Beyond People Pleasing: Understanding the Fawn Response

“You were not born to be quiet” -Nyyirah Waheed

So many of us know what it’s like to feel safest when we’re disappearing—when peace depends on how well we can read the room.

In her new book, Are You Mad at Me?, Meg Josephson captures something many of us feel but rarely name—the anxious flutter that rises when someone’s tone shifts, the impulse to smooth things over, to make ourselves smaller just to keep the peace. She gives voice to a deep and often invisible survival strategy: fawning.

From a somatic perspective, fawning isn’t about being “too nice” or “codependent.” It’s a biological reflex of connection under threat. When fight or flight aren’t possible—or safe—because the danger is relational, subtle, or chronic, the body finds another path to safety: appeasement. Our nervous systems orient toward the other person’s cues, scanning for micro-expressions, modulating our tone, and abandoning our own boundaries in the hope of preserving attachment. 

As a somatic psychotherapist, I see this not as pathology but as the body’s procedural memory of protection. What we often call “people-pleasing” isn’t a personality flaw; it’s a survival reflex shaped by both our personal histories and the cultures that taught us goodness equals safety. The impulse to please, smooth, or rescue often began in environments where connection was conditional—where anger or autonomy led to withdrawal, shame, or punishment. Where we learned, “If I can sense your mood and keep you calm, I’ll survive.” Over time, that strategy becomes embodied: chest collapsed, breath held high, voice softened, jaw tight behind a practiced smile.

The Biology of Appeasement

Neurobiologically, fawning reflects a hybrid state of a body under threat. There’s sympathetic arousal—urgency to appease—and dorsal vagal collapse—self-silencing and loss of agency. The ventral vagal system, designed for authentic social engagement, becomes co-opted in service of survival. Our neuroception reads danger in disapproval, and the body acts before thought: leaning in, apologizing, caretaking. It’s not a choice; it’s reflexive.

Pete Walker describes this beautifully in Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving, naming the “fawn type” as the survivor who seeks safety through compliance and caretaking. In somatic terms, the body has learned that safety equals appeasement. Healing begins when we can sense that impulse arise and bring gentle curiosity to it, rather than shame.

But our nervous systems don’t operate in isolation. They learn what to fear, what to appease, and what to suppress within the cultures that raise us.

Fawning as Contextual, Not Personal

It’s essential to see fawning through an anti-oppressive lens. Certain identities and social locations make appeasement more adaptive—sometimes necessary.

• Power and relational hierarchy: Fawning often occurs in contexts where one person holds more power—whether that’s an employer → employee dynamic, a man → woman dynamic, a white person → a person of colour dynamic or many other status differentials. The nervous system senses relational threat and may shift into compliance to maintain attachment, avoid rejection, or simply survive.

• Gender conditioning and the body: Many women and femmes are socialized to equate worth with likability and care. As Elise Loehnen explores in On Our Best Behaviour, this conditioning traces back to centuries-old moral frameworks—particularly those rooted in patriarchal and religious systems—that taught women to suppress instinctual drives such as anger, pride, and desire in favor of selflessness, modesty, and restraint. Goodness became synonymous with self-abandonment.

From a somatic perspective, this moral training lives in the body: the held breath of politeness, the softened voice of agreement, the collapsed posture of deference. Generations of women have learned to hold their tongues, cross their legs, lower their voices—gestures of containment that became the choreography of survival under patriarchy.

Seen this way, fawning isn’t merely an individual or relational reflex—it’s also a cultural inheritance, a nervous-system imprint shaped by centuries of gendered expectation and moral conditioning. Feminist writers such as Audre Lorde and bell hooks remind us that reclaiming our voice, boundaries, and anger is not rebellion but restoration—a return to our embodied truth and rightful power. Healing the fawn response thus becomes both personal and collective work: releasing not only our own fear of disapproval but the inherited belief that safety requires us to disappear.

• Race and culture: For people of colour, the impulse to “fit in” with dominant white culture (code-switching) can be a form of fawning—modulating voice, posture, behaviour, and expression to match expectations or culture of the dominant group for the sake of safety, inclusion, or advancement.

In My Grandmother’s Hands, Resmaa Menakem shares a story that has stayed with me: what he does as a black man in America when he’s pulled over by the police. He describes consciously keeping his hands visible, softening his body, smiling, and speaking calmly—actions that are not expressions of ease, but of embodied vigilance. His body knows that survival, in that moment, depends on appeasement. To me, it’s a powerful example of fawning in a racialized context—how the nervous system instinctively moves toward safety through de-escalation, even when the threat is systemic rather than personal. It captures the intelligence of the body’s survival responses and the immense cost of living in a world where certain bodies must constantly negotiate safety through submission.He reminds us that “white-body supremacy…doesn’t live in our thinking brains. It lives and breathes in our bodies.” This understanding illuminates how fawning, across contexts, can be both adaptive and deeply intelligent in systems marked by power and threat.

“Our bodies are where we store the memories of our cultural trauma. When we heal the body, we begin to heal the culture”. -Resma Menakem

From an IFS perspective, fawning conditioning in the context of power dynamics (i.e. gendered, racial etc.)  can be understood as a collective legacy burden—a pattern of survival and adaptation that has been internalized not only individually but across generations or cultures. In IFS, parts of us carry burdens that do not originate in our personal story; they are inherited through culture, lineage, and collective trauma. The fawn response can therefore express not only our own learned strategies for safety, but also ancestral or societal memories of what was once required to belong and survive.

Coming Home to the Body

In somatic healing, we work gently with the body to reclaim agency and authentic expression. Pat Ogden, founder of Sensorimotor Psychotherapy, invites us to notice the physical organization of fawning—the subtle lean forward, the softened voice, the held breath. These micro-movements are the body’s procedural memory of connection and protection. In the moment, they were wise and adaptive. Over time, though, they can constrain our sense of vitality and truth.

Small embodied experiments—releasing a held exhale, allowing the spine to lengthen, feeling the support of the floor—begin to re-pattern the body’s sense of safety. Over time, the system learns that connection can coexist with truth. Boundaries don’t sever belonging; they make it more real.

As we begin to sense and soften these patterns, something extraordinary happens: the same body that once kept us small becomes the ground for our truth. The muscles that once held tension for safety begin to hold strength for expression.

Honouring the Fawn

When I think of fawning now, I see loyalty—the body’s unwavering commitment to keep us safe and connected, no matter the cost. The healing isn’t in exiling that part, but in thanking it, and integrating it back to the wholeness of self. Recognizing and meeting these parts with compassion allows us to move from unconscious reaction to embodied choice.

It’s also important to acknowledge that not everyone has the privilege or safety to stop fawning. For some, appeasement remains a necessary survival strategy—whether in an abusive relationship, a toxic workplace, or within broader systems that still punish boundary and truth. In these contexts, the goal isn’t to force change, but to gently witness the body’s intelligence and to create pockets of safety—internal or external—where authenticity can begin to return. Healing the fawn response becomes possible not through pressure, but through increasing real, lived safety. This is not just a personal call to healing, but a collective one. Each time one of us reclaims space in our body, we loosen the collective inheritance of silence. The nervous system remembers: safety can include truth.

Reflection & Embodiment Practice

These invitations are designed to help you connect with your own patterns of fawning from a place of compassion and curiosity, not judgment. Move slowly, breathe often, and stop if anything feels overwhelming.

1. Body Awareness: When you notice yourself softening, pleasing, or appeasing, what happens in your body? Can you sense changes in posture, voice, or breath?

   
   

2. Somatic Curiosity: What happens if you pause and allow the impulse to fawn to slow down—even slightly? What sensations emerge underneath the appeasement?

   
   

3. Parts Compassion: Which inner part(s) might be leading in these moments? Can you meet that part with gratitude for how it’s tried to keep you safe? What part(s) oppose or resist your fawn part(s)?

   
   

4. Cultural & Social Awareness: In what ways have you been taught that being “good” or “easy” keeps you safe? How does this conditioning live in your body?

   
   

5. Power & Relational Awareness: In which relationships do you notice relational hierarchies or power differentials that trigger your fawning impulse? How might your body respond differently if you sensed connection and agency both being honored? Are there identities or relationships where you hold power? How do you help others with less power feel safe in your presence?

   
   

6. Re-embodiment: What does it feel like to stand, sit, or breathe as if you belong here—fully and without shrinking? How might it feel to let your body take up just a little more space? Explore slowly titrating into taking up more space with your body, movement, and voice.

   
   

7. Gratitude for the Fawn: Write a short note to the part of you that fawns. Acknowledge what it’s done for you, and gently let it know you’re learning new ways to stay safe.

Lohnen, E. (2023). On our best behavior: The seven deadly sins and the price women pay to be good. Dial Press.

Menakem, R. (2017). My grandmother’s hands: Racialized trauma and the pathway to mending our hearts and bodies. Central Recovery Press.

Ogden, P., Minton, K., & Pain, C. (2006). Trauma and the body: A sensorimotor approach to psychotherapy. W. W. Norton & Company.

Walker, P. (2013). Complex PTSD: From surviving to thriving: A guide and map for recovering from childhood trauma. Azure Coyote Press.

Josephson, M. (2024). Are you mad at me? How to stop focusing on what others think and start focusing on yourself. HarperOne.