Below, Ingrid Clayton shares five key insights from her new book, Fawning: Why the Need to Please Makes Us Lose Ourselves–and How to Find Our Way Back.
Ingrid is a clinical psychologist, trauma therapist, and complex trauma survivor. She helps people understand the survival patterns that shaped them, and how to reclaim their voice. Her private practice has been thriving for more than 16 years, and she regularly contributes to Psychology Today, where she publishes the blog Emotional Sobriety.
What’s the big idea?
If you’ve ever been called a “people pleaser” or “codependent,” you might actually be living in a chronic state of fawning. This is a trauma response that depends on altering your personality and behaviors to appease and please a threat as a means of avoiding conflict. When this happens, authenticity can feel dangerous, and therefore impossible. It is absolutely vital that we find ways to set boundaries and speak our truth. Everyone deserves a life beyond survival mode.
1. The trauma response alternative to fight or flight.
Sometimes we have trauma in our lives but don’t recognize it as such, especially when it comes to complex trauma. Unlike more commonly understood forms of trauma, like a car crash or a natural disaster, complex trauma is prolonged and ongoing. It doesn’t come from a single, clear event, but rather from persistent threats to our safety and sense of self or what’s possible in our vital relationships. It’s often rooted in childhood or relational experiences: growing up with an alcoholic parent, enduring emotional neglect, facing chronic poverty, or racism. These are not one-time shocks, but slow-drip injuries to the nervous system and spirit.
In these situations, the typical trauma responses we think of—fight, flight, or freeze—often aren’t options. You can’t fight your parent or flee from your family at age six. And freezing only goes so far. That’s when the nervous system may turn to fawning.
Fawning means trying to stay safe by becoming more appealing to the person who makes you feel unsafe. You try to appease, please, and avoid conflict at all costs. Fawning can look like:
- Smiling and laughing off an aggressive advance you don’t want.
- Staying silent about your values in a toxic workplace to avoid losing your job.
- Rationalizing a parent’s abusive behavior to preserve the relationship.
For me, growing up with a narcissistic stepfather, I learned to fawn early and often. But I didn’t have the language for it until I became a trauma therapist and discovered the term “fawning,” coined by psychotherapist Pete Walker. Suddenly, everything I’d struggled with for decades made sense.
Despite being sober since I was 21, reading every self-help book I could find, sitting on various therapists’ couches, and getting three degrees in psychology myself, I was stuck in a chronic fawn response. My dysfunctional relationships, my inability to set boundaries, my silenced voice—all of it traced back to this survival strategy. Naming it was the beginning of reclaiming myself.
2. People pleasing is a survival strategy, not a personality flaw.
People-pleasing and codependency are different symptoms of a chronic fawn response. These patterns often served a purpose in childhood. They helped you secure the love, safety, or connection you were dependent on. In that context, they were brilliant adaptive protectors. The body did what it needed to survive and reflexively responded in a nanosecond, without your conscious consent.
“Naming it was the beginning of reclaiming myself.”
The challenge is, we often carry these same responses into adulthood when they no longer serve us. Because they’re so deeply wired into our development, we often can’t see where we end, and fawning begins. We may think we’re just being nice or helpful, not realizing that we’re sacrificing our own authenticity.
People-pleasing often gets painted as a manipulative or submissive trait, but it’s about safety. If you learned that keeping others happy was the only way to avoid danger or abandonment, of course you kept doing it. The problem is, when you’re always attuned to what others want or need, you lose touch with yourself. You abandon you.
3. Fawning requires self-abandonment.
To survive your childhood, the various hierarchies of your life, you had to become who you needed to be—not who you truly were. That meant detaching from your inner world: instincts, intuition, insights, personality. You learned to shape-shift, edit yourself, and silence what was real in order to stay safe, loved, or simply tolerated.
The work of unfawning is the work of coming home to yourself. It means learning to go inward and listen to your own voice—your needs, your preferences, your truth—and starting to believe it matters. It means checking in with you first, before constantly attuning yourself to the moods, wants, or expectations of everyone else. This isn’t easy. It doesn’t happen overnight. But the gift of unfawning is finally starting to live a life that feels like yours.
“It means checking in with you first, before constantly attuning yourself to the moods, wants, or expectations of everyone else.”
I’ve seen this unfold time and again. I’ve had clients change careers entirely as they reconnect with their inner voice. I’ve seen people leave abusive relationships, not out of anger, but clarity. They begin to really see themselves for the first time. And they begin to seek alignment with who they truly are in their friendships, career goals, and even hobbies. Unfawning isn’t about being selfish. It’s about being real.
4. Unfawning doesn’t mean you’ll never fawn again.
Fawning may still feel like the safest option in some situations, and that’s ok. The goal isn’t total elimination. Rather, it’s creating more capacity, flexibility, and choice. Fawning should not be default mode. When you’re not trapped in it anymore, you can better assess and decide if fawning is the only (or best) way through a particular situation.
This work invites us to step out of an all-or-nothing mindset. We’re not aiming to go from broken to healed, or from unsafe to always safe. That’s not realistic. Unfawning is about:
- Growing your capacity for new emotional and relational territory.
- Learning to hold discomfort and risk vulnerability.
- Explore new ways of being.
It will feel scary. The nervous system will likely still equate discomfort with danger. But part of this work is learning to distinguish between the two. You’re forging a new path that may not have been modeled for you or ever felt possible. But with each step—each boundary set, each moment of truth spoken—you strengthen the muscles of self-trust.
5. Fawning is not your fault.
We live in a world that often requires fawning. From rigid, hierarchical work environments to patriarchal systems and racial inequity, many of us learned early on that being agreeable, accommodating, and non-threatening keeps us safe.
In systems that don’t recognize or value your full humanity, fawning isn’t weakness—it’s wisdom and adaptation. When we understand that, we can start seeing our behaviors with more compassion. We can stop blaming ourselves for doing what we had to do. And we can recognize the double binds we’re often placed in, where there is no good option or clear way out.
Our work is to grow beyond rigid coping, to move out of childhood patterns and into the rest of life—not by erasing what protected us, but by honoring it and then slowly moving into more internal safety. This isn’t a linear path, and there is no final destination. This is a lifelong journey of returning to yourself, again and again.
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