This past summer, my family and I spent a long weekend at Seeley Lake: perfect weather, calm lake, and a great wooded area for long walks. On one morning walk, I stumbled upon a deer and her fawn, just off the path. The fawn immediately retreated behind her mother, and the mother stepped closer toward me with one firm stomp.
Growing up in an alcoholic family, I had always wished I had a mother to stand between me and danger, an advocate who would tell me not to give up myself to please others. Of course, as a young adult, I understood that people-pleasing was a safety mechanism. Keep the peace at all costs. But no one really understands how deeply the pleasing river flows; it’s woven into identity.
Estimated reading time: 5 minutes
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I quaked like the fawn mentioned above, but no one came, so I hid.
I hid my true self; I hid to stay safe; I learned to please and acquiesce as easily as breathing.
Fawning.
All those years, that is what I was doing.
So, what is the definition of fawning? At its core, fawning is a trauma response where you try to appease or please a perceived threat to avoid conflict or harm.
It’s a survival strategy rooted in the belief that if you can make yourself likable, helpful, or agreeable enough, you can neutralize the danger.
Fawning is a fourth survival mechanism.
I remember reading the description of the fawn response. Finally, an understanding of why I had spent decades of my life twisting myself into a pretzel with contortions to keep everyone around me happy.
At last, I understood that my people-pleasing wasn't a character flaw or a lack of willpower. It was a deeply ingrained survival code wired into my nervous system when I was too young and helpless to choose another way.
When your brain senses danger, it doesn’t pause to think. In a split second, your primal survival instincts take over. You’ve likely heard of the “fight or flight” response, where we either confront the threat or run from it. You might even know about the “freeze” response, where we become paralyzed, like a deer caught in headlights.
But the fourth "F" of trauma response is fawning.
The term was coined by Pete Walker, a psychotherapist who specializes in complex trauma. He explains that fawning is essentially a strategy to neutralize a threat by becoming as pleasing and nonconfrontational as possible. If you’re a sci-fi fan, you’re familiar with shapeshifting. People-pleasers shapeshift, morphing into whatever another person needs, even mirroring personality traits.
When seeking to de-escalate conflict and find a sense of safety, it often means relinquishing boundaries, silencing our own voice, and accommodating the very people who make us feel unsafe. These patterned responses show up in everyday ways.
It’s that reflexive “I’m sorry” that slips out when someone else bumps into you.
It’s the knot in your stomach when a loved one is in a bad mood, and you immediately scan your memory, trying to figure out what you did wrong and how you can fix it.
It’s agreeing to a social event or a committee you have no energy for, just to avoid the possibility of disappointing someone.
Fawning is the silent calculation that tells you it’s safer to let your partner’s cutting remark slide than to risk a fight. It’s the compulsive need to be overly helpful, to anticipate every need, to become indispensable so that no one will ever have a reason to be angry with you—or in my case, not need you. Because if they don’t need you, they will abandon you.
It’s molding your personality to fit the room, laughing at jokes that repulse you, and hiding your own brilliance so as not to intimidate anyone. If you’ve ever felt like a chameleon (a word I’ve used frequently over the years), constantly changing your colors to blend in and survive, you know the feeling of fawning.
On the surface, fawning looks a lot like people-pleasing. It’s being helpful, agreeable, and accommodating. It’s anticipating others’ needs and meeting them before they even realize it themselves. It’s being an overly helpful employee (the one that volunteers for everything!), the “perfect” partner, and the “easy” child.
But here’s the crucial distinction: people-pleasing is the behavior; fawning is the unconscious survival strategy driving it.
Fawning is a complex, two-faced survival strategy, which is why it’s so often mistaken for mere niceness. On the surface, we’re the ultimate team players—we are great at fixing problems, a master at smoothing ruffled feathers, and we offer endless support even when exhausted.
But underneath this helpful exterior, a severe yet silent detachment is taking place. We are quietly disconnecting from our own feelings and needs, postponing our own desires and even identity. In the name of safety, we prioritize pleasing others over connecting with ourselves.
The truth is, nobody wants to fawn.
It feels hollow and inauthentic.
But when your brain is screaming, “threat!” and your nervous system is conflicted between “stay safe” and “be yourself,” safety wins every single time.
Related reading: “Reclaim Your Life!” 5 Keys to Stop People Pleasing in a Relationship.”
Fawning is a brilliant, adaptive strategy that a child’s nervous system develops to survive a threatening environment.
As Pete Walker explains, the trauma-based codependent learns to fawn very early in life. As a toddler, she learns quickly that protesting neglect or mistreatment leads to even more frightening parental retaliation, so she relinquishes the fight response, deleting “no” from her vocabulary and never developing the language skills of healthy assertiveness.
For many of us, our childhood homes were unsafe, making it impossible to express needs, emotions, or opinions. We learned that our authentic selves were too much, too loud, too sensitive, or too inconvenient for our caregivers. We learned that our survival depended on making ourselves small, quiet, and useful.
I can still remember the moment I profoundly learned this lesson. I was five years old, and my mom and dad were fighting with scary threats toward one another. I ran across the street to get help. Afterward, they shamed and blamed me for seeking help to keep THEM safe. My safety was inconsequential.
In this heartbreaking reality of the fawner, I—we—learned to abandon ourselves to avoid being abandoned by others.
Even though fawning might have kept us safe in childhood, it comes at a tremendous cost in adulthood.
When we live in a perpetual state of fawning, we are disconnected from our true selves. We don’t know what we need, what we want, or what we feel. Our lives are a reflection of others’ expectations, not our own desires.
This constant self-abandonment leads to a host of painful consequences:
● Resentment: We give and give, but it’s never from a place of genuine generosity. It’s a transaction, a payment for safety. And when we don’t get the love and appreciation we crave in return, we become bitter and resentful.
● Exhaustion: It takes an enormous amount of energy to constantly monitor others’ moods, anticipate their needs, and suppress our own. We live in a state of hypervigilance, and it’s exhausting.
● Loss of Self: After years of fawning, we lose touch with who we are. Our identity becomes enmeshed with our role as a pleaser, and we have no idea who we would be without it.
● Unhealthy Relationships: We attract people who are happy to take, and we repel those who want a genuine, reciprocal connection. After all, the foundation of our relationships is inequality and inauthenticity.
● Physical Health Issues: The chronic stress of hypervigilance and self-abandonment takes a toll on our bodies. Research shows a link between physical conditions associated with hypervigilance and post-traumatic stress, such as chronic pain, digestive issues, autoimmune conditions, and other stress-related illnesses. The body keeps the score, as trauma expert Bessel van der Kolk reminds us.
● Inability to Trust Ourselves: When we've spent a lifetime overriding our own needs and intuition, we can lose the ability to trust our inner guidance. We second-guess every decision, constantly seeking external validation because we've lost touch with our own internal compass.
Recommended reading: “Why Being a People Pleaser Damages Relationships—and What to Do About It!”
If you recognize yourself in this description of fawning, please know that you are not broken. You survived. This behavior has served a vital purpose, giving you tremendous abilities along the way!
Your fawning response is a testament to your resilience, your intelligence, and your incredible capacity to adapt. You CAN heal, and once you integrate the pain, you can use your gifts of sensitivity, reading energy, and kindness as valuable assets while simultaneously giving yourself self-love.
Moving from surviving to thriving is not about “fixing” yourself. It’s coming home to yourself—your true self. Your true self remains intact inside you.
You can learn to provide yourself with the safety, compassion, and love you never received as a child and set healthy boundaries to create a life you love. I did, and I could have never guessed how sweet life and relationships could be.
Here are the steps on the healing journey to reclaim your true self and repattern pleasing to self-enlightened empowerment.
The first step is simply recognizing the pattern of fawning in your life. Notice when you go into please-and-appease mode. Notice the fear that drives it. And as you notice, offer yourself compassion. Say to yourself, "What an amazing strategy to stay safe! And I’m not a helpless child anymore. I choose to be true to myself.”
For me, this awareness came gradually. I started tracking my resentment, noticing the pattern of over-giving. I began to observe the physical sensations in my body when I was about to say yes to something I really wanted to say no to—the tightness in my chest, the knot in my stomach, the voice in my head screaming "NO!" that I had learned to ignore.
Awareness without self-judgment is key. Gentle and compassionate acceptance transforms a survival pattern into freedom to be yourself.
Healing from past trauma requires us also to grieve the childhood we never had. Most people don’t tell you how much pain there is in realizing and coming to terms with the tremendous loss of years— decades—devoured by pleasing everyone but yourself.
It’s crucial to allow ourselves to feel the pain of being so alone, scared, and responsible for our own safety. Feeling the profound loss that occurred, to feel the death of a thousand tiny cuts every time we gave ourselves up. Every time we dared to hope, only to be disappointed—again!
Feel the grief of ignoring oneself. Forgive yourself for abandoning yourself to keep others happy. Say goodbye to lost years and opportunities.
As children without choices, we did our best. Now, it’s time to say goodbye and honor our own experience, thoughts, feelings, desires, goals, and values.
Fawning is the opposite of the fight response. To heal, we must reclaim our healthy anger. If you grew up in violence, you may be concerned that you’ll become hostile. For years, I stuffed my anger because I was afraid that if I released it, I would unleash a force I couldn’t control.
Anger is the emotion that tells us when our boundaries have been crossed, when there’s a threat to what we hold dear, or when a value is being disrespected. It’s a vital part of our self-protective system that was censored and unplugged for safety’s sake.
Go slow. Observe yourself and get reacquainted with your life force energy; it’s this intense energy that allows us to say “no,” to set boundaries, and to protect ourselves. You must reclaim it!
Setting boundaries can feel terrifying for a fawner. The key is to start small in your safest relationships.
Practice saying no to a small request. State a preference, even if it’s just about what to have for dinner. Each time you state a preference, express how you feel, or set a boundary, you are rewiring your brain to know it’s safe to be you and to let others see and know that person.
The most important part of healing is reconnecting with the hidden you. Ask yourself, throughout the day, “What do I NEED right now?” and “What do I WANT right now?” At first, you may not have an answer. That's okay. Keep asking. Slowly, gently, you will begin to hear the whispers of your own soul.
When I first started asking myself these questions, I often came up empty. I had spent so long disconnected from my own needs and desires that I literally didn't know what I wanted. Sometimes the answer was as simple as “I need a glass of water” or “I want to take three deep breaths.” Other times, it was bigger: “I need time alone” or “I want to pursue a hobby I love and have been ignoring.”
The practice of asking and listening is how we rebuild the relationship with ourselves.
You are learning to trust your own inner wisdom again. And it's how you’ll begin to live from a place of authenticity rather than survival.
Healing from a lifetime of giving up yourself and being a peacekeeper is not a quick or easy process. It’s a journey of unlearning, of reclaiming, and of coming home to yourself.
But it IS possible. I am living proof.
Today, my life is not about pleasing others. It’s about honoring myself. My inner space is compassionate and encouraging. Setting boundaries in my relationships is a natural part of life; there’s no hesitation or fear of how someone might react.
I have learned that my worth is independent of my usefulness. I have learned that I am allowed to have needs, to have feelings, and to take up space in the world.
Love truly heals, but we must be able to love ourselves, too.
A life of authenticity, of joy, and of deep, abiding self-love awaits you. It’s worth the work!
If you'd like support in repatterning people-pleasing and fawning, reach out to Heartmanity. Transforming lives IS our business!