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Fawning: Why the Need to Please Makes Us Lose Ourselves—and How to Find Our Way Back
From a clinical psychologist and expert in complex trauma recovery comes a powerful guide introducing fawning, an often-overlooked piece of the fight-flight-freeze reaction to trauma—explaining what it is, why it happens, and how to help survivors regain their voice and sense of self.
Most of us are familiar with the three F's of trauma—fight, flight, or freeze. But psychologists have identified a fourth, extremely common (yet little-understood) fawning. Often conflated with “codependency” or “people-pleasing,” fawning occurs when we inexplicably draw closer to a person or relationship that causes pain, rather than pulling away.
Do you apologize to people who have hurt you?Ignore their bad behavior?Befriend your bullies?Obsess about saying the right thing?Make yourself into someone you’re not . . . while seeking approval that may never come?
You might be a fawner.
Fawning explains why we stay in bad jobs, fall into unhealthy partnerships, and tolerate dysfunctional environments, even when it seems so obvious to others that we should go. And though fawning serves a purpose—it’s an ingenious protective strategy in unsafe situations—it’s a problem if it becomes a repetitive, compulsory reaction in our daily lives.
But here’s the good we can break the pattern of chronic fawning, once we see it for the trauma response it is. Drawing on twenty years of clinical psychology work—as well as a lifetime of experience as a recovering fawner herself—Dr. Ingrid Clayton demonstrates WHY we fawn, HOW to recognize the signs of fawning (including taking blame, conflict avoidance, hypervigilance, and caretaking at the expense of ourselves), and WHAT we can do to successfully “unfawn” and finally be ourselves, in all our imperfect perfection.
Most of us are familiar with the three F's of trauma—fight, flight, or freeze. But psychologists have identified a fourth, extremely common (yet little-understood) fawning. Often conflated with “codependency” or “people-pleasing,” fawning occurs when we inexplicably draw closer to a person or relationship that causes pain, rather than pulling away.
Do you apologize to people who have hurt you?Ignore their bad behavior?Befriend your bullies?Obsess about saying the right thing?Make yourself into someone you’re not . . . while seeking approval that may never come?
You might be a fawner.
Fawning explains why we stay in bad jobs, fall into unhealthy partnerships, and tolerate dysfunctional environments, even when it seems so obvious to others that we should go. And though fawning serves a purpose—it’s an ingenious protective strategy in unsafe situations—it’s a problem if it becomes a repetitive, compulsory reaction in our daily lives.
But here’s the good we can break the pattern of chronic fawning, once we see it for the trauma response it is. Drawing on twenty years of clinical psychology work—as well as a lifetime of experience as a recovering fawner herself—Dr. Ingrid Clayton demonstrates WHY we fawn, HOW to recognize the signs of fawning (including taking blame, conflict avoidance, hypervigilance, and caretaking at the expense of ourselves), and WHAT we can do to successfully “unfawn” and finally be ourselves, in all our imperfect perfection.
302 pages, Kindle Edition
First published September 9, 2025
500 people are currently reading
8004 people want to read
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July 1, 2025
Fawning: Why the Need to Please Makes Us Lose Ourselves—and How to Find Our Way Back – A Revelatory Guide to Breaking Free from Invisible Chains
Rating: 4.7/5
Dr. Ingrid Clayton’s Fawning is a transformative exploration of one of trauma’s most insidious yet overlooked responses, offering both a lifeline to survivors and a paradigm shift for mental health discourse. As someone who has witnessed the toll of people-pleasing in loved ones (and recognized glimmers of it in myself), this book felt like turning on a light in a dimly understood corner of psychology—equal parts validating and galvanizing.
Why This Book Stands Out
Clayton elevates “fawning” from a misunderstood behavior to a legitimate trauma response, distinct from codependency or mere niceness. Her framework—rooted in 20 years of clinical practice and personal reckoning—demystifies why survivors cling to harmful dynamics (toxic jobs, abusive relationships) through meticulous analysis of hypervigilance, self-betrayal, and the “employer savior complex” of emotional labor. The chapter on “unfawning” (a term she coins to describe reclaiming agency) is revolutionary, blending somatic exercises with cognitive reframing to help readers disentangle survival instincts from identity.
Emotional Resonance & Personal Impact
Reading Fawning stirred a rollercoaster of reactions: recognition (examples of over-apologizing or absorbing blame hit painfully close to home), anger (at how societal norms reward self-erasure), and ultimately hope. Her admission that fawning can be adaptive until it isn’t softened my self-judgment, while case studies of clients breaking free—learning to say “no” without guilt—left me cheering. The section on how fawning manifests in marginalized communities (where safety hinges on appeasement) was particularly eye-opening, bridging individual trauma with systemic oppression.
Constructive Criticism
While Clayton’s clinical expertise shines, the book occasionally leans heavily on therapeutic jargon; a glossary or simplified summaries for lay readers would enhance accessibility. The focus on individual healing, though vital, could be balanced with more concrete strategies for addressing fawning’s societal triggers (e.g., workplace cultures that exploit “team players”).
Final Verdict
A landmark work that deserves shelf space alongside The Body Keeps the Score and CPTSD: From Surviving to Thriving. Clayton doesn’t just name a silent struggle—she hands readers the tools to dismantle it.
Thank you to Edelweiss and Penguin Random House for the gifted copy. This book is a compass for anyone ready to trade approval for authenticity.
Pair with: Not Nice by Aziz Gazipura for assertiveness training, or What My Bones Know for a memoir complement.
For fans of: Gabor Maté’s trauma wisdom, Brené Brown’s vulnerability research, and Pete Walker’s CPTSD frameworks.
Rating: 4.7/5
Dr. Ingrid Clayton’s Fawning is a transformative exploration of one of trauma’s most insidious yet overlooked responses, offering both a lifeline to survivors and a paradigm shift for mental health discourse. As someone who has witnessed the toll of people-pleasing in loved ones (and recognized glimmers of it in myself), this book felt like turning on a light in a dimly understood corner of psychology—equal parts validating and galvanizing.
Why This Book Stands Out
Clayton elevates “fawning” from a misunderstood behavior to a legitimate trauma response, distinct from codependency or mere niceness. Her framework—rooted in 20 years of clinical practice and personal reckoning—demystifies why survivors cling to harmful dynamics (toxic jobs, abusive relationships) through meticulous analysis of hypervigilance, self-betrayal, and the “employer savior complex” of emotional labor. The chapter on “unfawning” (a term she coins to describe reclaiming agency) is revolutionary, blending somatic exercises with cognitive reframing to help readers disentangle survival instincts from identity.
Emotional Resonance & Personal Impact
Reading Fawning stirred a rollercoaster of reactions: recognition (examples of over-apologizing or absorbing blame hit painfully close to home), anger (at how societal norms reward self-erasure), and ultimately hope. Her admission that fawning can be adaptive until it isn’t softened my self-judgment, while case studies of clients breaking free—learning to say “no” without guilt—left me cheering. The section on how fawning manifests in marginalized communities (where safety hinges on appeasement) was particularly eye-opening, bridging individual trauma with systemic oppression.
Constructive Criticism
While Clayton’s clinical expertise shines, the book occasionally leans heavily on therapeutic jargon; a glossary or simplified summaries for lay readers would enhance accessibility. The focus on individual healing, though vital, could be balanced with more concrete strategies for addressing fawning’s societal triggers (e.g., workplace cultures that exploit “team players”).
Final Verdict
A landmark work that deserves shelf space alongside The Body Keeps the Score and CPTSD: From Surviving to Thriving. Clayton doesn’t just name a silent struggle—she hands readers the tools to dismantle it.
Thank you to Edelweiss and Penguin Random House for the gifted copy. This book is a compass for anyone ready to trade approval for authenticity.
Pair with: Not Nice by Aziz Gazipura for assertiveness training, or What My Bones Know for a memoir complement.
For fans of: Gabor Maté’s trauma wisdom, Brené Brown’s vulnerability research, and Pete Walker’s CPTSD frameworks.
September 17, 2025
I have never felt more seen in a book than I did reading Fawning 🤯 At times I felt as though Dr. Ingrid Clayton was speaking about me and my experiences. This book is well organized and contains a balance of technical information and relatable stories/case examples that made this a quicker read than I was expecting.
"Fawning" can sometimes be mistaken for people pleasing or codependency. It is supposed to be a protective response to an unsafe situation but it can become an unhealthy personality trait that individuals can struggle with. I found this book to be a helpful resource to learn about fawning and how to identify the behavior, emotions and thoughts surrounding this response. As the reader I feel like I have a better understand of my own behavior as well as habits I can incorporate to better my life.
I did start to feel like the chapters would become repetitive towards the end of each chapter (aka long chapters). But otherwise I really enjoyed this one
If you identify has an eldest daughter, people pleasing perfectionist I definitely recommend picking up a copy of this book (audiobook also recommended) 🧠 I always enjoy learning something new
"Fawning" can sometimes be mistaken for people pleasing or codependency. It is supposed to be a protective response to an unsafe situation but it can become an unhealthy personality trait that individuals can struggle with. I found this book to be a helpful resource to learn about fawning and how to identify the behavior, emotions and thoughts surrounding this response. As the reader I feel like I have a better understand of my own behavior as well as habits I can incorporate to better my life.
I did start to feel like the chapters would become repetitive towards the end of each chapter (aka long chapters). But otherwise I really enjoyed this one
If you identify has an eldest daughter, people pleasing perfectionist I definitely recommend picking up a copy of this book (audiobook also recommended) 🧠 I always enjoy learning something new
September 28, 2025
This was interesting and hit on a lot of good points. My issue with this was that the author used this book often as a platform to advertise her memoir. She talked A LOT about her own personal trauma and her experience with fawning. While I think that there is some value in self-disclosing, I don’t think that it should be happening for the majority of the book. I never read Dr. Clayton’s memoir, but I feel like I probably don’t need to because she talked about her own trauma so much in this book that I felt like I was listening to her own therapy sessions. Her story was interesting and she clearly went through a lot, but the book was advertised as “why the need to please makes us lose ourselves and how to find our way back.” I would’ve liked to read more about the psychology of fawning and actual strategies on how to work through it instead of her personal story woven throughout the book. It felt like this could’ve been a memoir to be honest and when I think back on what I’ve read, I can’t remember anything other than her own personal journey. I am disappointed.
September 5, 2025
I posted this at my work:
I'm reading Fawning by Dr. Ingrid Clayton. I love reading nonfiction psychology books (so if you need any 600s suggestions!). This book is actually fascinating. I got it as an ARC on Libro FM and the narrator is pretty great too (which I cannot say for most nonfiction audiobooks). Fawning is about the 4th stress response. So there is flight, fright and and freeze. Fawn is the (kind of) newest one. Psychologists have always kind of known about it but it hadn't really been studied yet, mainly because of patriarchal systems of oppression. But fawning is, instead of running away from a threat or hiding, you kind of kiss up to it to keep yourself safe. FASCINATING. She tells stories from her own life as well as stories from her patients (with permission and name changes). She also has an Instagram (and probably TikTok) that are pretty popular. Her explanations are thorough, very relatable and easy to understand, thoughtful, and make you want to save quotes.... from a nonfiction book... about psychology.
I'm reading Fawning by Dr. Ingrid Clayton. I love reading nonfiction psychology books (so if you need any 600s suggestions!). This book is actually fascinating. I got it as an ARC on Libro FM and the narrator is pretty great too (which I cannot say for most nonfiction audiobooks). Fawning is about the 4th stress response. So there is flight, fright and and freeze. Fawn is the (kind of) newest one. Psychologists have always kind of known about it but it hadn't really been studied yet, mainly because of patriarchal systems of oppression. But fawning is, instead of running away from a threat or hiding, you kind of kiss up to it to keep yourself safe. FASCINATING. She tells stories from her own life as well as stories from her patients (with permission and name changes). She also has an Instagram (and probably TikTok) that are pretty popular. Her explanations are thorough, very relatable and easy to understand, thoughtful, and make you want to save quotes.... from a nonfiction book... about psychology.
September 23, 2025
Very surprised this has received such accolades. My guess is that it’s mostly coming from people outside of the psych world who are feeling seen and validated by some of Dr. Clayton’s anecdotes and are thus praising the book as a whole… This actually got worse for me as it went on. Not that I expected this to paint some all-encompassing picture of fawning (its etiology, its response, etc.) but I didn’t expect such a one-note tale. I’m honestly not sure that you couldn’t swap out the title and every other instauration of “fawning” with “people pleaser” and have the same (and probably more accurate) book. This missed huge varieties in how fawning manifests in a damaging way.
September 27, 2025
I wish I could inject this book into the veins of every single mental health professional!
November 19, 2025
Wow! Like a weighted blanket and faith that a really good hug is coming soon...
P7 Pete Walker […] defined fawning as ”a response to a threat by becoming more appealing to the threat.” Fawners mirror or mirge with someone else’s desires or expectations, to defuse conflict rather than confront it directly.
P8 Essentially, we abandon ourselves when we fawn – our needs, values, and opinions –and this reinforces our vulnerability.
P10 We’ve learned that interpersonal safety nets are for other people, that unconditional love is either a myth or our job to uphold. Consequently, we often become hyper-independent. Unable to lean into healthy relational support, we have to figure it our for ourselves. So we do. […] We swallow it down, pretend everything is fine, and continue fawning for perpetual safety – an exhausting and lonely endeavor.
P11 This is the most heartbreaking component of fawning. We lose the connection to ourselves. […] Fawning is a common coping mechanism for those dealing with continuing relational trauma.
P18 The hyperarousal aspect of fawning has us instinctively managing the moods and states of those ”in charge.” We lean into the very relationships that are causing us harm […] The hypoarousal of fawning numbs our connection to self, our broader sense of agency, and often our ability to feel the effects of the abuse at all.
P19 […] the traumatized body does not forget and is stuck in a state of anticipating – sensing potential danger even when no real danger can be found.
P20 […] many of us confuse our trauma responses for personality. We literally don’t know where we end and where unconscious trauma response begins.
P22 Fawning happens when we are in a double bind, when there are real consequences for not fawning. We can’t address every need simultaneously, so the body has to choose. We choose safety over self. […] which means we cannot identify or act on red flags. […] Merging with distorted views erodes our self-trust and our sense of self altogether.
P27 We need to take back the realities of healthy dependency and caregiving.
P28-9 […] codependency and people-pleasing were ourbest attempts to name something important with the inforomation we had at the time. They were conceived of and grew up alongside our understanding of relational trauma. But until now they weren’t in conversation. Consequently, they weren’t trauma informed.
P30 […] sets up the rescuer dynamic as a proxy for secure attachment. We learn that safety and connection happen only when we prioritize someone else’s needs.
P32 Healing happens when we honor the ways we learned to protect ourselves. When we stop focusing on the imperfections of our coping mechanisms […] Then, and only then, will those old protectors step aside, allowing space for another way.
P38 When we learn to unfawn, we learn to detach from our old ways of people-pleasing and tune in to the self we had to abandon long ago.
P48 Additionally, many parents with dysregulated nervous systems can’t tolerate their child’s full range of emotion.
P62 I could choose myself over my need for her to choose me.
P75 Fawnsters don’t often realize when they’re fawning. […] This is particularly true when fawning stems from childhood trauma, where we weren’t consciously responding to threat as much as were were orienting toward safety, connection, and security. Our focus was on what we were gaining [….]
P76 Getting smaller through fawning is basically solving a math problem. It’s proportional. The relationship is a cup, and if someone else is taking up 80 percent, we need to figure out how to live in the 20 percent that’s left.
P78 Minimization is protective. When you see an animal crouching down, you don’t think, Gee, that squirrel has a self-esteem problem.
P79 […] fawning is a relational trauma response – dependent on the relationship we are in at the time. […] On a scale of ”de-escalate abuse” to ”raise your self-esteem” … de-escalation wins every time.
P80 […] when it comes to anxiety and relational trauma, the cure is rarely about cultivating more calm through breath work or mindfulness; it’s about needing relational safety.
P81 Our fawning is masking our anxiety, managing it through caretaking, appeasing, or blending in. […] Reciprocal relationships are often a foreign experience for fawners.
P82 Due to anxiety, fawners overfunction and overcommit. […] Recall that the act of fawning includes both a merging with preceived expectations and a disconnection with ourselves. This overriding of greater authenticity […]. Fawners are in fact looking for ourselves, outside of ourselves, and it makes us dizzy, confused, and incredibly anxious because there are as many opinions as there are bodies. […]
Perfectionism, in truth, is anxiety masquerading as discipline. (margins)
P83 So many fawners are longing for validation, to be seen, and it seems safe to do it through success, achievement, some obvious marker of our worthiness. […] in order to heal, we have to feel. [….] Because ultimately this is the path to gaining actual self-trust. To finding solid ground.
P86 Judging us for the ways in which our nervous systems were hijacked is not only abhorrent but simply doesn’t help. […] Only when shame has been diminished can we reduce chronic fawning and its consequences.
P88 Healthy conflict involves tolerating some upset, but most fawners don’t know what healthy conflict feels like.
P90 When fawning becomes our go-to trauma response, it’s not just our fight response that gets dropped. It’s our ability to notice or feel conflict at all.
P95 Relational trauma survivors are often called ”old souls,” as though our adultlike attitudes and skill sets come from a past life rather than the necessity of our present-day childhoods.
P97 Fawners have learned that they are the only ones in their family/relationship who can take care of business, metabolize distress. […] 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.
P100 We feel stuck in relationships, solely focused on the other person, not understanding how we are stuck in our own patterns of dysfunction. […] I was seeking the solution outside of myself. Trying to solve my dysregulation by attempting to regulate others.
P101 We are hardwired to grow in relationship with others. And we’re just trying to get those fundamental attachment needs met now. The truth is, though, we are often trying to do it with unavailable people. […] healing can absolutely happen in relationship. But it often requires two people who are longing for that, choosing it consciously. It doesn’t happen by the simple fact of being in relationship.
[…] We are brilliant caretakers. […] 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.
P103 […] we needed to lie because honesty invited annihilation. How we had to pretend to be something we weren’t because a greater relational need was at stake.
P108 Particularly when the roots of self-deception are from childhood, being able to stop lying is part of the rescue mission we must go on. WE must go back to the parts of ourselves that are stuck in time and let them know: I AM HERE. You are safe with me.
P110 She was trying to solve a relational problem by taking all the blame.
P113 This shift, from I need [this other person] to save me to Maybe I can save myself can be so hard for trauma survivors to even conceive of, because for so many years, we did need others. We needed our parents.
P115 from Mother Hunger […] “A safe relationship with one trustworthy adult is the cure. Once a safe relationship is established, trauma work might not even be necessary, because attachment healing is trauma healing.
P116 Patrick Teahan […] “A definitive symptom of childhood trauma is trying to get a difficult person to be good to us.”
P117 We’re oriented toward the need we are attempting to meet, not the sacrifices we make to get there.
P119 […] trauma bonding occurs from intermittent reinforcement, creating a hormonal attachment to the person causing us harm.
P123 I didn’t yet understand how adrenaline from a fight-or-flight response mimics the feelings of sexual desire. Elevated heart rate and blood pressure blur the lines between terror and attraction.
P128 Now I understand those particular sparks I’d once thought were essential in a new relationship were better at predicting insanity than healthy chemistry. […] With Yancy, there were no games. In fact, I often joked he had no game.
[…] it’s possible to find a new place within ourselves to call home.
P132 Sacrificing relational harmony, even in relationships we no longer want, feels terrifying, so fawners stay.
P136 We are establishing ourselves as forces of nature. Prioritizing loving relationships with ourselves and with others, because we have finally found safety within.
P143 She didn’t have the language or awareness to tune in to her body, so the answers weren’t available. All of Mia’s focus was external. She knew what everyone else was thinking, what they were feeling, what they wanted her to fix.
P147 […] so often our greatest trauma isn’t the thing that happened to us, but the lack of a safe place to turn. It’s feeling alone with our wounds.
P151 The work of unfawning is about building a new relationship to ourselves, establishing both trust and connection. We must reset our compass from an external orientation to one focused on ourselves as the authority.
P153 An important part of trauma healing is moving away from a strictly cognitive relationship with ourselves, centered in the brain – what we know, or what we think we know – toward what we are sensing, feeling, dreaming, intuiting in our bodies.
P154 Unresolved trauma further disconnects us, making the past feel intrusive, removing us from the experience of right now. [description of SE orienting]
P156 When we learn to attune to others, we look outside of ourselves for answers. […] ask yourself, What do I notice? What might I need?
P161 I thought I needed to stay in a broken relationship to be whole.
P166 The fact is, we will get triggered, and our lives are not meant to be in service of avoiding them.
P167-8 […] strategies aimed at parenting weren’t solving the real problem: my dysregulation. […] And those of us with an overactive fawn response might unconsciously want our children to fawn. […] it can feel like our children won’t be safe in the world without learning to appease, get quiet, and comply, all under the guise of respect.
P174 […] he’s too busy thinking what someone else might think or how he should respond if they ask. So a part of Davis’ trauma healing and ultimately his unfawning is making it safe to know what he is feeling.
P176 Unfawning is an expansion. We are broadening our vision to see more choices and have greater flexibility. […] We don’t have to tell stories that erase aspects of ourselves or of our reality.
P177 There will still be contexts where fawning is appropriate. Just as a fight response is appropriate at times but not all the time.
P178 A major component of unfawning is learning to quell the constant arousal, regulating our nervous system in order to foster more internal safety. […] We often need space in between the instinct to fawn and the discovery of how we actually feel.
P183 We are not fixing ourselves but being with ourselves. […] Fawners are habituated to regulate others in an attempt to regulate ourselves: gaining others’ approval, making them happy so we can be happy. Part of the paradigm shift is finding our center, our safety, without the middleman.
P184 […] Am I in danger, or is this discomfort? […] We aren’t meant to avoid discomfort; we are growing our capacity to tolerate it.
P185 For years, many of us have bypassed our deeper feelings through our trauma responses. Additionally, in trauma that stems from childhood, we weren’t developmentally capable of processing overwhelming feelings, so they’ve remained untouched ever since. Luckily, we have the capacity to process them now. We just need to know how.
P186 So finding a therapist is trauma informed is a must. Finding someone who is trauma trained is ideal. That means they have specific bottom-up trauma modalities in their tool kit.
P197 […] modalities in trauma healing: […] we need to trust the truth in our bodies so we can begin to reclaim it. We need to let the feelings come. Discover that we can feel them. Allow natural processes to finally resolve.
P198 No one quite understands why EMDR works. One theory is that bilateral stimulation mimics REM sleep, helping the body process and consolidate memories and emotions. Another is that it encourages better communication between the right and left hemispheres of the brain.
P200 The idea in EMDR is to notice what you notice. It’s not about telling a story; it’s being an audience member of your own mind and body. […] No more […] resistance.
P201 She’d become internally safe enough to contain it and was finally able to process what had happened. […] EMDR purged what her eating disorder was always trying to but never could.
P202 Other forms of bilateral stimulation are drumming, dancing, and even walking.
P203 […] psychedelic […] The theme among all these medicines […] is they allow people to access difficult memories without the same emotional charge.
P204 Like so much other unfinished business, trauma inhibits our ability to grieve […] the wounds in our lives, much less all the time we lost trying to avoid them.
P205 Grieving drops us into reality. This can be painful, but it’s also where we have real choices. […] Fawners have felt invisible and undeserving for so long, but grieving can restore our voices. It opens the door to a healthy fight response where we build our capacity for anger and asserting ourselves. It holds the seeds of reciprocal relationships. […] My clients and I have discovered our healing often entails leaving a trauma-bonded relationship.
P206 […] the debilitating pain that no one was coming to save her. […] When we wake up to how fawning is no longer working, when we realize the person or situation that we thought would save us is gone or will never do what we thought they would, we feel a complete loss of hope. Unbelievable despair.
[…] We’ve had to grieve not just what happened in the past, but also the loss of self the original wounding required. We must grieve the fact that the people who were meant to be closest to us, to love us the most, hurt us the most.
[…] a part of us is dying. The part that was fiercely protecting others. Fighting for them and abandoning us. In facing what feels like disloyalty to ourselves and others, we become more honest than we ever were before, and this begins our rebirth.
P208 Rituals can be a profound way to mark transitions and honor grief. They can hold aspects of the grieving process and make it visible while we are building our new sense of self. […] To live in reality. Not the magical thinking of a child’s mind, but the full expanse of what it means to be human.
P210 In essence, reparenting is parenting ourselves. It’s becoming the parent we needed back then. When we can provide the care and nurturance we always deserved, our needs can finally be met. […]
While there is no such thing as perfect parenting, the fact is that children need co-regulation. Parents bounce babies because they literally can’t self-soothe.
[…] We allow ourselves to put down our stories and admit what our childhood was really like. This doesn’t have to be about blame, it’s about clarity.
P211 <> […] lots of trauma work feels like inner child work, as the core is related to seeing and soothing ourselves.
P212 She needed a loving, capable presence to help get her unstuck, and that loving presence was her.
P213 A key part of healing trauma means we become the person we needed as a child. This means showing up for them, connecting with them, loving them, and letting them feel that they are no longer alone.
P223 Rather than always orienting ourselves toward others, we practice letting others lean in toward us if they are able. And if they choose not to – well, that’s good information, too, that allows us to make informed choices from there.
P224 A key aspect of unfawning, then, is cultivating a new relationship with […] anger […]
P225 We don’t sacrifice ourselves to anger, impulsively reacting in a rage. We learn to feel our anger and be in relationship with it.
P227 Leaning into healthy anger provides a gateway to appropriate response. We turn from how others might be impacted to what we actually need. […] Part of learning a healthy fight response mean feeling the boiling point we’ve been avoiding for good reason.
P228 Unfawning […] doesn’t mean we stop considering other people’s needs; it means our needs matter, too.
P231 Compensating for neglect, invisibility, and never having our needs met, we’ve attempted to meet everyone else’s needs as the route to self-care.
P242 I finally realized that if I had to choose (and I did), I would rather have me in my life than her in my life. […] I was breaking a cycle, doing the brave and brutal work of healing trauma. […] I never realized that staying in relationship with a mother who saw me as broken made me believe I actually was.
P246 It’s that we each feel responsible for ourselves and for the quality of our relationship. […] It allows us to have an actual partnership where each take up space.
P253 Unfawning is about welcoming ourselves to the party. […] We remember that we can have a say, that we are allowed a seat at the table. This allows us to exhale, sink into our bodies, and finally be ourselves.
P256 […] the metaphorical file folders she has for all her loved ones. They contain all the ideas she has for how they might improve their lives. […] When she realized that maybe it was time to let go of all those files, she was like, “Well, now what will I do with my days?” But that is exactly the point. When we let go of managing others, we can start to make a file folder for ourselves.
P7 Pete Walker […] defined fawning as ”a response to a threat by becoming more appealing to the threat.” Fawners mirror or mirge with someone else’s desires or expectations, to defuse conflict rather than confront it directly.
P8 Essentially, we abandon ourselves when we fawn – our needs, values, and opinions –and this reinforces our vulnerability.
P10 We’ve learned that interpersonal safety nets are for other people, that unconditional love is either a myth or our job to uphold. Consequently, we often become hyper-independent. Unable to lean into healthy relational support, we have to figure it our for ourselves. So we do. […] We swallow it down, pretend everything is fine, and continue fawning for perpetual safety – an exhausting and lonely endeavor.
P11 This is the most heartbreaking component of fawning. We lose the connection to ourselves. […] Fawning is a common coping mechanism for those dealing with continuing relational trauma.
P18 The hyperarousal aspect of fawning has us instinctively managing the moods and states of those ”in charge.” We lean into the very relationships that are causing us harm […] The hypoarousal of fawning numbs our connection to self, our broader sense of agency, and often our ability to feel the effects of the abuse at all.
P19 […] the traumatized body does not forget and is stuck in a state of anticipating – sensing potential danger even when no real danger can be found.
P20 […] many of us confuse our trauma responses for personality. We literally don’t know where we end and where unconscious trauma response begins.
P22 Fawning happens when we are in a double bind, when there are real consequences for not fawning. We can’t address every need simultaneously, so the body has to choose. We choose safety over self. […] which means we cannot identify or act on red flags. […] Merging with distorted views erodes our self-trust and our sense of self altogether.
P27 We need to take back the realities of healthy dependency and caregiving.
P28-9 […] codependency and people-pleasing were ourbest attempts to name something important with the inforomation we had at the time. They were conceived of and grew up alongside our understanding of relational trauma. But until now they weren’t in conversation. Consequently, they weren’t trauma informed.
P30 […] sets up the rescuer dynamic as a proxy for secure attachment. We learn that safety and connection happen only when we prioritize someone else’s needs.
P32 Healing happens when we honor the ways we learned to protect ourselves. When we stop focusing on the imperfections of our coping mechanisms […] Then, and only then, will those old protectors step aside, allowing space for another way.
P38 When we learn to unfawn, we learn to detach from our old ways of people-pleasing and tune in to the self we had to abandon long ago.
P48 Additionally, many parents with dysregulated nervous systems can’t tolerate their child’s full range of emotion.
P62 I could choose myself over my need for her to choose me.
P75 Fawnsters don’t often realize when they’re fawning. […] This is particularly true when fawning stems from childhood trauma, where we weren’t consciously responding to threat as much as were were orienting toward safety, connection, and security. Our focus was on what we were gaining [….]
P76 Getting smaller through fawning is basically solving a math problem. It’s proportional. The relationship is a cup, and if someone else is taking up 80 percent, we need to figure out how to live in the 20 percent that’s left.
P78 Minimization is protective. When you see an animal crouching down, you don’t think, Gee, that squirrel has a self-esteem problem.
P79 […] fawning is a relational trauma response – dependent on the relationship we are in at the time. […] On a scale of ”de-escalate abuse” to ”raise your self-esteem” … de-escalation wins every time.
P80 […] when it comes to anxiety and relational trauma, the cure is rarely about cultivating more calm through breath work or mindfulness; it’s about needing relational safety.
P81 Our fawning is masking our anxiety, managing it through caretaking, appeasing, or blending in. […] Reciprocal relationships are often a foreign experience for fawners.
P82 Due to anxiety, fawners overfunction and overcommit. […] Recall that the act of fawning includes both a merging with preceived expectations and a disconnection with ourselves. This overriding of greater authenticity […]. Fawners are in fact looking for ourselves, outside of ourselves, and it makes us dizzy, confused, and incredibly anxious because there are as many opinions as there are bodies. […]
Perfectionism, in truth, is anxiety masquerading as discipline. (margins)
P83 So many fawners are longing for validation, to be seen, and it seems safe to do it through success, achievement, some obvious marker of our worthiness. […] in order to heal, we have to feel. [….] Because ultimately this is the path to gaining actual self-trust. To finding solid ground.
P86 Judging us for the ways in which our nervous systems were hijacked is not only abhorrent but simply doesn’t help. […] Only when shame has been diminished can we reduce chronic fawning and its consequences.
P88 Healthy conflict involves tolerating some upset, but most fawners don’t know what healthy conflict feels like.
P90 When fawning becomes our go-to trauma response, it’s not just our fight response that gets dropped. It’s our ability to notice or feel conflict at all.
P95 Relational trauma survivors are often called ”old souls,” as though our adultlike attitudes and skill sets come from a past life rather than the necessity of our present-day childhoods.
P97 Fawners have learned that they are the only ones in their family/relationship who can take care of business, metabolize distress. […] 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.
P100 We feel stuck in relationships, solely focused on the other person, not understanding how we are stuck in our own patterns of dysfunction. […] I was seeking the solution outside of myself. Trying to solve my dysregulation by attempting to regulate others.
P101 We are hardwired to grow in relationship with others. And we’re just trying to get those fundamental attachment needs met now. The truth is, though, we are often trying to do it with unavailable people. […] healing can absolutely happen in relationship. But it often requires two people who are longing for that, choosing it consciously. It doesn’t happen by the simple fact of being in relationship.
[…] We are brilliant caretakers. […] 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.
P103 […] we needed to lie because honesty invited annihilation. How we had to pretend to be something we weren’t because a greater relational need was at stake.
P108 Particularly when the roots of self-deception are from childhood, being able to stop lying is part of the rescue mission we must go on. WE must go back to the parts of ourselves that are stuck in time and let them know: I AM HERE. You are safe with me.
P110 She was trying to solve a relational problem by taking all the blame.
P113 This shift, from I need [this other person] to save me to Maybe I can save myself can be so hard for trauma survivors to even conceive of, because for so many years, we did need others. We needed our parents.
P115 from Mother Hunger […] “A safe relationship with one trustworthy adult is the cure. Once a safe relationship is established, trauma work might not even be necessary, because attachment healing is trauma healing.
P116 Patrick Teahan […] “A definitive symptom of childhood trauma is trying to get a difficult person to be good to us.”
P117 We’re oriented toward the need we are attempting to meet, not the sacrifices we make to get there.
P119 […] trauma bonding occurs from intermittent reinforcement, creating a hormonal attachment to the person causing us harm.
P123 I didn’t yet understand how adrenaline from a fight-or-flight response mimics the feelings of sexual desire. Elevated heart rate and blood pressure blur the lines between terror and attraction.
P128 Now I understand those particular sparks I’d once thought were essential in a new relationship were better at predicting insanity than healthy chemistry. […] With Yancy, there were no games. In fact, I often joked he had no game.
[…] it’s possible to find a new place within ourselves to call home.
P132 Sacrificing relational harmony, even in relationships we no longer want, feels terrifying, so fawners stay.
P136 We are establishing ourselves as forces of nature. Prioritizing loving relationships with ourselves and with others, because we have finally found safety within.
P143 She didn’t have the language or awareness to tune in to her body, so the answers weren’t available. All of Mia’s focus was external. She knew what everyone else was thinking, what they were feeling, what they wanted her to fix.
P147 […] so often our greatest trauma isn’t the thing that happened to us, but the lack of a safe place to turn. It’s feeling alone with our wounds.
P151 The work of unfawning is about building a new relationship to ourselves, establishing both trust and connection. We must reset our compass from an external orientation to one focused on ourselves as the authority.
P153 An important part of trauma healing is moving away from a strictly cognitive relationship with ourselves, centered in the brain – what we know, or what we think we know – toward what we are sensing, feeling, dreaming, intuiting in our bodies.
P154 Unresolved trauma further disconnects us, making the past feel intrusive, removing us from the experience of right now. [description of SE orienting]
P156 When we learn to attune to others, we look outside of ourselves for answers. […] ask yourself, What do I notice? What might I need?
P161 I thought I needed to stay in a broken relationship to be whole.
P166 The fact is, we will get triggered, and our lives are not meant to be in service of avoiding them.
P167-8 […] strategies aimed at parenting weren’t solving the real problem: my dysregulation. […] And those of us with an overactive fawn response might unconsciously want our children to fawn. […] it can feel like our children won’t be safe in the world without learning to appease, get quiet, and comply, all under the guise of respect.
P174 […] he’s too busy thinking what someone else might think or how he should respond if they ask. So a part of Davis’ trauma healing and ultimately his unfawning is making it safe to know what he is feeling.
P176 Unfawning is an expansion. We are broadening our vision to see more choices and have greater flexibility. […] We don’t have to tell stories that erase aspects of ourselves or of our reality.
P177 There will still be contexts where fawning is appropriate. Just as a fight response is appropriate at times but not all the time.
P178 A major component of unfawning is learning to quell the constant arousal, regulating our nervous system in order to foster more internal safety. […] We often need space in between the instinct to fawn and the discovery of how we actually feel.
P183 We are not fixing ourselves but being with ourselves. […] Fawners are habituated to regulate others in an attempt to regulate ourselves: gaining others’ approval, making them happy so we can be happy. Part of the paradigm shift is finding our center, our safety, without the middleman.
P184 […] Am I in danger, or is this discomfort? […] We aren’t meant to avoid discomfort; we are growing our capacity to tolerate it.
P185 For years, many of us have bypassed our deeper feelings through our trauma responses. Additionally, in trauma that stems from childhood, we weren’t developmentally capable of processing overwhelming feelings, so they’ve remained untouched ever since. Luckily, we have the capacity to process them now. We just need to know how.
P186 So finding a therapist is trauma informed is a must. Finding someone who is trauma trained is ideal. That means they have specific bottom-up trauma modalities in their tool kit.
P197 […] modalities in trauma healing: […] we need to trust the truth in our bodies so we can begin to reclaim it. We need to let the feelings come. Discover that we can feel them. Allow natural processes to finally resolve.
P198 No one quite understands why EMDR works. One theory is that bilateral stimulation mimics REM sleep, helping the body process and consolidate memories and emotions. Another is that it encourages better communication between the right and left hemispheres of the brain.
P200 The idea in EMDR is to notice what you notice. It’s not about telling a story; it’s being an audience member of your own mind and body. […] No more […] resistance.
P201 She’d become internally safe enough to contain it and was finally able to process what had happened. […] EMDR purged what her eating disorder was always trying to but never could.
P202 Other forms of bilateral stimulation are drumming, dancing, and even walking.
P203 […] psychedelic […] The theme among all these medicines […] is they allow people to access difficult memories without the same emotional charge.
P204 Like so much other unfinished business, trauma inhibits our ability to grieve […] the wounds in our lives, much less all the time we lost trying to avoid them.
P205 Grieving drops us into reality. This can be painful, but it’s also where we have real choices. […] Fawners have felt invisible and undeserving for so long, but grieving can restore our voices. It opens the door to a healthy fight response where we build our capacity for anger and asserting ourselves. It holds the seeds of reciprocal relationships. […] My clients and I have discovered our healing often entails leaving a trauma-bonded relationship.
P206 […] the debilitating pain that no one was coming to save her. […] When we wake up to how fawning is no longer working, when we realize the person or situation that we thought would save us is gone or will never do what we thought they would, we feel a complete loss of hope. Unbelievable despair.
[…] We’ve had to grieve not just what happened in the past, but also the loss of self the original wounding required. We must grieve the fact that the people who were meant to be closest to us, to love us the most, hurt us the most.
[…] a part of us is dying. The part that was fiercely protecting others. Fighting for them and abandoning us. In facing what feels like disloyalty to ourselves and others, we become more honest than we ever were before, and this begins our rebirth.
P208 Rituals can be a profound way to mark transitions and honor grief. They can hold aspects of the grieving process and make it visible while we are building our new sense of self. […] To live in reality. Not the magical thinking of a child’s mind, but the full expanse of what it means to be human.
P210 In essence, reparenting is parenting ourselves. It’s becoming the parent we needed back then. When we can provide the care and nurturance we always deserved, our needs can finally be met. […]
While there is no such thing as perfect parenting, the fact is that children need co-regulation. Parents bounce babies because they literally can’t self-soothe.
[…] We allow ourselves to put down our stories and admit what our childhood was really like. This doesn’t have to be about blame, it’s about clarity.
P211 <> […] lots of trauma work feels like inner child work, as the core is related to seeing and soothing ourselves.
P212 She needed a loving, capable presence to help get her unstuck, and that loving presence was her.
P213 A key part of healing trauma means we become the person we needed as a child. This means showing up for them, connecting with them, loving them, and letting them feel that they are no longer alone.
P223 Rather than always orienting ourselves toward others, we practice letting others lean in toward us if they are able. And if they choose not to – well, that’s good information, too, that allows us to make informed choices from there.
P224 A key aspect of unfawning, then, is cultivating a new relationship with […] anger […]
P225 We don’t sacrifice ourselves to anger, impulsively reacting in a rage. We learn to feel our anger and be in relationship with it.
P227 Leaning into healthy anger provides a gateway to appropriate response. We turn from how others might be impacted to what we actually need. […] Part of learning a healthy fight response mean feeling the boiling point we’ve been avoiding for good reason.
P228 Unfawning […] doesn’t mean we stop considering other people’s needs; it means our needs matter, too.
P231 Compensating for neglect, invisibility, and never having our needs met, we’ve attempted to meet everyone else’s needs as the route to self-care.
P242 I finally realized that if I had to choose (and I did), I would rather have me in my life than her in my life. […] I was breaking a cycle, doing the brave and brutal work of healing trauma. […] I never realized that staying in relationship with a mother who saw me as broken made me believe I actually was.
P246 It’s that we each feel responsible for ourselves and for the quality of our relationship. […] It allows us to have an actual partnership where each take up space.
P253 Unfawning is about welcoming ourselves to the party. […] We remember that we can have a say, that we are allowed a seat at the table. This allows us to exhale, sink into our bodies, and finally be ourselves.
P256 […] the metaphorical file folders she has for all her loved ones. They contain all the ideas she has for how they might improve their lives. […] When she realized that maybe it was time to let go of all those files, she was like, “Well, now what will I do with my days?” But that is exactly the point. When we let go of managing others, we can start to make a file folder for ourselves.
December 19, 2025
As someone who has struggled with people-pleasing, fawning, and an inability to say no, this book was a must-read for me. The author, a clinical psychologist, shares stories from her clients and weaves them into her own personal struggles and battles with fawning. Self-help books are very hit or miss for me. I’m obsessed with trying to improve my mental health, looking for ways to gain insight and knowledge, and have a better sense of self. This is why I seek out so many self-help books. However, sometimes they can get bogged down in the details and can be too clinical and hard to get into, but this book works because it has a personal touch to it.
I became very emotional during certain chapters of the book, as I felt seen and heard by the author. She’s a magnificent writer who is empathetic, smart, and very talented. She knows how to tell a story and she kept me engaged for about 75% of the book. 25% of the book didn’t fully connect with me, as I felt it was meandering at times. Overall, though, this book inspired me to take stock of my life, not be afraid to take up space, and to evaluate the relationships in my life and how I come across. It’s a nearly perfect book, and I really wanted to give it five stars, but it did lose me for a little while there. In the end, if you find yourself exhausted from making others happy, putting them first, and ignoring your own needs, like myself, you will find a lot in this book that you will connect with and relate to, and it will give you helpful and practical tips on how to live an authentic and meaningful life.
I became very emotional during certain chapters of the book, as I felt seen and heard by the author. She’s a magnificent writer who is empathetic, smart, and very talented. She knows how to tell a story and she kept me engaged for about 75% of the book. 25% of the book didn’t fully connect with me, as I felt it was meandering at times. Overall, though, this book inspired me to take stock of my life, not be afraid to take up space, and to evaluate the relationships in my life and how I come across. It’s a nearly perfect book, and I really wanted to give it five stars, but it did lose me for a little while there. In the end, if you find yourself exhausted from making others happy, putting them first, and ignoring your own needs, like myself, you will find a lot in this book that you will connect with and relate to, and it will give you helpful and practical tips on how to live an authentic and meaningful life.
November 14, 2025
I wish I would have had this book years ago.
December 21, 2025
Whether you are a professional or a layperson, this is a useful resource. Dr. Ingrid does a great job at showing why the fawn response develops and becomes automatic. Stylistically, it reads more like memoir and less like a guidebook with practical suggestions. I still found it eye-opening and worth the read. 4.5 stars rounded up
October 12, 2025
Read through chapter 4 & do not intend to finish.
Read
November 17, 2025This would have been more relevant for me a few years ago, but nonetheless a very readable and engaging book that crystallised some things for me. Would def recommend to folks prone to people pleasing and fawning.
Read
November 17, 2025In "Fawning: Finding Your Way Back from the Need to Please", Ingrid Clayton explores a survival pattern that often hides beneath outward competence and kindness: the instinct to appease others at the expense of oneself. Many people live their entire lives saying yes when they want to say no, downplaying their own needs, or staying in relationships that quietly erode their sense of self. Clayton examines this reflex not as a flaw in character but as a deeply embedded trauma response. She reveals why attempts to simply 'be assertive ' or 'set boundaries’ often fail for those who fawn, and she offers a clearer understanding of why this pattern develops and how to slowly unwind it. By presenting real stories, psychological insight, and body-based tools for change, the book lays out a path back to authenticity and self-trust.
Clayton begins by introducing the idea that fawning is a fourth trauma response that exists alongside fight, flight, and freeze. Unlike ordinary people-pleasing, fawning is involuntary. It is what happens when the mind and body sense that submission is the safest available option. Through her own adolescent experience - being trapped in a hot tub with a predatory stepfather - she illustrates how fawning emerges when neither confrontation nor escape is possible. At thirteen, she didn’t consciously choose to act cheerful; her nervous system adopted the only strategy that offered protection. This moment becomes emblematic of how children raised in unsafe or unpredictable environments learn to sacrifice their needs, voice, and boundaries in order to maintain proximity to those they depend on. Because this adaptation can look like compliance, politeness, or emotional maturity, society often mistakes it for strength. Yet beneath the surface lies fear. Clayton introduces examples like Anthony, the high-achieving attorney whose entire identity was formed around external validation, and whose moment of awakening came only when he accidentally overheard his parents insult him with casual cruelty. His story, like hers, underscores that fawning can disguise itself as high functioning, ambition, or generosity, even as it erodes the self from within.
The book goes on to show how fawning is not simply a personal issue but a behavior supported and reinforced by the systems around us. Hierarchies - social, corporate, cultural - often reward those who stay agreeable, compliant, and nonconfrontational. Clayton uses examples such as Dax Shepard’s childhood instinct to appease a violent man and describes how his later physical growth gave him the literal ability to respond differently. Most people never experience such a dramatic shift in power. Women, people of color, and those who have grown up in emotionally volatile households face additional pressure to adapt their behavior to the expectations of others. Francis, one of the individuals Clayton highlights, learned early that managing her mother’s emotions kept her safe, and later found herself repeating this same emotional labor with a volatile partner. Her eventual refusal to obey one of his demands caused an explosion of anger that clarified the truth: their relationship depended on her compliance. Through stories like these, the book explains why telling someone to 'stop being a people-pleaser ' is ineffective. People who fawn are often performing necessary roles within the systems around them, and changing the behavior may require reexamining entire relational structures.
Clayton then turns to the subtle signs of fawning that can be difficult to detect because they often masquerade as virtues. Self-erasure is common: minimizing one’s needs, smoothing conflict before it occurs, apologizing reflexively, or changing one’s personality to match the environment. She describes people who become emotional contortionists, taking up as little space as possible because doing otherwise once resulted in punishment. Grace’s story - being physically assaulted by her father for choosing her preferred pizza topping - illustrates how quickly a child can learn that personal preferences carry danger. As an adult, she still panics around simple choices because her body remembers the consequences of having an opinion. The book emphasizes that these symptoms are not signs of weakness but lingering echoes of environments where safety depended on invisibility.
Healing begins with awareness, and Clayton presents various practices that help people shift from automatic appeasement to conscious choice. A crucial theme is the idea that the body must be involved in recovery. Many survivors intellectually understand their trauma but continue to react from deeply stored physical memory. The story of Sadie, who had extensive knowledge about eating disorders yet remained trapped in her patterns, demonstrates this mind-body divide. Her transformation occurred only when she engaged in somatic processing through EMDR. By incorporating bilateral tapping and letting bodily sensations guide her, she accessed and released the emotional burdens her thinking mind could not address. Clayton explains why body-based modalities - long exhaled breathing, grounding exercises, gentle movement, and sensory awareness - help regulate the nervous system and create enough internal safety to make new choices.
Another essential component of healing is reconnecting with one’s internal compass. Clayton encourages practices like Orienting, which involves consciously taking in one’s physical surroundings to signal to the nervous system that immediate danger is not present. She also discusses resourcing, the practice of asking oneself what the body needs in the moment - food, rest, movement, solitude - and following that internal guidance. These practices begin to loosen the grip of automatic appeasement by reminding survivors that their needs matter and can be attended to. Clayton includes examples like Francis, who discovered a newfound sense of freedom and identity when spending an entire weekend alone for the first time. Moments of solitude, self-directed time, and intentional decision-making help individuals differentiate between who they are and who they have been told to be.
The book also highlights how healing can disrupt long-standing relationships. Clayton does not sugarcoat the reality that some people are invested in the compliant version of us. Lily’s experience with her friend Ava - who reacted with hostility when Lily withheld private details about her dating life - shows how setting even small boundaries can reveal unhealthy dynamics. The ending of that friendship was painful but necessary, illustrating the truth that not all relationships can withstand a person’s return to themselves. Clayton stresses that healthy anger, though often frightening to those who fawn, is a natural and vital emotion. Reclaiming anger allows individuals to sense when something is wrong and to protect themselves through appropriate boundaries.
Ultimately, "Fawning: Finding Your Way Back from the Need to Please" teaches that the goal is not to eliminate protective instincts but to regain the ability to choose. Fawning may have been essential for survival once, but healing invites a broader range of responses - assertiveness, authenticity, self-direction, and connection grounded in mutual respect. Clayton’s work provides both understanding and practical guidance for anyone who has lived their life tuned to others’ needs while suppressing their own. Her message is a hopeful one: with awareness, somatic healing, and courageous boundary-setting, it is possible to step out of automatic appeasement and return to a life shaped by genuine self-trust.
Clayton begins by introducing the idea that fawning is a fourth trauma response that exists alongside fight, flight, and freeze. Unlike ordinary people-pleasing, fawning is involuntary. It is what happens when the mind and body sense that submission is the safest available option. Through her own adolescent experience - being trapped in a hot tub with a predatory stepfather - she illustrates how fawning emerges when neither confrontation nor escape is possible. At thirteen, she didn’t consciously choose to act cheerful; her nervous system adopted the only strategy that offered protection. This moment becomes emblematic of how children raised in unsafe or unpredictable environments learn to sacrifice their needs, voice, and boundaries in order to maintain proximity to those they depend on. Because this adaptation can look like compliance, politeness, or emotional maturity, society often mistakes it for strength. Yet beneath the surface lies fear. Clayton introduces examples like Anthony, the high-achieving attorney whose entire identity was formed around external validation, and whose moment of awakening came only when he accidentally overheard his parents insult him with casual cruelty. His story, like hers, underscores that fawning can disguise itself as high functioning, ambition, or generosity, even as it erodes the self from within.
The book goes on to show how fawning is not simply a personal issue but a behavior supported and reinforced by the systems around us. Hierarchies - social, corporate, cultural - often reward those who stay agreeable, compliant, and nonconfrontational. Clayton uses examples such as Dax Shepard’s childhood instinct to appease a violent man and describes how his later physical growth gave him the literal ability to respond differently. Most people never experience such a dramatic shift in power. Women, people of color, and those who have grown up in emotionally volatile households face additional pressure to adapt their behavior to the expectations of others. Francis, one of the individuals Clayton highlights, learned early that managing her mother’s emotions kept her safe, and later found herself repeating this same emotional labor with a volatile partner. Her eventual refusal to obey one of his demands caused an explosion of anger that clarified the truth: their relationship depended on her compliance. Through stories like these, the book explains why telling someone to 'stop being a people-pleaser ' is ineffective. People who fawn are often performing necessary roles within the systems around them, and changing the behavior may require reexamining entire relational structures.
Clayton then turns to the subtle signs of fawning that can be difficult to detect because they often masquerade as virtues. Self-erasure is common: minimizing one’s needs, smoothing conflict before it occurs, apologizing reflexively, or changing one’s personality to match the environment. She describes people who become emotional contortionists, taking up as little space as possible because doing otherwise once resulted in punishment. Grace’s story - being physically assaulted by her father for choosing her preferred pizza topping - illustrates how quickly a child can learn that personal preferences carry danger. As an adult, she still panics around simple choices because her body remembers the consequences of having an opinion. The book emphasizes that these symptoms are not signs of weakness but lingering echoes of environments where safety depended on invisibility.
Healing begins with awareness, and Clayton presents various practices that help people shift from automatic appeasement to conscious choice. A crucial theme is the idea that the body must be involved in recovery. Many survivors intellectually understand their trauma but continue to react from deeply stored physical memory. The story of Sadie, who had extensive knowledge about eating disorders yet remained trapped in her patterns, demonstrates this mind-body divide. Her transformation occurred only when she engaged in somatic processing through EMDR. By incorporating bilateral tapping and letting bodily sensations guide her, she accessed and released the emotional burdens her thinking mind could not address. Clayton explains why body-based modalities - long exhaled breathing, grounding exercises, gentle movement, and sensory awareness - help regulate the nervous system and create enough internal safety to make new choices.
Another essential component of healing is reconnecting with one’s internal compass. Clayton encourages practices like Orienting, which involves consciously taking in one’s physical surroundings to signal to the nervous system that immediate danger is not present. She also discusses resourcing, the practice of asking oneself what the body needs in the moment - food, rest, movement, solitude - and following that internal guidance. These practices begin to loosen the grip of automatic appeasement by reminding survivors that their needs matter and can be attended to. Clayton includes examples like Francis, who discovered a newfound sense of freedom and identity when spending an entire weekend alone for the first time. Moments of solitude, self-directed time, and intentional decision-making help individuals differentiate between who they are and who they have been told to be.
The book also highlights how healing can disrupt long-standing relationships. Clayton does not sugarcoat the reality that some people are invested in the compliant version of us. Lily’s experience with her friend Ava - who reacted with hostility when Lily withheld private details about her dating life - shows how setting even small boundaries can reveal unhealthy dynamics. The ending of that friendship was painful but necessary, illustrating the truth that not all relationships can withstand a person’s return to themselves. Clayton stresses that healthy anger, though often frightening to those who fawn, is a natural and vital emotion. Reclaiming anger allows individuals to sense when something is wrong and to protect themselves through appropriate boundaries.
Ultimately, "Fawning: Finding Your Way Back from the Need to Please" teaches that the goal is not to eliminate protective instincts but to regain the ability to choose. Fawning may have been essential for survival once, but healing invites a broader range of responses - assertiveness, authenticity, self-direction, and connection grounded in mutual respect. Clayton’s work provides both understanding and practical guidance for anyone who has lived their life tuned to others’ needs while suppressing their own. Her message is a hopeful one: with awareness, somatic healing, and courageous boundary-setting, it is possible to step out of automatic appeasement and return to a life shaped by genuine self-trust.
September 17, 2025
5 stars.
Full disclosure, Ingrid is a childhood friend and I adore her and would read anything she wrote and -sidenote-would listen to her read anything, and would pay large amounts of money to listen to hear sing anything.
That said, I have been looking forward to this release because I follow Ingrid's professional instagram and have been on my own therapeutic journey to heal my complex childhood trauma. I've witnessed Ingrid's awakening as she has navigated her personal healing path and been keenly interested in her research and experience working with clients healing their trauma. I had never heard of Fawning and even as I learned snippets from her social media, wasn't clear that it was a descriptor of my behavior.
This book is wonderful as a gateway to learning and understanding behaviors that may have benefitted us as children but perhaps are hindering us as adults. I've already suggested to my therapist as well as many of my friends who are either on self-growth paths or who have complex trauma on their own that they pick up this book.
A phenomenal work. Bravo.
Full disclosure, Ingrid is a childhood friend and I adore her and would read anything she wrote and -sidenote-would listen to her read anything, and would pay large amounts of money to listen to hear sing anything.
That said, I have been looking forward to this release because I follow Ingrid's professional instagram and have been on my own therapeutic journey to heal my complex childhood trauma. I've witnessed Ingrid's awakening as she has navigated her personal healing path and been keenly interested in her research and experience working with clients healing their trauma. I had never heard of Fawning and even as I learned snippets from her social media, wasn't clear that it was a descriptor of my behavior.
This book is wonderful as a gateway to learning and understanding behaviors that may have benefitted us as children but perhaps are hindering us as adults. I've already suggested to my therapist as well as many of my friends who are either on self-growth paths or who have complex trauma on their own that they pick up this book.
A phenomenal work. Bravo.
November 17, 2025
Worthwhile read - 4/5 stars
Notes from my phone
- fawning: enacting a subconscious trauma response that keeps you trapped in harmful patterns while appearing perfectly functional on the surface
- Most people know about our ingrained fight, flight, and freeze response when facing threats. But there's a fourth response called fawning, where we become more appealing to the very person or situation that’s harming us. But unlike regular people-pleasing, fawning isn’t a conscious choice – it’s an unconscious survival strategy
- Her options of response were limited. She couldn't fight him – he was twice her size; couldn't flee – she was a dependent child; and for some reason, didn't freeze. Instead, her body chose a fourth option: act normal and agreeable while internally terrified. She played along just enough to stay safe, appearing sweet and docile to her predator to manage his mood. She was fawning.
This pattern stems from what psychologists call complex trauma.
- Complex trauma stems not from a single dramatic event, but ongoing threats to our safety in relationships
- Your nervous system made the best choice available at the time. Healing begins with honoring these protective mechanisms while gradually expanding your capacity to be authentically yourself in relationships
- we find ourselves embedded in all kinds of social hierarchies that demand compliance.
Patriarchal systems reward traditionally "feminine" traits like deference and caretaking. Corporate cultures expect employees to be "team players" who don't rock the boat. Family systems often require children to manage their parents' emotions rather than the reverse.
- For people of color, the stakes are even higher. Code-switching – adjusting your entire presentation depending on your environment— becomes a daily necessity. You might need to appear "cool" and tough in one setting, then switch to accommodating small talk in another, never getting to be authentically yourself.
- Self-minimization is perhaps the most common pattern of fawners. They treat relationships like math problems: if someone else takes up 80 percent of the emotional space, they learn to survive in the remaining 20 percent. They justify others' harmful behavior, lower their expectations, and engage in magical thinking that things will improve "if only" they do more
- The pattern of shapeshifting follows naturally for fawners. They adopt different personalities in different contexts to meet perceived expectations.
- The unfawning process involves several key stages. First, you must reconnect with your healthy anger – that inner fire that signals “I'm not okay with this." Somatic practices like the ones described earlier can be a great path toward this. Many people who fawn are disconnected from their body and its natural emotions. Learning to feel and express anger safely, whether through physical movement, creative outlets, or direct communication, becomes essential
Notes from my phone
- fawning: enacting a subconscious trauma response that keeps you trapped in harmful patterns while appearing perfectly functional on the surface
- Most people know about our ingrained fight, flight, and freeze response when facing threats. But there's a fourth response called fawning, where we become more appealing to the very person or situation that’s harming us. But unlike regular people-pleasing, fawning isn’t a conscious choice – it’s an unconscious survival strategy
- Her options of response were limited. She couldn't fight him – he was twice her size; couldn't flee – she was a dependent child; and for some reason, didn't freeze. Instead, her body chose a fourth option: act normal and agreeable while internally terrified. She played along just enough to stay safe, appearing sweet and docile to her predator to manage his mood. She was fawning.
This pattern stems from what psychologists call complex trauma.
- Complex trauma stems not from a single dramatic event, but ongoing threats to our safety in relationships
- Your nervous system made the best choice available at the time. Healing begins with honoring these protective mechanisms while gradually expanding your capacity to be authentically yourself in relationships
- we find ourselves embedded in all kinds of social hierarchies that demand compliance.
Patriarchal systems reward traditionally "feminine" traits like deference and caretaking. Corporate cultures expect employees to be "team players" who don't rock the boat. Family systems often require children to manage their parents' emotions rather than the reverse.
- For people of color, the stakes are even higher. Code-switching – adjusting your entire presentation depending on your environment— becomes a daily necessity. You might need to appear "cool" and tough in one setting, then switch to accommodating small talk in another, never getting to be authentically yourself.
- Self-minimization is perhaps the most common pattern of fawners. They treat relationships like math problems: if someone else takes up 80 percent of the emotional space, they learn to survive in the remaining 20 percent. They justify others' harmful behavior, lower their expectations, and engage in magical thinking that things will improve "if only" they do more
- The pattern of shapeshifting follows naturally for fawners. They adopt different personalities in different contexts to meet perceived expectations.
- The unfawning process involves several key stages. First, you must reconnect with your healthy anger – that inner fire that signals “I'm not okay with this." Somatic practices like the ones described earlier can be a great path toward this. Many people who fawn are disconnected from their body and its natural emotions. Learning to feel and express anger safely, whether through physical movement, creative outlets, or direct communication, becomes essential
December 1, 2025
There are four types of stress responses; fight, flight, freeze, and fawn. Fawning is a new to me kind of response because I always assumed I was a flight person, but as it turns out, I'm a major fawner. In this book, Dr. Ingrid Clayton provides personal anecdotes, relatable case stories and examples, and technical information that explains what it is, how fawning is used unknowingly, and what we can do to overcome these tendencies.
What I find most interesting is that this wasn't necessarily studied up until recently due to patriarchal systems of oppression.... Read that again.
This book shows us that fawning isn't a personal 'issue' but perhaps a behavior that's reinforced by systems around us. Be agreeable, don't rock the boat, just forget about it, it's in the past move on, be compliant, don't confront, etc. While I understand that 'being agreeable' is sometimes easy, it also oppresses our own personal feelings by doing what the other person(s) wants. It's taking care of someone else before yourself. But if you're catering to other people's needs before your own, how are you taking care of yourself and your own mental state?
I thought reading this around the holidays was actually the best time to read it. This book helped me understand what I do unknowingly that may be hurting me in the long run. I'm not saying I'm going to riot against every single tradition and event that I'm not 100% into, but it does help me mentally address what I can do to modify how I react to certain things.
This book has a lot of personal anecdotes from Dr. Clayton's upbringing that didn't always feel like it was something I could relate to, however, her responses to certain situations definitely were relatable. What I've found is that situations don't have to be similar, but responses are.
This book teaches to not eliminate protective instincts, but to regain the ability to choose for yourself. I thought Dr. Clayton provided excellent guidance for those who would like to work on their fawning tendencies. This book is filled with hope, healing, and guides to reinforce setting boundaries to return to your true, genuine self.
What I find most interesting is that this wasn't necessarily studied up until recently due to patriarchal systems of oppression.... Read that again.
This book shows us that fawning isn't a personal 'issue' but perhaps a behavior that's reinforced by systems around us. Be agreeable, don't rock the boat, just forget about it, it's in the past move on, be compliant, don't confront, etc. While I understand that 'being agreeable' is sometimes easy, it also oppresses our own personal feelings by doing what the other person(s) wants. It's taking care of someone else before yourself. But if you're catering to other people's needs before your own, how are you taking care of yourself and your own mental state?
I thought reading this around the holidays was actually the best time to read it. This book helped me understand what I do unknowingly that may be hurting me in the long run. I'm not saying I'm going to riot against every single tradition and event that I'm not 100% into, but it does help me mentally address what I can do to modify how I react to certain things.
This book has a lot of personal anecdotes from Dr. Clayton's upbringing that didn't always feel like it was something I could relate to, however, her responses to certain situations definitely were relatable. What I've found is that situations don't have to be similar, but responses are.
This book teaches to not eliminate protective instincts, but to regain the ability to choose for yourself. I thought Dr. Clayton provided excellent guidance for those who would like to work on their fawning tendencies. This book is filled with hope, healing, and guides to reinforce setting boundaries to return to your true, genuine self.
November 17, 2025
BLUF (Bottom Line Up Front)
I learned that “fawning” is a fourth trauma response people rationally use as a survival strategy I had never been taught to see.
Executive Summary
Ingrid Clayton documents how the fawn response emerges when a person under threat defaults to appeasement to secure safety. Core ideas include:
• Fawning functions alongside fight, flight, and freeze as a stress adaptation.
• Chronic appeasement reshapes identity, boundaries, and relational patterns.
• Recovery requires naming the pattern, locating its developmental roots, and practicing discomfort tolerance.
• Awareness of fawning in others allows for more accurate empathy and healthier boundaries.
Review
Clayton’s framing hits a blind spot most trauma discussions skip. I spent years adhering to the flight, fight, or freeze framework — yet I had missed that some students, colleagues, even friends weren’t avoiding conflict or lacking confidence or just sucking up. They were fawning. That distinction matters. I wonder if it’s only a serious trauma response, or whether there is a more nuanced, lower-stakes application, like talking to a professor about a grade.
The book made me see how often we misinterpret compliance as engagement. In design work, these are the learners who nod along, over-accommodate, and disappear the moment stakes rise. Clayton’s narrative maps the internal logic: appeasement feels safer than authenticity.
Personally, the concept exposed how quickly I rationalize others’ behaviors without understanding the survival math underneath. Recognizing fawning forces me to slow down, ask better questions, and stop assuming that quiet agreement equals true consent.
Similar Reads
• No Bad Parts by Richard Schwartz — identity, protection, and internal survival strategies.
• The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel van der Kolk — foundational trauma physiology.
Authorship Note: This review was co-authored using a time-saving GPT I built to help structure and refine my thoughts.
I learned that “fawning” is a fourth trauma response people rationally use as a survival strategy I had never been taught to see.
Executive Summary
Ingrid Clayton documents how the fawn response emerges when a person under threat defaults to appeasement to secure safety. Core ideas include:
• Fawning functions alongside fight, flight, and freeze as a stress adaptation.
• Chronic appeasement reshapes identity, boundaries, and relational patterns.
• Recovery requires naming the pattern, locating its developmental roots, and practicing discomfort tolerance.
• Awareness of fawning in others allows for more accurate empathy and healthier boundaries.
Review
Clayton’s framing hits a blind spot most trauma discussions skip. I spent years adhering to the flight, fight, or freeze framework — yet I had missed that some students, colleagues, even friends weren’t avoiding conflict or lacking confidence or just sucking up. They were fawning. That distinction matters. I wonder if it’s only a serious trauma response, or whether there is a more nuanced, lower-stakes application, like talking to a professor about a grade.
The book made me see how often we misinterpret compliance as engagement. In design work, these are the learners who nod along, over-accommodate, and disappear the moment stakes rise. Clayton’s narrative maps the internal logic: appeasement feels safer than authenticity.
Personally, the concept exposed how quickly I rationalize others’ behaviors without understanding the survival math underneath. Recognizing fawning forces me to slow down, ask better questions, and stop assuming that quiet agreement equals true consent.
Similar Reads
• No Bad Parts by Richard Schwartz — identity, protection, and internal survival strategies.
• The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel van der Kolk — foundational trauma physiology.
Authorship Note: This review was co-authored using a time-saving GPT I built to help structure and refine my thoughts.
September 11, 2025
I realized I’ve been fawning my entire life. Signs of fawning include minimizing oneself, hyper vigilance, anxiety and shame.
It can also include masking to fit situations.
We do this because of the need to be chosen, approved of and to hold onto our sense of safety.
Fawners are not lying about who we are, but trying to learn who we are and want to be, who we need to be to remain relationally safe while maintaining others’ perception of us.
This book was extremely relatable and included so many different real-person examples. Definitely worth reading
It can also include masking to fit situations.
We do this because of the need to be chosen, approved of and to hold onto our sense of safety.
Fawners are not lying about who we are, but trying to learn who we are and want to be, who we need to be to remain relationally safe while maintaining others’ perception of us.
This book was extremely relatable and included so many different real-person examples. Definitely worth reading
December 5, 2025
This is a great book! I rated it a 3 only because I don't think it's super revolutionary for those who previously were or are currently in therapy. It has a lot of great reminders though! I liked the individual stories to help show what fawning is. It is a great book and a great starter for those who have not done therapy.
September 8, 2025
Fantastic
October 8, 2025
Some good truth to this book, but sometimes being high intellectualizer doesn’t help :(
Currently reading
October 26, 2025Page 54: But if we don’t allow ourselves to feel our anger, discomfort, and frustration, we can’t see our truth.… We remain stuck in disconnection, from ourselves and others.
November 2, 2025
Excellent! I’m a huge fan of Ingrid and this is a must-read to learn about fawning and putting it in its proper place as an involuntary trauma response.
November 17, 2025
Self help books are always a bit redundant but 4 stars cuz i feel like this one will actually help?!
dnf
November 19, 2025Dnf'ed @ 22%
November 23, 2025
this book helped me break up with my boyfriend
October 24, 2025
This book is more of a 4.5 rating for me. I really loved the focus on fawning and how unfawning is a process that takes time and patience to understand. Coping with trauma is challenging and the fact that not everyone picks fight, flight, or freeze as their defense mechanism can make things even more complicated when the safest route looks like cozying up to the abuse. While, I personally would have liked some more research thrown in, overall the book does a great job of helping the reader move through understanding fawning and working towards unfawning behavior.
-------
Below are pull quotes from the book:
Pete Walker, a psychotherapist and the author of Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving, coined the term fawning after working with countless survivors of trauma and abuse. 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 the moment.
-
fawning as a trauma response puts our behaviors in the context of disempowerment or maltreatment. It’s not about brownnosing for an A or sucking up to people in power. 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. If it is a boss, we are dependent on a paycheck or career advancement. If it’s a partner, we are dependent on their income, the ability to see our children, the status that marriage affords. With fawning, connection means protection.
-
While fawning is meant to neutralize danger (and it does), it has an invisible downside. 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.
-
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.
-
Many fawners have an experience like this in our backgrounds— something that shows us we can never wholly rely on anyone but ourselves. We’ve learned that interpersonal safety nets are for other people, that unconditional love is either a myth or our job to uphold. Consequently, we often become hyper-independent. Unable to lean into healthy relational support, we have to figure it out for ourselves. So we do. It’s common that we don’t even tell others when bad stuff happens. We swallow it down, pretend everything is fine, and continue fawning for perpetual safety—an
exhausting and lonely endeavor.
-
This is the most heartbreaking component of fawning. We lose the connection to ourselves. We develop these coping mechanisms that become so ingrained in us we don’t even know we are using them. We are the fawner and yet we can appear happy, perpetually going along to get along. We might see ourselves as generous, empathic, and compassionate. These are often intrinsic qualities we possess, but we don’t know the extent to which they’ve been hijacked by our trauma response
-
The fawn response is different. Fawning is a hybrid response, activating the sympathetic (hyperarousal) and parasympathetic (hypoarousal) branches of the autonomic nervous system at the same time.
The hyperarousal aspect of fawning has us instinctively managing the moods and states of those “in charge.” We lean into the very relationships that are causing us harm, appeasing our perpetrators while taking personal responsibility for all relational difficulties.
Fawning can be incredibly active. But at the same time, we are detaching from ourselves. The
hypoarousal of fawning numbs our connection to self, our broader sense of agency, and often our ability to feel the effects of the abuse at all.
We are threading a fine needle when we fawn, neither risking greater harm through fight or flight, nor shutting down completely. This highly adaptive response is moving beyond playing dead to playing LIFE
-
In our evolution, humans have learned to override this vital instinct. Thus, when trauma happens, our bodies can remain in a constant state of arousal and tension. In particular, when we experience complex trauma, the threat never goes away. We are essentially still living in the war zone. Instead of shaking it off, we swallow it down. It gets embedded inside us. Survivors of complex trauma live in a perpetual state of emotional dysregulation.
-
Like the arc of a roller coaster, our trauma responses are meant to resolve, moving us through danger to safety on the other side. We are meant to come to a stop, to get off the ride. With complex trauma and chronic trauma responses, we are hovering at the midpoint of the coaster. Living our
lives in suspended alarm. Through this lens, we can see how many of us confuse our trauma responses for personality. We literally don’t know where we end and where unconscious trauma response begins.
-
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.”
-
Fawning happens when we are in a double bind, when there are real consequences for not fawning. We can’t address every need simultaneously, so the body has to choose. We choose safety over self.
But this forced choice has dire consequences. It clouds our perception; we lose touch with our internal guidance system. We learn to override our gut, our inner wisdom, which means we cannot identify or act on red flags.
For fawners, internal safety is always reliant on the condition of external safety, so it remains at arm’s length: in someone else’s body or ideology, in their perception or story. Merging with distorted views erodes our self-trust and our sense of self altogether.
In addition to causing us to lose connection with our authentic nature, the fawn response leads to deep shame, leaning into danger, disrespect, and behaviors that don’t align with our values. We often don’t understand why we do what we do—why we appease our abuser, why we butter up our jerk of a boss, why we placate a difficult parent instead of standing up for ourselves—but it feels impossible to stop.
-
We are not meant to eradicate our trauma responses. We couldn’t if we tried! We need these lifesaving instincts, and I’m grateful for them. But when I drove away, hundreds and then thousands of miles from that dysfunction, I remained the same. I brought these imprints with me, no longer discerning safety on a moment-to-moment basis, but unconsciously accepting life in an unsafe world. We aren’t meant to live in survival mode, but these instincts were steering the ship in every relationship— accommodating, shapeshifting, erasing myself until I no longer knew who I was. Fawning was my stunt double, and I had no idea it was acting as me, shielding me—from the bad and from the good. From the good that was inside of me.
-
The goal in our healing is to come back to the body’s natural inclination of flexibility and repair. One grounded in regulation, a whole and true self. We cannot eliminate all threat, but we can move out of binary responses to it: healed or broken, safe or unsafe. I believe there is more room for us to
learn how to tolerate discomfort and to enlarge our capacity to be ourselves
-
Fawning wasn’t a problem that needed fixing. It was in fact the solution. Fawning was working—taming monsters, moving mountains, maintaining vital structures of my life—and it was
happening without my expressed consent. So being judged for fawning, without respecting its intelligence, appreciating and having compassion for it, was, dare I say, a mindfuck
-
In cases of childhood trauma, we often can’t tolerate the fact that our caregivers are deficient. We instinctively place the blame on ourselves to avoid feeling the terror of being that alone. This is
how the body seeks power in powerless situations. If I broke it, I can fix it. This also sets up the rescuer dynamic as a proxy for secure attachment. We learn that safety and connection happen
only when we prioritize someone else’s needs.
-
Emotionally immature parents overshare with their children. They require sympathy, self-esteem, and soothing from them, as though their child is the caretaker. Consequently, children of emotionally immature parents often feel guilty, like they must meet their parents’ needs, feel sorry for what their parents have been through or bad about showing up for their own lives. Never having had their instincts validated, they have difficulty trusting themselves. And when these children try to share their feelings or their life, the emotionally immature parent offers the bare minimum and doesn’t engage or bond over their child’s interests.
-
When we are faced with abuse and neglect in relationships, we are chemically wired to focus on getting to the other side. When the abuser is the person who brings us relief, the brain associates them with safety. The brain latches on to the positive experience of relief rather than the negative impact of the abuser. This creates the feeling that we need the abuser to survive and is often mistaken for love. The highs and lows of these relationships can elevate “love” to great heights, magical even. We don’t realize it feels that way only because of the inconsistency, because the highs are such a contrast to the lows.
-
This incongruence can feel frustrating, but fawning is a relational trauma response—dependent on the relationship we are in at the time. Sometimes we can turn down the volume on our fawning—practice becoming more assertive—but other times we are heading back into the lion’s den. On a scale of “de-escalate abuse” to “raise your self-esteem”… de-escalation wins every time.
-
Perfectionism, in truth, is anxiety masquerading as discipline. In this context, it aims to keep us relationally safe by ensuring we are “perfect.” We achieve in order to please. So many fawners are longing for validation, to be seen, and it seems safe to do it through success, achievement, some
obvious marker of our worthiness. But perfectionism is just another way to mask our fears. It ultimately keeps our worries firmly in place because no amount of success erases their origins. And then the perfectionist thinks, Maybe next time…
-
When we’ve learned to de-escalate by contorting ourselves, unfawning becomes incredibly difficult. Healthy conflict involves tolerating some upset, but most fawners don’t know what healthy conflict feels like. We don’t know if we are in relationships that can support it, and we don’t want to risk trying. Our bodies are keeping a perpetual eye out for new threats, so even potential upset is overwhelming. We might interpret hints of disappointment as It’s happening again, and automatically say we like onions rather than face being violently kicked out of the house. Building
new capacity means facing the fear and overwhelm we’ve instinctively turned away from, for good reason
-
It’s as though if we can appease enough, turn our cheeks enough, be helpful enough, we hope that eventually we might finally feel worthy. A new form of relational safety might stand in for the safety we’d always lacked. Sometimes it’s marriage, sometimes it’s the feeling of belonging or
getting the job, and sometimes we’re stuck still trying to convince our original offenders of our worth. But at the core, we’re hoping we can finally stop proving ourselves. The sad reality is that this strategy only invites more of the same
-
With fawning, lying is like tucking pieces of ourselves and our experiences away. Sometimes the tucking is within a safe distance, one we can access and know. We are tucking it in for safekeeping. And sometimes things get tucked so far in, we might never get them back.
When we lie, it’s because we are trying to hide something sacred, something that isn’t safe in the world. Lying to ourselves and others has been a form of protection. I think of it like a life preserver. No one was throwing us one, so we manufactured one out of thin air. In fact, we became it. I see the fawner’s storytelling as a superpower. A genius adaptation that spontaneously came online right when we needed it. The same thing is true then when I use the word honesty.
-
If you were neglected, you might unconsciously be drawn to unavailable partners. Trying to prove your worth, you chase their affections, ultimately pushing the unavailable person away, and the cycle comes full circle. If you were raised with unpredictability or volatility, you might be drawn to partners who are hot and cold, inconsistent, actively engaged in addiction. Again, these relationship patterns feel familiar. Thus they feel safe, even though they are anything but.
-
In this context, fawning can make us feel like we have the power to shift someone from hating us to
loving us. As though we’re powerful sorcerers with magical qualities, we can transport ourselves and the other person to another (albeit temporary) reality. This feeling of power, when we feel so powerless in the rest of our lives, is one element that makes trauma bonding so intoxicating.
-
Because I had been sexualized by my stepfather in puberty, my sexuality became intrinsically tied to my worth. It often felt like my only power or the sole sure path to acceptance. I would flirt when I wasn’t attracted or interested, playing into someone’s fantasy while hoping to keep them at
bay. This led to countless boundary crossings by older, married, inappropriate men. I was always shocked when they eventually crossed a line, never understanding how or why I was being pursued this way, or how at times I was reenacting my trauma.
I wanted to fawn just enough, as though I could find the sweet spot of proximity, gain their acceptance without their overtures. But I never struck the right balance, at least not for very long.
-
Although the focus on others has fawners feeling so available, we were never truly intimate, because we weren’t sharing our true selves. Grace was often thinking more about the shape of her body during intimacy, how it might look to others. Fawners are often dissociated from their bodies, from the sex they are having. We can’t focus on what might feel good because we aren’t fully there.
While sex is often performative, fawners do this to an extreme for the sake of their partner.
-
I drank my coffee slowly, worried they would kick me out once I finished my drink. If I had been there with a friend, I would have felt fine; we were allowed to take up space. And if someone was to get mad at us, my friend could have acted like a shield, helping to take the heat. But being alone in a public place made me feel vulnerable, like anyone at any moment could think I was doing something wrong. Just existing feels assertive for a fawner.
We have to practice making our own decisions. Rather than our first reflex of I’m good—you can decide, we must wonder, Where do I want to go? But this might invite opposition. What will they think of my choice? Even if our mind is telling us that we did something wrong or will be punished, this is patterning from our trauma. Learning to take up space requires learning to tolerate discomfort.
-
There is a theme in almost all the inner unfawning processes. They happen in our bodies. That’s right. Unfawning is about going in. Not to our overactive minds, which can argue for any side, second-guess, or insert opinions that have nothing to do with what we actually need. (That’s part of what’s kept us stuck.) Trauma is trapped in the body. Our unexpressed feelings are stuck there, too.
-
Fawners are habituated to regulate others in an attempt to regulate themselves: gaining others’ approval, making them happy so we can be happy. Part of the paradigm shift is finding our center, our safety, without the middleman. This shift is major.
-
So an important question we must learn to ask is, Am I in danger, or is this discomfort?
Our bodies may be screaming danger, recalling previous threats to our well-being. Moving out of survival mode then means moving into the present time and place. Situations that provoke our triggers provide an opportunity to go inside, feel, and be present with our emotions. We aren’t
meant to avoid discomfort; we are growing our capacity to tolerate it.
-
“When I am genuinely giving, it takes no toll on me. It brings me joy, and when it’s over, that’s it.
When it’s fawning, I feel anxious because I want something in return that I’m not sure I’ll get: love, praise, acceptance, etc. and when I don’t receive these things, I feel depleted and sometimes resentful.”
-
-------
Below are pull quotes from the book:
Pete Walker, a psychotherapist and the author of Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving, coined the term fawning after working with countless survivors of trauma and abuse. 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 the moment.
-
fawning as a trauma response puts our behaviors in the context of disempowerment or maltreatment. It’s not about brownnosing for an A or sucking up to people in power. 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. If it is a boss, we are dependent on a paycheck or career advancement. If it’s a partner, we are dependent on their income, the ability to see our children, the status that marriage affords. With fawning, connection means protection.
-
While fawning is meant to neutralize danger (and it does), it has an invisible downside. 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.
-
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.
-
Many fawners have an experience like this in our backgrounds— something that shows us we can never wholly rely on anyone but ourselves. We’ve learned that interpersonal safety nets are for other people, that unconditional love is either a myth or our job to uphold. Consequently, we often become hyper-independent. Unable to lean into healthy relational support, we have to figure it out for ourselves. So we do. It’s common that we don’t even tell others when bad stuff happens. We swallow it down, pretend everything is fine, and continue fawning for perpetual safety—an
exhausting and lonely endeavor.
-
This is the most heartbreaking component of fawning. We lose the connection to ourselves. We develop these coping mechanisms that become so ingrained in us we don’t even know we are using them. We are the fawner and yet we can appear happy, perpetually going along to get along. We might see ourselves as generous, empathic, and compassionate. These are often intrinsic qualities we possess, but we don’t know the extent to which they’ve been hijacked by our trauma response
-
The fawn response is different. Fawning is a hybrid response, activating the sympathetic (hyperarousal) and parasympathetic (hypoarousal) branches of the autonomic nervous system at the same time.
The hyperarousal aspect of fawning has us instinctively managing the moods and states of those “in charge.” We lean into the very relationships that are causing us harm, appeasing our perpetrators while taking personal responsibility for all relational difficulties.
Fawning can be incredibly active. But at the same time, we are detaching from ourselves. The
hypoarousal of fawning numbs our connection to self, our broader sense of agency, and often our ability to feel the effects of the abuse at all.
We are threading a fine needle when we fawn, neither risking greater harm through fight or flight, nor shutting down completely. This highly adaptive response is moving beyond playing dead to playing LIFE
-
In our evolution, humans have learned to override this vital instinct. Thus, when trauma happens, our bodies can remain in a constant state of arousal and tension. In particular, when we experience complex trauma, the threat never goes away. We are essentially still living in the war zone. Instead of shaking it off, we swallow it down. It gets embedded inside us. Survivors of complex trauma live in a perpetual state of emotional dysregulation.
-
Like the arc of a roller coaster, our trauma responses are meant to resolve, moving us through danger to safety on the other side. We are meant to come to a stop, to get off the ride. With complex trauma and chronic trauma responses, we are hovering at the midpoint of the coaster. Living our
lives in suspended alarm. Through this lens, we can see how many of us confuse our trauma responses for personality. We literally don’t know where we end and where unconscious trauma response begins.
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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.”
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Fawning happens when we are in a double bind, when there are real consequences for not fawning. We can’t address every need simultaneously, so the body has to choose. We choose safety over self.
But this forced choice has dire consequences. It clouds our perception; we lose touch with our internal guidance system. We learn to override our gut, our inner wisdom, which means we cannot identify or act on red flags.
For fawners, internal safety is always reliant on the condition of external safety, so it remains at arm’s length: in someone else’s body or ideology, in their perception or story. Merging with distorted views erodes our self-trust and our sense of self altogether.
In addition to causing us to lose connection with our authentic nature, the fawn response leads to deep shame, leaning into danger, disrespect, and behaviors that don’t align with our values. We often don’t understand why we do what we do—why we appease our abuser, why we butter up our jerk of a boss, why we placate a difficult parent instead of standing up for ourselves—but it feels impossible to stop.
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We are not meant to eradicate our trauma responses. We couldn’t if we tried! We need these lifesaving instincts, and I’m grateful for them. But when I drove away, hundreds and then thousands of miles from that dysfunction, I remained the same. I brought these imprints with me, no longer discerning safety on a moment-to-moment basis, but unconsciously accepting life in an unsafe world. We aren’t meant to live in survival mode, but these instincts were steering the ship in every relationship— accommodating, shapeshifting, erasing myself until I no longer knew who I was. Fawning was my stunt double, and I had no idea it was acting as me, shielding me—from the bad and from the good. From the good that was inside of me.
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The goal in our healing is to come back to the body’s natural inclination of flexibility and repair. One grounded in regulation, a whole and true self. We cannot eliminate all threat, but we can move out of binary responses to it: healed or broken, safe or unsafe. I believe there is more room for us to
learn how to tolerate discomfort and to enlarge our capacity to be ourselves
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Fawning wasn’t a problem that needed fixing. It was in fact the solution. Fawning was working—taming monsters, moving mountains, maintaining vital structures of my life—and it was
happening without my expressed consent. So being judged for fawning, without respecting its intelligence, appreciating and having compassion for it, was, dare I say, a mindfuck
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In cases of childhood trauma, we often can’t tolerate the fact that our caregivers are deficient. We instinctively place the blame on ourselves to avoid feeling the terror of being that alone. This is
how the body seeks power in powerless situations. If I broke it, I can fix it. This also sets up the rescuer dynamic as a proxy for secure attachment. We learn that safety and connection happen
only when we prioritize someone else’s needs.
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Emotionally immature parents overshare with their children. They require sympathy, self-esteem, and soothing from them, as though their child is the caretaker. Consequently, children of emotionally immature parents often feel guilty, like they must meet their parents’ needs, feel sorry for what their parents have been through or bad about showing up for their own lives. Never having had their instincts validated, they have difficulty trusting themselves. And when these children try to share their feelings or their life, the emotionally immature parent offers the bare minimum and doesn’t engage or bond over their child’s interests.
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When we are faced with abuse and neglect in relationships, we are chemically wired to focus on getting to the other side. When the abuser is the person who brings us relief, the brain associates them with safety. The brain latches on to the positive experience of relief rather than the negative impact of the abuser. This creates the feeling that we need the abuser to survive and is often mistaken for love. The highs and lows of these relationships can elevate “love” to great heights, magical even. We don’t realize it feels that way only because of the inconsistency, because the highs are such a contrast to the lows.
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This incongruence can feel frustrating, but fawning is a relational trauma response—dependent on the relationship we are in at the time. Sometimes we can turn down the volume on our fawning—practice becoming more assertive—but other times we are heading back into the lion’s den. On a scale of “de-escalate abuse” to “raise your self-esteem”… de-escalation wins every time.
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Perfectionism, in truth, is anxiety masquerading as discipline. In this context, it aims to keep us relationally safe by ensuring we are “perfect.” We achieve in order to please. So many fawners are longing for validation, to be seen, and it seems safe to do it through success, achievement, some
obvious marker of our worthiness. But perfectionism is just another way to mask our fears. It ultimately keeps our worries firmly in place because no amount of success erases their origins. And then the perfectionist thinks, Maybe next time…
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When we’ve learned to de-escalate by contorting ourselves, unfawning becomes incredibly difficult. Healthy conflict involves tolerating some upset, but most fawners don’t know what healthy conflict feels like. We don’t know if we are in relationships that can support it, and we don’t want to risk trying. Our bodies are keeping a perpetual eye out for new threats, so even potential upset is overwhelming. We might interpret hints of disappointment as It’s happening again, and automatically say we like onions rather than face being violently kicked out of the house. Building
new capacity means facing the fear and overwhelm we’ve instinctively turned away from, for good reason
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It’s as though if we can appease enough, turn our cheeks enough, be helpful enough, we hope that eventually we might finally feel worthy. A new form of relational safety might stand in for the safety we’d always lacked. Sometimes it’s marriage, sometimes it’s the feeling of belonging or
getting the job, and sometimes we’re stuck still trying to convince our original offenders of our worth. But at the core, we’re hoping we can finally stop proving ourselves. The sad reality is that this strategy only invites more of the same
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With fawning, lying is like tucking pieces of ourselves and our experiences away. Sometimes the tucking is within a safe distance, one we can access and know. We are tucking it in for safekeeping. And sometimes things get tucked so far in, we might never get them back.
When we lie, it’s because we are trying to hide something sacred, something that isn’t safe in the world. Lying to ourselves and others has been a form of protection. I think of it like a life preserver. No one was throwing us one, so we manufactured one out of thin air. In fact, we became it. I see the fawner’s storytelling as a superpower. A genius adaptation that spontaneously came online right when we needed it. The same thing is true then when I use the word honesty.
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If you were neglected, you might unconsciously be drawn to unavailable partners. Trying to prove your worth, you chase their affections, ultimately pushing the unavailable person away, and the cycle comes full circle. If you were raised with unpredictability or volatility, you might be drawn to partners who are hot and cold, inconsistent, actively engaged in addiction. Again, these relationship patterns feel familiar. Thus they feel safe, even though they are anything but.
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In this context, fawning can make us feel like we have the power to shift someone from hating us to
loving us. As though we’re powerful sorcerers with magical qualities, we can transport ourselves and the other person to another (albeit temporary) reality. This feeling of power, when we feel so powerless in the rest of our lives, is one element that makes trauma bonding so intoxicating.
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Because I had been sexualized by my stepfather in puberty, my sexuality became intrinsically tied to my worth. It often felt like my only power or the sole sure path to acceptance. I would flirt when I wasn’t attracted or interested, playing into someone’s fantasy while hoping to keep them at
bay. This led to countless boundary crossings by older, married, inappropriate men. I was always shocked when they eventually crossed a line, never understanding how or why I was being pursued this way, or how at times I was reenacting my trauma.
I wanted to fawn just enough, as though I could find the sweet spot of proximity, gain their acceptance without their overtures. But I never struck the right balance, at least not for very long.
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Although the focus on others has fawners feeling so available, we were never truly intimate, because we weren’t sharing our true selves. Grace was often thinking more about the shape of her body during intimacy, how it might look to others. Fawners are often dissociated from their bodies, from the sex they are having. We can’t focus on what might feel good because we aren’t fully there.
While sex is often performative, fawners do this to an extreme for the sake of their partner.
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I drank my coffee slowly, worried they would kick me out once I finished my drink. If I had been there with a friend, I would have felt fine; we were allowed to take up space. And if someone was to get mad at us, my friend could have acted like a shield, helping to take the heat. But being alone in a public place made me feel vulnerable, like anyone at any moment could think I was doing something wrong. Just existing feels assertive for a fawner.
We have to practice making our own decisions. Rather than our first reflex of I’m good—you can decide, we must wonder, Where do I want to go? But this might invite opposition. What will they think of my choice? Even if our mind is telling us that we did something wrong or will be punished, this is patterning from our trauma. Learning to take up space requires learning to tolerate discomfort.
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There is a theme in almost all the inner unfawning processes. They happen in our bodies. That’s right. Unfawning is about going in. Not to our overactive minds, which can argue for any side, second-guess, or insert opinions that have nothing to do with what we actually need. (That’s part of what’s kept us stuck.) Trauma is trapped in the body. Our unexpressed feelings are stuck there, too.
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Fawners are habituated to regulate others in an attempt to regulate themselves: gaining others’ approval, making them happy so we can be happy. Part of the paradigm shift is finding our center, our safety, without the middleman. This shift is major.
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So an important question we must learn to ask is, Am I in danger, or is this discomfort?
Our bodies may be screaming danger, recalling previous threats to our well-being. Moving out of survival mode then means moving into the present time and place. Situations that provoke our triggers provide an opportunity to go inside, feel, and be present with our emotions. We aren’t
meant to avoid discomfort; we are growing our capacity to tolerate it.
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“When I am genuinely giving, it takes no toll on me. It brings me joy, and when it’s over, that’s it.
When it’s fawning, I feel anxious because I want something in return that I’m not sure I’ll get: love, praise, acceptance, etc. and when I don’t receive these things, I feel depleted and sometimes resentful.”
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Read
September 26, 2025Welp, might as well change my middle name to Fawn!! Grateful for this book. I had lots of mini personal revelations throughout
October 18, 2025
Getting all my fawners this book for Christmas
December 4, 2025
As a fawner that was previously told by a therapist that I’m a people pleaser—even though that never made sense to me—this book was life-changing.
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