Are You Mad at Me?: How to Stop Focusing on What Others Think and Start Living for You

Are You Mad at Me? (2025) by Meg Josephson is a self-help guide that addresses the psychological roots of people-pleasing and chronic anxiety about others’ perceptions. Drawing from trauma-informed therapy, attachment theory, Internal Family Systems, and Buddhist mindfulness practices, Josephson speaks primarily to women and marginalized individuals who learned early in life that their safety depended on managing others’ emotions. The book offers readers a framework for understanding how childhood survival mechanisms persist into adulthood and provides practical tools for developing self-compassion, setting boundaries, and reconnecting with authentic desires.

Key Takeaways:

• Recognize Fawning as a Survival Response, Not a Character Flaw
• Practice Self-Validation Rather than Waiting for External Acknowledgment
• Distinguish Between Anxiety and Intuition to Reclaim Your Inner Voice
• Use Resentment as a Boundary-Setting Compass
• Engage in Repair After Conflict Rather than Seeking Perfection
• Redirect Energy from Managing Others’ Perceptions to Soothing Your Own Wounds

This guide uses the 2025 Kindle edition published by Gallery Books.

Content Warning: The source material and guide feature depictions of mental illness, bullying, child sexual abuse, substance use, and disordered eating.

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Summary

Josephson begins by sharing her own therapeutic journey, tracing how her hypervigilance—which developed during her childhood with a father with an alcohol dependency—manifested in adult relationships as constant anxiety about others’ approval. She introduces the fawn response, a trauma reaction involving appeasing others to feel safe. Unlike fight, flight, or freeze responses, fawning moves toward threats rather than away from them, and it often develops when children learn that being agreeable provides relative safety in unpredictable environments.

The book traces how childhood roles like Peacekeeper, Performer, Caretaker, and Perfectionist protect children in dysfunctional households but create exhausting patterns in adulthood. Josephson emphasizes that complex trauma accumulates through repeated small moments of feeling unsafe rather than requiring catastrophic events, and she validates that fawning has been necessary for marginalized groups navigating oppressive systems. A central theme throughout the book is the importance of grieving what one never received—emotional attunement, consistent safety, unconditional acceptance—rather than waiting indefinitely for parental acknowledgment or apologies.

Josephson provides concrete practices for healing: Using the NICER framework to relate compassionately to anxious thoughts; reconnecting with the body through breathwork and grounding exercises; and learning to distinguish anxiety’s jittery urgency from intuition’s calm clarity. She reframes boundaries as acts of self-compassion rather than selfishness, arguing that sustainable relationships require honoring one’s own needs. The book emphasizes that conflict, when followed by genuine repair, strengthens connections more than avoiding rupture altogether.

Throughout, Josephson positions healing as an ongoing practice rather than a destination, acknowledging that setbacks are inevitable while emphasizing that awareness itself represents progress. She concludes by framing personal healing as inherently collective work, suggesting that processing intergenerational trauma creates ripples that benefit broader communities and future generations.