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November 17 - November 24, 2025
There are so many ways to tell someone you’re thinking of them, and because of that, there are also so many opportunities to feel forgotten.
As the years passed, I didn’t even realize how much I had changed until I looked back and noticed how different I felt in situations that had used to spark so much tension.
the fawn response is about becoming more appealing to the threat, being liked by the threat, satisfying the threat, being helpful and agreeable to the threat—so that you can feel safe.
So, as an alternative survival strategy, the child “learns to fawn [their] way into the relative safety of becoming helpful.”1 All these stress responses are useful, adaptive, and necessary—but we’re supposed to be in them for only a few minutes or hours at a time, not for years on end.
We learn that the other person’s comfort is more important than our own, that we can’t feel okay until the other person is okay. We learn that, in order for us to feel safe, we need to keep the peace, whatever it takes. And as a result, we’re disconnected from questions such as What do I need? What do I think? What do I want?
Nice is about how we’re being perceived—it’s doing something for the sake of being seen as good. Compassion is about authenticity, doing something because it feels good to be kind.
Most of Isabelle’s childhood memories are of being alone, hiding in the pages of a fantasy book borrowed from the library, left to soothe herself in the hope that her parents would make up by the time she got to the acknowledgments section.
“I know this sounds horrible, but sometimes I wish something ‘big’ had happened to me, so at least then I could feel like I had a ‘real’ reason to feel this way. Then maybe people would believe me, and I’d believe myself.”
Trauma is about how the nervous system perceives the event or period of time, how the body processes it. (This is why two siblings can experience the same thing and one can feel traumatized from it, while the other is unfazed.)
When we’re often left to feel unsafe, unheard, unloved, or unseen by those who are supposed to make us feel safe, the effect is called complex trauma. So often, complex trauma happens within the home or the caregiving system, because those are environments that are supposed to be sources of safety and stability.
Complex trauma also involves what didn’t happen, the support and nurturing that you didn’t receive in the midst of the traumatic situation or in the aftermath.
There can be parts that were loving and other parts that hurt, and the loving parts don’t negate the reality of the hurtful parts and the hurtful parts don’t negate the love.
The point is to finally allow yourself to acknowledge the emotions that others didn’t.
Most people pleasers were “parent pleasers” first.
My safety comes from pleasing you. I can’t feel safe until I know you like me.
So many of my clients who had emotionally immature parents express that the most painful part of childhood trauma wasn’t the trauma itself but that it was never spoken about.
Because of this, it’s normal for a fawner to carry a deep sense of shame and to fear that they’re secretly a bad person, a fear that’s held close, in silence. It’s so much safer to believe that we’re bad than to think that our parents can’t take care of themselves and therefore maybe can’t fully take care of us.
She spent so much of her time and energy meeting her family’s physical and emotional needs that she forgot she had needs of her own.
I thought that if I cared enough for them, they’d eventually care about me.
My value is in being helpful and taking care of others.
Emotional neglect can be so confusing to process because it’s about what didn’t happen.
On the flip side, anything that’s unfamiliar to the body—like setting a boundary, saying no, speaking up, being with someone who’s emotionally stable—is going to feel dangerous, because it’s completely new. Clear, direct communication is going to feel like aggression if your baseline is people-pleasing.
Does this feel uncomfortable because it’s unsafe, or is it just unfamiliar?
Grief isn’t just about losing someone when they pass; it’s also about what you didn’t have. It’s wanting to be nurtured but not having a parent who can nurture you. It’s watching other families be with one another on holidays in a way you’ve only dreamed of. It’s wanting to call your parent just to talk but knowing that they won’t listen. It’s a feeling of I want to go home when you’re in your own family’s house. It’s knowing that you would be a family-oriented person if only you had a family to be that person with. It’s letting go of that last sliver of hope that someone could change and be
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There’s grief to be felt in realizing that your parents aren’t capable of being the parents you need(ed) them to be.
“Oh, you should be a lawyer,” they’d say, but I just wanted to be heard.
“The nice things he would say about me in front of other people, he never said to me. And then people would be like, ‘I love your dad! He’s the best!’ but they had no idea of the person I knew, the side that I saw.”
You can have empathy for what your parents have gone through themselves, for the trauma they must have survived, and feel angry that you experienced what you did.
We can start healing when we stop trying to get our pain validated by the people who caused us harm.
Another common experience for fawners—or for anyone who was in survival mode growing up—is feeling like they’re constantly “behind” in life.
The causes and conditions that have led us here aren’t our fault, but our healing is our responsibility.
if you reached the point where you felt “good enough,” that protective part would feel scared because it would mean you could stop trying so hard.
Our thoughts are not actions. What we do with our thoughts and with our emotions—that’s our responsibility and that’s what’s in our control.
The scared part isn’t something to get rid of; it’s a part of you that’s starving for love and acceptance.
Healing is the practice of slowly getting comfortable with being uncomfortable.
In other words, trauma can “freeze” your emotional response at the age when you experienced the trigger most deeply.
It’s said that unresolved grief and unprocessed sadness can disrupt lung function, manifesting as shortness of breath, fatigue, and higher susceptibility to colds and asthma.
he were the right fit for you, you wouldn’t need to work so hard to prove that you’re worth loving.”
You are not responsible for the version of you that exists in other people’s minds.
Since fawning stems from complex relational trauma (i.e., trauma that happens while in relationship to other people), healing happens when we can form relationships that are safe and supportive and reveal the messy parts of ourselves.
If in our early experiences taking in nourishment from someone else came with a price, we’re going to resist it or not fully absorb it, so no amount of reassurance or validation will feel like enough. We’ll always be starving for more.
Fawners don’t know how to set boundaries because we learned that in order to receive love, we have to do more, give more.
“Maintaining boundaries doesn’t cause outcomes; maintaining boundaries can hasten outcomes,” meaning our consistency with our boundaries simply reveals what’s been there all along in the relationship and brings us closer to that clarity.
If you have been stuck in the fawn response from an early age, it’s normal to feel behind in life or to feel like you’re meeting yourself only now, as an adult, because others your age were able to develop and explore while you were surviving and pleasing others.
In the absence of a deep, consistent emotional connection with their caregivers, children will often create a romantic, hopeful story in which their unhappiness, loneliness, and pain are cured.
Nothing reveals unprocessed trauma like a new relationship.
Healing is about returning home to ourselves.
