You’ve probably heard of fight, flight, and freeze – the three survival responses your
nervous system deploys when it senses danger. What most people haven’t heard of is
the fourth one. The one that looks nothing like survival. The one that looks, from the
outside, like generosity.
It’s called fawning.
Fawning is what happens when you learn early in life that conflict is dangerous, that
your needs are too much, and that the safest way to exist is to make yourself
indispensable to the people around you. Instead of fighting, fleeing, or freezing, you
appease. You accommodate. You pour yourself out for others until there is very little left,
and then you pour some more – because the alternative, standing still long enough to
ask what you need, feels terrifying.
The term was first introduced by therapist Pete Walker to describe a trauma response
common in people who experienced childhood emotional neglect or unpredictable
environments. Fawning develops as a survival strategy: if I can just anticipate what
everyone needs, stay useful, stay pleasant, stay necessary – I will be safe. I will be kept.
Here is what makes fawning so difficult to recognize: it masquerades as virtue.
The woman who always says yes doesn’t look traumatized. She looks dependable. The
one who never asks for anything doesn’t look like someone managing a nervous system
on high alert. She looks selfless. The one who shows up for every crisis that isn’t hers
doesn’t look like someone who never learned her own worth isn’t contingent on her
usefulness. She looks like a leader.
I know this because I was her.
For most of my life I confused over-giving with love. I confused endurance with strength.
I believed that if I worked hard enough, gave generously enough, held everything
together long enough, I would finally earn the thing I had been reaching for since I was
nine years old, standing at a chalkboard while a room full of children called me names
and my teachers said nothing: safety. Belonging. The permanent kind that couldn’t be
revoked.
It took losing everything – my career, my mother, my sense of who I was – before I could
finally see what I had been doing. I hadn’t been giving from abundance. I had been
giving from fear.
Recognizing fawning in yourself doesn’t happen all at once. It happens in small
moments of honesty – when you notice you said yes before you even thought about
whether you wanted to, when you realize you’ve been managing someone else’s
emotions instead of acknowledging your own, when you understand that the exhaustion
you carry isn’t from the work itself but from the constant performance of someone who
never needs anything.
If any of this sounds familiar, you are not broken. You adapted. Your nervous system
learned what it needed to learn to keep you safe in an environment where your needs
weren’t reliably met. That strategy made sense when you were small. It may have
carried you a very long way.
But survival is not the same as living.
The work – and it is work – is learning to tell the difference between genuine generosity
and fear wearing generosity’s face. It is learning to ask, before you say yes: Am I doing
this because I want to, or because I’m afraid of what happens if I don’t?
That question alone can change everything.
Sheri Boelter spent three decades leading behavioral health nonprofits and is the author
of the forthcoming memoir Not What They Said I Was, a book about dyslexia, identity,
and the long work of learning to stop proving and start belonging.