Most adults have difficulty with distant or disconnected relationships without even knowing the source is childhood trauma. One dynamic but frequently overlooked trauma response is fawning the desire to please others to remain safe or avoid confrontation.
What Is the Fawning Response?
Fawning starts during childhood, particularly for individuals growing up in disturbed, abusive, or emotionally unstable households. In these homes, love appears conditional and honesty is not prized. Children learn to "read the room" quickly, modulating their own behavior to maintain peace and avoid physical or emotional injury.
Gradually, they deny themselves their needs and feelings and learn to be masters at pleasing other people. This survival mechanism serves them well throughout their childhood but tend to ruin their mental lives and relationships as adults.
Psychologist Dr. Ingrid Clayton, in her book Fawning: Why the Need to Please Makes Us Lose Ourselves and How to Find Our Way Back, writes about fawning as a relational trauma response, not something done consciously. Unlike mere "people-pleasing," fawning is rooted in an intense, nervous-system-level need for safety a way the body guarded itself against threat.
How Fawning Appears in Adulthood
As adults, fawners come across as kind, dependable, and selfless qualities that society admires. But what underlies this behavior is profound fatigue and emotional numbness. Dr. Clayton describes fawning as being encouraged among women and minority groups as a means of "staying safe, included, or employable."
But this ongoing erasure of the self fills a person with internal emptiness. Even within family gatherings or friendships, a fawner's behavior might be polite but emotionally void filled with performance rather than presence. This can produce quiet estrangement not by physical distance, but by emotional distance from others and oneself.
Common Signs of Fawning
Dr. Clayton outlines several patterns that indicate a fawning response:
- People-pleasing as a chronic behavior: Complying with anything in order to prevent conflict.
- Over-apologizing: Apologizing when you have done nothing wrong.
- Hyper-awareness of others: Continuously watching for others' moods and adjusting your tone or posture to fit.
- Compulsive caretaking: Assuming responsibility for others' feelings or welfare.
- Weak boundaries: Not setting boundaries because you don't want to be in conflict or rejected.
- Performative kindness: Smiling or agreeing to be popular even if you feel angry or hurt.
Though these behaviors previously aided in keeping you alive, they now lock you into emotional burnout and isolation.
Healing from the Fawning Response
Dr. Clayton, herself a survivor of addiction and trauma, points out that healing is not about eradicating fawning altogether. Rather, it is about recovering authenticity learning to be real and present without anxiety.
She recommends the following steps in recovery:
1. Recognize your patterns. Pay attention to times that you mute yourself or over-accommodate others.
2. Become uncomfortable. Vulnerability is necessary for true connection; it's alright to be uncomfortable.
3. Establish positive boundaries. Learn how to say no and communicate your needs without shame.
4. Let go of unrealistic expectations. You can't be all things to all people.
5. Find assistance. Support groups or therapy may help restore self-trust and self-confidence.
As Dr. Clayton so eloquently puts it, "Unfawning ourselves is welcoming ourselves to the party to finally be who we truly are."