Fawning: Why the Need to Please Makes Us Lose Ourselves—and How to Find Our Way Back

by Ingrid Clayton

He defined fawning as “a response to a threat by becoming more appealing to the threat.” Fawners mirror or merge with someone else’s desires or expectations, to defuse conflict rather than confront it directly. Because it’s their best chance to stay safe. At least for now.

When you continually dismiss a parent’s abusive behavior to maintain the connection, you guessed it. Fawning.

Fawning isn’t conscious manipulation. Rather, it’s a way we seek safety in the face of exploitation, shame, neglect, abuse, or other harm.

When we feel unsafe, we sync with our aggressors (or abusers) with the hope of emerging unscathed. We strive to stay connected because we are dependent on the person who is hurting us. If it’s a parent (or stepparent), we are dependent on their care.

With fawning, connection means protection.

Merging with others’ desires means surrendering our own. When we fawn, we forgo assertiveness and become overly accommodating. We shapeshift to stay safe. We submit to the very person or people who have harmed us. Essentially, we abandon ourselves when we fawn—our needs, values, and opinions—and this reinforces our vulnerability.

Sometimes referred to as please and appease, fawning is often equated with people-pleasing or codependency.

Fawning is not a conscious choice. It is a survival mechanism. In a nanosecond, the reptilian brain selects the response that offers the greatest chance for survival. Afterward, the body remembers what was successful the first time and repeats it in the future. The fawner’s intentions then were never to please or compulsively caretake. We were looking for power in situations where we were powerless.

The tough part about complex trauma is that we often don’t see it as traumatic because we misinterpret it as either the norm or as a personal failing.

I chronically put everyone above myself, helping people heal their wounds as though that would magically heal my own.

Fawners, or what Walker calls fawn types, are “seeking safety by merging with the wishes, needs, and demands of others.” Even more, he goes on to say, they learn that the “price of admission to any relationship is the forfeiture of all their needs, rights, preferences, and boundaries.”

Unfawning is a journey of self-reclamation. A journey of finding our voices, stepping into our authority, and finally living life on more of our own terms.

Healing (from anything) rarely happens from directly exposing our wounds or feeling shame about the ways we’ve guarded against them. Healing happens when we honor the ways we learned to protect ourselves. When we stop focusing on the imperfections of our coping mechanisms and can validate their valiant and necessary efforts. Then, and only then, will those old protectors step aside, allowing space for another way.

complex trauma was what happened to me, and narcissistic abuse was foundational to why. In fact, Pete Walker states that fawners “are usually the children of at least one narcissistic parent who uses contempt to press them into service, scaring and shaming them out of developing a healthy sense of self.”

“You’ll bounce back; you always do.” While resilience can indeed be a strength, when it’s wielded as a mandate or an expectation, it becomes yet another tool of dismissal.

Fawning is taught, encouraged, and expected in so many contexts, which is why we can miss it as a trauma response and why we can think it is just our personality. Fawning flourishes and is perpetuated because it’s bigger than one person’s body or coping mechanism. It is ignited in us, then, through a feedback loop, becomes amplified and rewarded in the world. Our sense of self becomes distorted not just through personal adaptation, but because systems of oppression accelerate this process of change, moving us further away from our inherent state. This is why so many fawners might need to “turn off the comments,” so to speak. To stop or step out of the feedback loops that prefer our deference and encourage self-doubt and self-censorship. So we can discern, and truly hear, our own voice.

And she kept repeating this mantra softly: “I did nothing wrong.” The second all this awareness dropped into her body, it shattered the hope she’d been carrying for years, that change was coming. Shattered her determination to stick around for that day. And she felt immediate grief. Walking out, she knew it was over, and she was devastated. It was like all the young parts of her, with gaping wounds, who’d been waiting for help from someone else for decades, were all just told, NOBODY IS COMING. There was no rescue mission. Now sobbing uncontrollably in her car, she was hysterical when she called her sister. “I need to come over right now.” Previous iterations of Francis would have reached out to make peace. Would have sent Colin a text: “I’m really sorry I didn’t want to go downtown. I should have said, ‘Can we just go for an hour and then I can get some work done?’ ” If she offered a solution that seemed normal, maybe the whole thing was. But she had no intention of playing nice this time. There is no sugarcoating what happened next. Crying harder than she ever had, rocking back and forth, shaking, sick to her stomach, she later explained how she felt. I felt like I was never going to be okay, ever again. Part of me wished I could die. I was not safe in my body or in the world. The LOVE OF MY LIFE let me leave with no acknowledgment, no apology, no awareness of his behavior, completely villainizing me. The lack of empathy or understanding after five YEARS of doing everyth...

Gabor Maté, MD, an expert in trauma, addiction, and child development, and the author of The Myth of Normal, talks about this tension: An issue that comes up in a lot of people’s lives [is] the conflict we all experience between being ourselves, on the one hand, and being loved and accepted on the other. That’s what we want…But what if you can’t have both and the child can’t or perceives that they can’t. Then they go for the attachment, and they suppress themselves. Self-expression and authenticity become a threat to them. All our lives we are afraid to be ourselves. It’s not a mistake that we give up our authenticity. It’s not a weakness. It’s not a moral fault. It’s a survival mechanism.

Being blind to conflict lends itself to naivete. We remain trusting, hopeful, almost experiencing the world as a fairy tale, at least until we’re shook up once again. It’s no surprise many of us are conflict avoidant, as we’ve never witnessed healthy conflict. I didn’t see parents who respected each other, getting closer through the process of shared vulnerability. I saw power dynamics that squashed the soul.

For most fawners, our resentments simmer, right below the boiling point. I once told a therapist, “On the outside, I seem fine. But on the inside, I’m carrying the rage of a three-hundred-pound linebacker.” I knew I was angry, but I had no idea what to do with it. The people I was mad at couldn’t hear it, that much was clear. So I just held it. Hoping it would eventually go away on its own. News flash…that didn’t happen. It rarely does.

Because of the necessity for conflict avoidance, it’s no surprise that fawning creates a need for caretaking, fixing, and enabling. If there’s no room for the mess of real relating, fawners are like Mr. Clean, mopping it all up. We solve all the problems as the only way to attend to our own—through our helpfulness.

Pick Me!: The Need to Be Chosen or Liked There is one theme underneath almost all the signs of fawning: the need to be chosen, the need for external validation, the need to be rescued or picked. This is in fact a counterpoint to self-abandonment. If there is less of me, I need more of you. So we tolerate abuse and mistreatment and anxiously squash our feelings about it. We become the person others need us to be, do what they need us to do, because we don’t want to jeopardize what is ultimately more important: the protection only a seal of approval can provide.

The only way we get to be ourselves is when we stop self-abandoning.

But one day (maybe today?!) we can see how great we are. We can choose ourselves. We can stop doing their work and start doing our own. The deeply rooted work of nervous system regulation. The work of RESCUING OURSELVES. We will look at these strategies in the unfawning section of this book, but here is where there is some good news for fawners: We are brilliant caretakers. We have loads of resourcefulness. We are creative and compassionate and willing to go to any lengths. And when we turn all of that back on ourselves, to rescue all the parts of us that we lost along the way, we can finally get free.

Recalling this moment from adolescence, how it represented so many others in her life, Lily was heartbroken how often she lied to feel remotely understood in the world. When our actual feelings are constantly overridden—they literally don’t matter to others—we try to find something that does.

I see now how it was curated. And how exhausting it’s been. How splitting off from the truth meant I couldn’t take care of myself. It meant I couldn’t even know myself. To some extent, we aren’t lying as much as we don’t know who we are or how we feel. It’s not like we start from connection to ourselves and then try to override that. We start from the place of What do I need to do, who do I need to be, to be relationally safe? I lied because I needed to maintain someone’s perception of me. And because we don’t really know another’s perception, it was often a guessing game.

In an interview with Dr. Ramani Durvasula, he said, “A definitive symptom of childhood trauma is trying to get a difficult person to be good to us.”

There’s a saying in trauma therapy: “Red flags don’t look like red flags when they feel like home.”