Fawning

You’ve probably heard and said at some point recently: “I went into fight or flight” - shorthand for: “I panicked, and my instincts took over”. Along with fight, flight, and freeze, Pete Walker added the term fawn to the safety instinct lexicon in his 2009 book Complex PTSD, From Surviving to Thriving, one of my favorite recommendations for clients who've experienced any form of emotional abuse or neglect in childhood.

Walker first defined fawning as “a response to a threat by becoming more appealing to the threat”. When we fawn, we merge with someone else’s desires and preferences to diffuse conflict and maintain our own sense of relational and/or physical safety. For children, staying safely connected to family members always takes priority over authenticity, a developmental bind Gabor Mate describes in 2021's The Myth of Normal. 

From a fawn response throughout our earlier years, we may go on to develop adult behavioral patterns of people pleasing, shape shifting, avoiding conflict at all costs, caretaking , self minimization, letting deep resentment build, needing to be chosen, and walking on eggshells (Clayton, Fawning, 2025). Ingrid Clayton describes a common pattern in adult intimate relationships of "hoping and helping", while not seeing or ignoring glaring red flags.

Since fawning is an instinctual response, we don’t plan on doing it, we don’t consciously choose it, and we're not always aware of it. When we feel threatened, our bodies and brains will often go with the safety strategy that has worked best before. For many of us, that may well be to smile agreeably and offer to help. 

When we live with someone who can be cruel, moody, unpredictable, frightening - the ability to read and monitor that person’s emotional state while adjusting our own demeanor and actions accordingly, is adaptive and makes perfect sense. Many of us grew up unconsciously logging and monitoring triggers for other people’s scary emotional outbursts or shutdowns. The ability to surmise within seconds whether someone in our home was upset, drunk, brooding - and then quickly adjust ourselves - could often make a huge difference, temporarily, in the degree to which we could feel safe with that person. If we could delay an explosion for even an hour, that was a win. Of course, fawning kicks in and can be very effective with intimidating or "off" strangers and acquaintances as well.

In Fawning, Clayton describes the way we now understand the instinct as adaptive and effective, in contrast to older codependency literature that describes it as a problem to fix. Clayton writes about the experience of feeling unseen by the older literature:

“So being judged for fawning, without respecting its intelligence, appreciating and having compassion for it, was, dare I say, a mindfuck…It’s about honoring the roots of fawning rather than seeing it strictly as a malady…When it’s working, it feels powerful. No wonder fawners don’t resonate with language that can feel steeped in shame and weakness. We are freaking acrobats!” 

“But I do it really well, and it works a lot of the time!” Over the years, I’ve heard some variation of this from people who identify as fawners. Yes, it works: some of the time, and at what cost? We might win some matches, but managing someone else’s emotional experience is ultimately an unwinnable game, and one we may tire of playing as we get older.

All our safety instincts (fight, flight, and freeze too) in overdrive can cause just as many problems as they helped.  What worked to keep us safe in our younger years often isn’t as helpful for us in our adult lives when we are so much more well resourced emotionally and physically. We can do many things as adults we were not able to do as children: We can get in our cars and leave a bad situation, seek professional help on our own accord, ask for what we want, call the police, quit a job, etc. 

We don’t want to eradicate our fawn response; it’s a crucial element in the human safety system. We want to work toward shifting it out of overdrive, and supplementing it with other skills to build assertiveness and capacity for more authentic expression. We can practice allowing other people be upset or disapprove, saying what we really think, and practice taking up space. 

How do we do this? Role playing with a trusted friend or therapist can be a helpful way to learn to tolerate the anxiety that comes with expressing ourselves more authentically. We can also consider the practice of going back for a “take two” after we realize we’ve fawned when we wish we hadn’t. We can speak up days or weeks later, communicate our revised position, this time from a more authentic and honest place.

If any of this material resonates, the books I've mentioned in this post can be tremendously helpful resources and a great way to learn more. Therapy can help you explore your patterns in greater detail, and modalities like EMDR can help increase self-trust and loosen the grip of old, unhelpful beliefs about yourself.