[0:00]

The term fawn response was introduced by a psychotherapist called Pete Walker around 2003. He was working extensively in the PTSD space and in codependency and noticed this additional response that people had that didn’t quite fit into the fight, flight or freeze responses we already knew about. He laid it out in more detail in a book published in 2013 called Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving.

Walker wasn’t inventing the concept of the fawn response. It had been observed in the animal kingdom and across mammals since the fifties. What he did was take an older concept and apply it clinically to treating people with complex trauma, placing it alongside fight, flight and freeze as a distinct response pattern.

[1:00]

When we look at polyvagal theory and Stephen Porges’ work, we start to see more layers here. Appeasing isn’t just a physiological strategy. It’s an automatic, nervous system-driven process of co-regulation. Your body is trying to regulate the other person’s state to make you safer. It’s an attempt to create safety.

What I want you to understand is that this isn’t just a pop psychology concept. There is an underlying response driven by decades of research that we’re learning more and more about. When we can name it and recognise it, it gives people a language for their experience and a starting point for finding new ways to communicate and be in relationship without fawning, without losing themselves in the process.

[3:00]

The fawn response. What it actually is.

Most people have heard of fight or flight, and some have heard of fight, flight or freeze. Very few have heard of fawn. Let me explain all four.

The fight response is to confront, argue, push back. Flight is to run away, exit, avoid, withdraw. Freeze is to shut down, go blank, sometimes lose the ability to speak. Fawn is to appease, smooth over, agree, make it okay for the other person at the cost of yourself.

It’s not a personality flaw. It’s a nervous system response. It happens so quickly that your body is reacting before your brain has had a chance to catch up. In polyvagal terms, your social engagement system is working in overdrive. You’re reading micro-cues in the other person’s face, their tone, their posture, and shaping yourself to their state, all in a split second, all before conscious awareness.

[4:30]

From the outside it doesn’t look like trauma. It looks like someone being nice, flexible, easy to get along with. That pattern is invisible precisely because it’s socially rewarding. There’s real benefit to being the easygoing one, the accommodating one. Which is part of what makes it so confronting to consider changing. Because you think, what am I giving up? I like being the nice person. I’ll come back to the distinction between being nice and fawning a bit later.

How this shows up in day-to-day life varies. What I see in the therapy room is a mixed bag.

For some people it’s apologising for things that weren’t their fault, and it happens so quickly. Someone bumps into you at the supermarket and you say sorry. If someone’s in a bad mood you’re apologising for something you didn’t do. From the people around them that can actually be quite irritating, frustrating, even infuriating. Some people take advantage of it.

Another way it shows up is abandoning your own opinion mid-conversation. You have a view on something, someone else has a contradictory one, and midway through you turn the conversation around. Oh yeah, actually you’re right, that’s what I meant too. Just agreeing with their perspective.

[5:00]

It could be agreeing with people you fundamentally disagree with, just to keep the peace. At work, at family dinners, in conversations with friends. This is very different from being boundaried and choosing the right time and place for different conversations. I know there are conversations at the dinner table I would avoid, and that’s not a fawn response. That’s knowing this particular conversation isn’t going to give us a good dinner and redirecting accordingly.

One of the other ways it shows up is a kind of shape-shifting. Being one way in one room, slightly different in another. Adjusting your views, your energy, your personality depending on who you’re with. Over time this can be really disorienting. You don’t know who you are anymore.

[6:30]

Some people also feel responsible for other people’s emotional states. If your boss or your partner is sad or upset, you find yourself trying to lift them up, being extra cheerful, trying to put them in a better mood because some part of you feels responsible for that. Or because in your experience, someone being in a bad mood meant something unsafe was about to follow. If your mum was stressed you absorbed it. If your boss was cranky you absorbed it, and you felt like it was your job to fix it.

[7:00]

The way I see it most often in couples therapy is what I call checking behaviours. Are you okay? Are we okay? Is everything fine? Constantly scanning to see if the other person is pleased. These patterns can be really harmful to relationships because they can feel inauthentic. Fawning is a form of dishonesty, and that kind of dishonesty can rupture relationships.

When the other person responds with a bit of distance or irritation, it actually increases the fawn response. If I’m asking my partner are we okay, is everything alright, and they say fine, just stop it, I think, oh no, they are upset, I was right, something’s wrong. The more I fawn the more irritable they might get, the more they snap back, and that cycle repeats itself.

[8:30]

Say you’ve got a friend who asks can you look after my dog. You say yeah, sure, no problem, and before you know it the dog is being dropped off and you’re thinking, I don’t even like dogs, I had plans this weekend. So the dog arrives and you’re being lovely about it, they leave, and you’re thinking, what have I done? This dog is going to chew my chairs. Your friend messages asking if everything’s good and you say yeah, it’s fine. Meanwhile you’re slowly getting resentful. Then you start thinking, why does she always assume I’ll do this? When I ask for a favour nobody ever says yes.

When you start seeing those resentments coming up, that’s a sign you’ve been fawning rather than holding your boundaries. When you say no to something, your yes has much more value. The relationship can stay intact when you say no. In fact, over time when you say no and then say yes because you genuinely can, that yes has real power and trust builds.

[10:00]

Learning to understand the difference between discomfort and safety is going to be significant in managing the fawn response.

Why does fawning get mistaken for being a good person?

From the outside, fawning can be indistinguishable from genuine kindness, generosity or being a warm person. In a single interaction they can look identical. Culturally we reward fawning. The easy colleague, the low-maintenance friend, the accommodating partner. There are real social prizes for this behaviour. Women get rewarded more heavily for it than men. Being agreeable gets reinforced as being feminine, being a good girl, being nice.

[11:00]

People with a fawn response are often praised their whole lives for the exact trait that’s slowly hurting them. She’s so easy to be around. He’s so thoughtful. She’s just so easygoing. That praise is a trap. It can leave someone unable to get their needs met. It can leave relationships feeling inauthentic. It leads to a build-up of resentment, and for a lot of the people I see in my therapy room, they feel like they fit in but don’t belong. They get through interactions and conversations but no one really knows them and no one shows up for them. It happens gradually, not all at once. It gets slowly chipped away.

There is a real cost to that invisible trait. You can’t fix what you can’t see. Most people carrying this pattern don’t even know they have it. They just know they’re tired and resentful and can’t quite work out why.

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For most people, the fawn response starts early in childhood.

It tends to emerge in environments where other people’s emotions felt dangerous. Usually negative emotions. We rarely find someone’s joy or enthusiasm threatening. It’s usually their frustration, anger, anxiety, or possibly depression. Or if there was substance use and someone came home in an altered state. Certain emotions signalled that something unsafe might follow. A fight might erupt. Someone might get violent, belittling, unkind. We might observe this in a parent or sibling and learn ways to try to prevent it from happening.

It doesn’t have to involve physical danger, though that is a significant factor. More often it’s when a parent’s anger or disappointment felt catastrophic, even if nothing physical happened. When you’re little your parents are huge influences. That relationship, that connection, feels essential. To feel like it could be threatened at any point literally feels like a life or death situation. So you learn ways to manoeuvre around it. If their disappointment felt threatening, you tried very hard not to disappoint them. And those patterns come with you into adulthood.

[13:30]

It can also come from environments where love felt conditional. Where affection and approval were earned through being agreeable rather than freely given. Where you got warmth and praise when you were being a good girl, and things got withdrawn when you were seen as being difficult or uncooperative.

It can show up in families where disagreement is seen as disloyal, where having a different opinion got you labelled as the problem child or the difficult one. I’ve seen this recently in some of the people I work with where they genuinely don’t know how to ask for what they need as adults. They can’t even suggest a restaurant because they never felt they had a say. That instinct has come into adult relationships. Someone asks where they want to go for dinner and they say I don’t mind, whatever you want, not because they’re genuinely indifferent but because they’re scared of getting it wrong. What if I suggest pizza and they can’t eat gluten? What if I pick somewhere that turns out to be bad? All of those thoughts are surrounding it.

[15:00]

That’s different from genuinely not minding. For me, if a friend asks where I want to go for dinner and I actually don’t have a strong preference, I’ll say I’m happy with anything other than pizza, do you want to pick something near you? We have a conversation about it. It doesn’t feel loaded.

The difference isn’t in the words you use. From the outside someone might not be able to tell. It’s only in knowing how it feels for you. When I’m working with someone, we’re looking at the effect on the person rather than what the people around them observe. When you’re questioning, am I going to get in trouble, am I going to get it wrong, what if I do this, that’s a fawn response.

[16:00]

For some people the fawn response develops in households with big emotions and very little space for yours. An unwell parent. Someone struggling with their own mental health. A volatile or very critical parent. The child learns to scan and adjust constantly.

Sometimes it comes from generational patterns. A parent who modelled fawning and couldn’t tolerate their child having a different inner world. There are so many ways it can be created.

Why fawning rather than fight or flight?

Sometimes a child has no option to fight. They’d lose. They’re little. They have no option to flee. Where would they go? Fawning is a very available strategy for children. It worked. The tension lifted. Saying yep, fine, food’s great, when you really wanted pizza, and the fight was avoided. The nervous system files that away. Good strategy. This worked. We’ll do that again. And so it keeps going.

[17:30]

I want to share an example. Someone with a parent who had serious mental health issues. The parent was doing the best they could, but this person learned to shrink a little, to have fewer needs, to not ask for things. They didn’t ask for treats. If they mentioned a present they wanted at Christmas it might have been seen as too expensive and comments were made about money. So they learned to not say what they wanted. When it came to school, how their day was, anything, everything was yep, fine, okay. What sport do you want to play? Your brother’s doing this, do you want to do the same? Yep, sure.

As an adult that shows up as not knowing what you like. You might ask them do they feel like Thai or pizza and they genuinely don’t know. Not because they have no preferences but because they’ve been so conditioned to watch how others will respond to their answer that they haven’t considered what they might actually want.

That’s also really hard for the people around them. What would bring you joy? What would be exciting or interesting to you? What’s your identity? Because it keeps changing. They might like one thing with one person and something different with another.

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If this is you, starting to recognise those traits in yourself is the first step. Be really kind with yourself about it. This was a strategy you learned to keep yourself safe. Our brains and bodies do remarkable things to protect us. In adult life those tools can sometimes be more costly than helpful. They came from a good place and we might need to add some new things alongside them so we can be more authentically ourselves without that resentment and without losing who we are.

[20:00]

What is it actually costing you?

Your needs never get met because you don’t name them. Over time this builds into a low-level chronic resentment. Not the loud kind. Sometimes it can be the instant, I wish I hadn’t done that. More often it’s the quiet type that slowly changes how you feel about the people you love.

Maybe you start thinking, nobody really knows me, they don’t understand me, they don’t show up for me. If I’m sick nobody comes with chicken soup. I’d do that for someone else. You start making conclusions about people’s care for you based on that. And it creates negative loops around people’s affection.

You lose your sense of what you actually want. After years of calibrating to other people, the question of what do you feel like for dinner can feel genuinely unanswerable.

[21:00]

There’s a physical cost too. Chronic fawning keeps your nervous system in a low-grade stress state. A tight jaw. Shallow breath. A shortened fuse. Tiredness that sleep doesn’t fix. A low-level hum where you never quite feel entirely relaxed.

You can lose touch with your own preferences, your own opinions, your own emotional responses. Some clients describe it as not knowing who they are anymore. I’m like this with this group, and like this with that group, and I don’t know who I actually am.

[22:00]

Fawning creates distance, not closeness. I know. You’re going to think no, no, I keep people close, I keep them pleased. When it’s fawning it creates distance. That’s the counterintuitive part. It feels like closeness because you’re accommodating, but genuine intimacy requires two people to show up. If one of you is always agreeing and disappearing into what the other person needs, the other person is in a relationship with a mirror. Mirrors don’t make you feel close. They make you feel lonely.

When I work with couples where one partner fawns, the partner of them often says things like: I don’t really know you. You don’t share your inner world with me. I feel lonely when we’re together. I don’t know what you actually think. They want connection. They want difference of opinion. They want to know what you actually think and feel and want.

Intimacy requires difference. It requires you to say I see things differently, or that doesn’t work for me, or what you did hurt my feelings, and for the relationship to stay intact. Fawning removes all of that. It removes the very thing that closeness is built on.

[23:00]

What do you actually do about it?

Start with noticing. You don’t have to change anything yet. If you’re listening to this and thinking, this is me, that recognition is a huge first step. The first step isn’t to stop fawning. It’s to see it happening.

Notice the physical cue first. Maybe your jaw tenses, your stomach drops, your breathing changes or goes shallow, or there’s an urge to apologise or change the subject. That’s the fawn response. It lives in the body before it’s entered the mind. Try to notice those sensations.

[23:30]

Buy some time.

One of the strategies I use with clients is to create even a pause. Five seconds. One, two, three, four, five. That can feel excruciating, but take a breath and try: let me check and get back to you.

So if your friend rings and they want you to puppy-sit, don’t say sure, that’d be great. Say let me check and get back to you. Let me confirm with my partner, let me check my diary, let me see what else I have on. Buy yourself some time. That’s the single most useful phrase. Let me check and get back to you.

If it’s a text message you don’t have to respond immediately. Depending on how urgent, it might be within half an hour. For other things it might be by the end of the week. You do have to get back to them. You can’t just avoid it. But buying that time is the first thing to practise.

[25:00]

Learning to tolerate the discomfort of disappointing someone is the real work. I’ll talk about this in more detail in an upcoming series on boundaries. But you have to learn to sit with the discomfort that comes with someone being disappointed. Understanding that they might say, oh no, I was really hoping you could look after the puppy. And being able to say I understand, I still can’t. Clear is kind. You can be kind and be clear. If that feels too hard, start with buying some time first.

Disappointing someone is not abandoning them. Saying no is not cruel. The guilt you feel when holding a small boundary is not evidence that you did the wrong thing. Discomfort doesn’t mean something’s unsafe. Learning that difference, that me saying no and that feeling uncomfortable doesn’t mean the relationship is under threat, is enormous.

[26:00]

Start with low-stakes moments.

Don’t start with the most difficult conversation of your life. Start small. When someone asks where you want to eat, say something. I wouldn’t mind some Japanese food actually. There are a few places in the city I’d like to check out. The pub near me does a really good parma, could we go there? Have a preference. If this question comes up regularly, have some go-to places ready. Do some Googling. Figure out what you like, what your budget is, what’s near you. So the next time someone asks you have something to say.

Think about when you get invited to things. Do you actually want to go to that concert, that movie, that show? Does it match what you’re interested in? Can you afford it? Being able to say I’d love to catch up, that show’s not really my thing, could we meet for a drink beforehand or dinner afterwards? That’s a complete response.

[28:00]

The third practice is with TV shows and movies. Next time a friend or partner or housemate says do you want to watch this, instead of just going along with it, try saying that’s not really my thing. Or let’s find something we both like. Or I don’t feel like watching that tonight. Practice in the low-stakes environments.

Small honest conversations will feel hard. The nervous system needs to learn a new way of responding to disagreement. Each time you let yourself be real and your body sees nothing catastrophic happens, you teach your body a new pattern.

[29:00]

Think of it like rebuilding fitness. You can’t go from not running to running a 10-kilometre race. You start small. Maybe 60 seconds of running. Maybe one kilometre. You might be able to tolerate less than other people and that’s fine. The goal is to push through the discomfort to grow, while not causing injury. Finding that balance matters for communication too. It’s going to be hard. It’s going to be awkward. You might be out of breath because you haven’t done it before. Over time it gets easier. Practice makes progress, not perfection.

[30:00]

If you’re struggling to do this on your own, it’s worth finding a trauma-informed therapist who can help you understand what’s genuinely underneath these patterns, what purpose they’ve served, what they’re costing you, and how to do things differently.

[31:00]

Q&A: Is fawning the same as people pleasing?

This is a really common question. There’s a distinction. People pleasing is a behaviour you can observe from the outside: saying yes, going along with things, being accommodating, smoothing things over. Fawning is the nervous system mechanism underneath. It’s what’s driving the behaviour.

Not all people pleasing is fawning. Sometimes you’re genuinely thoughtful or generous, or you’re being strategic. It becomes fawning when it’s compulsive, automatic and anxiety-driven. The only way to know the difference is what’s happening for you internally. When the yes is out of your mouth before you’ve even thought about it, when you find it impossible to say no, that’s fawning.

It matters because fawning is a nervous system response that requires a different kind of work to shift.

[32:00]

Q&A: Is fawning always a trauma response?

No, not always. Genuine kindness exists. Genuine generosity exists. Being a thoughtful person isn’t a pathology. The difference is whether it feels chosen or compelled. If you’ve considered it and you said yes and you’re okay with it afterwards, that’s genuine. If your body said yes before your brain caught up and afterwards you feel depleted, resentful or confused about why you agreed, that’s fawning.

It’s not always trauma. It can come from childhood environments, certain family structures, that weren’t traumatic but didn’t allow for developing the capacity to say no. That said, for some people the danger behind it was real. Violence, physical harm, severe neglect or abuse. When you’re completely dependent on your family, when it literally is life or death, it shapes behaviours profoundly.

[33:00]

Q&A: How do I know if I’m fawning or just being nice?

The best test is a body test. If the idea of saying no fills you with dread and anxiety, chances are it’s a fawn response. Genuine kindness leaves you feeling warm and connected, maybe tired, but okay with it. Looking after my neighbour’s three dogs can be chaotic but I genuinely enjoy it.

Fawning leaves you depleted, resentful, and often unsure why you said yes. Genuine generosity comes from a sense of choice. Fawning comes from a sense of survival even when there’s no actual threat.

Another marker is who you do it with. Fawning tends to spike around specific people. Authority figures, parents, bosses, partners, anyone whose disapproval or anger feels disproportionately scary. If you can hold your ground with most people but completely lose yourself around one or two, that’s useful information about that dynamic.

[35:30]

Q&A: Can fawning develop in adulthood or does it have to start in childhood?

It usually starts in childhood, in environments where appeasing kept you safe. It can also be developed or deepened in adulthood through long-term exposure to unsafe relationships or environments. Abusive partners. Controlling or volatile workplaces. Chronically unstable family systems. Caregiver roles where you’re responsible for managing someone else’s emotional state. The nervous system can learn this as a strategy at any age if the conditions repeat for long enough.

It’s also why some people leave difficult relationships and discover they’re fawning in their next one. The pattern was reinforced, not created, in the last relationship.

Cultural and systemic factors also matter here. Marginalised groups often develop fawning as a survival strategy in response to systemic threat, not just individual relationships. Some people have to do what they have to do to keep themselves safe. Fawning can be an extremely useful strategy in those contexts.

[36:30]

Q&A: Does fawning go away once you recognise it?

I wish. Knowing something is the first step, not the last. The pattern lives in the nervous system, not just the thinking part of the brain. You can’t think your way out of it.

It softens through repetition, through practice, through being honest and not being punished for it. Each small no that doesn’t end a relationship is data for your body. Each small disagreement that gets met with curiosity instead of anger teaches your nervous system something new. Over time the response gets quieter and more manageable.

Therapy that works somatically can be really helpful. Things like somatic experiencing, EMDR, internal family systems, and schema therapy can all be useful for trying to find new ways of communicating that don’t cost you so much.

It takes time. Usually not weeks. Often years. It absolutely can shift.

[37:30]

The fawn response was protective. It made sense when you needed it. Letting go isn’t betraying anything. It’s outgrowing something you no longer need.

You don’t owe anyone the version of yourself that can’t say no.

Small shifts in everyday moments are what change this, not one single brave conversation. Start small this week. Notice one moment where you say yes when you mean no, and see if you can buy yourself five seconds before you answer. That’s the whole practice.

Sometimes the kindest people in the room are the ones with the deepest fawn response. They’ve learned to extend all that care outward and very little inward. You’re allowed to turn some of that inward. You’re allowed to care about you.

The fawn response is a pattern, not a personality. You built it for a reason and you can unbuild it with practice.

Thanks for listening. If this one resonated, share it with someone who might need it. Take care.