes the endless management of other people’s nervous systems, when RAGE and DISGUST carry the exiled dignity of protest, when GRIEF holds the cost of abandonment and self-abandonment, when SEXUALITY/EMERGENCE becomes tangled with compliance, when PLAY is replaced by monitoring, and when SEEKING loses its own inner direction.
Using trauma-informed nervous system education and Resonant Healing practices, we will explore how to identify fawning states, release the emotional labor contracts that keep them in place, and engage time-travel processes to bring younger or vulnerable selves out of danger and into greater safety.
We will also make room for the political and relational dimensions of fawning: how patriarchy, homophobia, racism, colonization, ableism, economic dependency, and other power hierarchies condition people to regulate others at the expense of themselves. We will bring warmth and precision to the ways women and gender-marginalized people are especially trained to become digestible, agreeable, desirable, useful, and easy to manage. To unfawn the nervous system is to welcome back the internal signals that were once too dangerous to feel. It is to make room for the body’s yes, the body’s no, the body’s longing, the body’s protest, the body’s grief, the body’s delight, and the body’s own direction – grounded in mutuality, truth, dignity, and choice.
Unfawning is restoring the circuits of SEEKING, FEAR, RAGE, CARE, SEXUALITY/EMERGENCE, DISGUST, GRIEF, and PLAY so that they can support self-regulation, authenticity, protection, tenderness, pleasure, discernment, mourning, delight, and life.
Where?
The course will meet via zoom. We welcome participants from all time zones who wish to learn asynchronously for some or all of the sessions. Recordings and visuals will be made available to those who are registered for the live program.
When?
July 6 – August 10, 2026
Monday | 1:30 – 2:55 PM Pacific Time
Click Here to convert to your time zone
What To Expect
Participants will leave this workshop with:
- A clear, embodied understanding of fawning as a nervous system survival response
- Increased self-compassion and reduced shame around relational patterns
- Tools for identifying fawning states in the body, in language, and in relationships
- Practices for releasing unconscious emotional labor contracts
- More access to RAGE and DISGUST as protectors of dignity and boundaries
- More tenderness for FEAR and GRIEF as they emerge from long-held survival
- More capacity for CARE that includes the self
- More connection with SEEKING, PLAY, and SEXUALITY/EMERGENCE as sources of aliveness and inner direction
- Greater access to authenticity, agency, and social engagement with self-connection
This class offers a pathway toward emergence. Together, we will support the movement into presence, dignity, and choice, and into relationships where we get to matter.
This course is taught by Sarah Peyton, with Jaya Manske as a guest teacher for one session.
What You'll Learn
Week 1: Intro to the Circuits in Fawning, Your Circuit Map and Honoring SEEKING
Week 2: FEAR, the Nervous System, and Releasing the Organizing Contracts of Appeasement
Week 3: The roles of CARE and PANIC/GRIEF: Releasing False Bodhisattva Vows of Fawning
Week 4: Awakening and Befriending the Sleeping Giants of RAGE and DISGUST
Week 5: The Gentle Excavation of our SEXUALITY/EMERGENCE from the Ashes of Fawning
Week 6: Reawakening PLAY as we Relinquish Monitoring
Who is This Course For?
Anyone from total beginners to experienced resonance practitioners are welcome. This course also supports space holders and people who are interested in therapeutic and emotional session-work, including resonance partners, empathy buddies, therapists and social workers.
This Course Includes Resonant Assistant Support
Assistant support is available during classes. There are three ways this happens:
- In groups of three with one assistant and two participants, so that participants can practice the breakout exercises with support.
- In small groups, with 1 assistant and 3+ participants, with work with one participant occurring by lottery, and the remaining participants observing.
- Depending on assistant availability, the third option is 1-1 support to receive resonant processes like time travel and unconscious contracts for material that comes up during class.
Cost
$270 Early Bird
$300 Regular Price
Scholarship Information
Partial scholarships may be available for this course. For more information, please write to help@sarahpeyton.com after June 29, 2026.
Please Note:
- Your tuition payment is non-refundable (but it is transferable).
- This course will be recorded for those who want to learn asynchronously for some or all sessions.
- This work is not therapy and is not a substitute for therapy. If you have a sense that you would be destabilized by yourself or others speaking about difficult events, then this course may not be for you. While we hope that the processes and information that we share can be of use in your journey, we do not have the resources to support extreme psychological difficulties.
