Fawning: why we mirror, merge and self-abandon

Seven years ago, I read Pete Walker’s book on complex PTSD, and it was the first time I truly understood the nervous system response of Fawning. I had known the behaviour as “people pleasing,” but I hadn’t realised until then that fawning was a protective response our body utilises. As I explored it more deeply, I realised it was everywhere and that it was not a personality trait, but a strategy our system uses to keep us safe, particularly in the face of a power-over dynamic.

How many times had I sat in conversations in the workplace where a person was labelled a people pleaser as it if was a personality flaw with no true understanding or curiousity of what was driving it. Let alone acknowledgement that this person does not feel safe. I realised right then that fawning shows up in so many ways. I see it in people who over-function, some organisations are run off the back of employing a workforce who constantly does this. Entire customer service cultures are built on fawning.

Fawning is a nervous system strategy that supports us to stay in connection when we feel unsafe and we are in a double bind; where there are real consequences for us not to fawn. We all do it. Women are a little more predisposed to it because we have lots of estrogen and oxytocin is the neuromodulator of our body. What that means is that bonding and connection helps us regulate and process our lives. It can come up at anytime because it is a strategy your autonomic nervous system uses to keep you safe. If it doesn’t work you go to fight and flight, then freeze. It is a cascade.

Men fawn too, not to soothe, but to belong. Male fawning often looks like “fitting in,” but underneath is the same physiology. In very masculine coded work cultures you see this all the time. Men fawn to avoid being the odd one out. They mute their sensitivity or complexity, mimic bravado or certainty, abandon their authentic relational needs and shape-shift to avoid being shamed.

Digital Art, Kellie Stirling. Woman merged with nature

When we fawn we shapeshift, so we morph into a version of ourselves that feels the most likely to keep us safe. For some people, fawning looks like becoming more of who they are; more charming, smart, generous, funny or adored. For other people it is about being less of who you are; less vocal, creative, smart, self-assured or even able to set boundaries. Fawning shows up sexually, in money situations or, in the constant emotional regulation of other people.

We all know about fight, flight and freeze. The fawning response is different because it is a hybrid of these. The hyperarousal part of fawning encourages us to lean into relationships that are causing us harm so we to appease the person. The flight response, self-abandoning to stay safe. The hypoarousal part, or freeze part, numbs our connection to our needs and desires, so we don’t feel the effects of the harm we are experiencing.

When we fawn, we mirror or merge with someone else’s desires or expectations of us to stay safe. We do this to defuse potential conflict because that is our best chance of maintaining safety. In most of these situations there is a power over relationship. Someone has power over us. When we merge or mirror, whilst it keeps us safe, we forgo our own desires and agency and become overly accommodating of others. We become shapeshifters moulding ourselves to each scenario and person. We abandon ourselves, what we care about, our opinions, desires and what we value.

Fawning is so culturally imbued in our society that we are conditioned from a young age to do it. Think of these statements: “give your uncle a kiss”, “be the better person”, “take the high road’, “be a team player’, “you have to learn to compartmentalise it'‘, “just go with it”. We say these every day and they normalise fawning.

Fawning is a common coping system for people dealing with ongoing relational trauma. It also occurs in larger systems of oppression or marginalisation where we must let go of aspects of ourselves to secure membership or a sense of belonging. Over time fawning becomes a systemic pattern.

Individuals don’t just fawn, systems induce fawning. Some examples I see frequently include: A leader who is dysregulated will have a whole team fawning to avoid triggering them. A family with a narcissistic parent creates children who become emotional caregivers or family systems with rigid hierarchy. Workplaces where vulnerability is punished. Relationships where one partner regulates through dominance.

Fawning is not a personal pathology; it’s a predictable adaptation to power-over cultures. So you can see it is not about being nice, it is a nervous system adaptation to relational power dynamics.

One of the deepest wounds of fawning I have observed is the disconnection from anger. Many fawners cannot feel their anger; not because it isn't there, but because it has been repressed for survival. Anger felt too dangerous, too destabilising, too likely to provoke retaliation or abandonment.

So internally, they learned that their anger was not safe and put them at risk. The thing is their anger doesn’t disappear, it goes underground. Into the unconscious.

Over time, this suppressed anger can turn into resentment, chronic tension because you are constantly bracing, exhaustion or collapse, health issues particularly autoimmune issues and a fierce inner critic who constantly self blames.

Restoring healthy aggression, the energy of our boundaries, clarity, and self-protection is essential. But it must be done slowly. Really slowly. Because letting that much anger thaw all at once can overwhelm the system that originally buried it to stay safe.

How do we stop Fawning?

Well it starts with finding safety in the body. You can’t talk yourself out of a fawn response nor can you mindset your way through it. Your nervous system needs to feel safe in the body to try anything new.

The work looks like being able to notice the early cues the anticipatory smile, the shallow breath, the scanning of the other person’s mood and gently interrupting the impulse to fix or appease. Learning to feel tiny drops of healthy anger in an incredibly titrated, slow and digestible way. Allowing the internal critic to soften, which often happens naturally when anger can finally move outward instead of being turned inward

Learning to stop the fawn process from being pervasive is the process of reclaiming power-within, instead of surviving through power-over dynamics. Our fawning response is wisdom it is not a flaw. It has kept us safe and will continue to do so, when we need it in the moment. Our fawn has kept the peace and helped us to function in environments that could not hold our full aliveness.

It is profoundly healing for us to notice our fawn patterns (and to continue to be able to notice them in the moment) and gently let them loosen their grip. Over time it becomes a survival strategy we have access to, not our default mode of functioning. When you start to let go of it you are not losing the nice aspect of yourself, you are becoming more You.

Breaking the cycles of ancestral trauma, a pathway to freedom

One of the hardest growth challenges I have noticed in my family, friends and clients is the coming to terms with our own ancestral trauma that is passed down through family systems. There comes a time in most people’s lives, a stage in adulthood, when we see our parents for the human being they really are. We see their fragility, their own adaptive childhood survival strategies, and for most of us, this point in time is very confronting. Because even though we are adults ourselves, we are still their children.

When we get curious about our own adaptive strategies, we start to see patterns passed down through family systems and there is a particular kind of sadness that comes when we begin to uncover the depths of the trauma that lives within our family systems.

It’s the grief of realising that those who raised us—our parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles—may have been deeply disembodied, cut off from their own emotional landscapes, and perhaps unable to truly connect with themselves, let alone with us. We can experience a heartbreak that carries a sense of loss, not just for what we personally endured, but for the generations before us who never had the chance to break these patterns. For what they personally suffered.

The symptoms you may be experiencing, whether they by psychological or physical may not just be your story. They be the voice of an entire lineage of your ancestors - one that never got to grieve, express their anger or speak up freely.

As we peel back the layers of our own survival strategies and touch the rawness of our deepest wounds, we often discover that our parents were children once, too—perhaps trapped in their own survival responses, shaped by environments that never taught them to feel or to fully inhabit their bodies. We come to see how their nervous systems, often locked in chronic states of freeze, fight, or flight, struggled to find a sense of safety, just as ours have.

"You are the medicine, the one who can transform the pain of your lineage into love and liberation." – Unknown

This is what we mean when we say the body keeps the score across generations. When grief wasn’t processed, when rage wasn’t allowed or was punished, when speaking up freely was unsafe - all of those emotions didn’t disappear because the stress cycle was not able to be completed. They become stored in the body. They are carried an often passed on.

This awareness can open a well of grief, a mourning for the parents we needed but never truly had, and acknowledging the parenting they received that wasn’t attuned to their needs. It can be excruciating to confront the emotional immaturity or disconnection we see in those we love, and to reckon with the reality that they may never be capable of meeting us in the depths where we’ve begun to live. This is not just a loss of connection, but a loss of potential, of the kind of love and relationship we yearned for and perhaps still do.

Yet, within this grief lies an invitation to reclaim our own aliveness. As we touch these deep places within ourselves, we begin to unearth the layers of ancestral pain, shedding the weight of unspoken histories that live in our tissues. We can choose to break these cycles, to live more fully in our bodies, to find the connection and safety that may have been missing for generations. This is the work of becoming embodied, of coming home to ourselves even when our family could not.

As we move through this, it’s important to honour the complexity of what we feel. To allow our sadness, anger, disappointment, resentment and grief to rise, to be held and processed, rather than pushed aside. In doing this, we give ourselves the chance to break the cycle, to break free from the survival strategies that once served us but no longer define us. We offer ourselves the possibility of living a life that isn’t just a reaction to the past but a conscious choice toward wholeness and connection.

This is deep somatic work that is required because these patterns that we are carrying are wired into our system down to a cellular level.

This kind of deep work is often cyclical, arising in layers over time, each wave bringing a deeper sense of clarity and a renewed capacity for compassion. It can be heart-wrenching and beautiful all at once—a reminder that, even amidst the heartbreak of what never was, we hold the power to reshape what can be. The pain or despair you may be feeling are your body speaking to you in its language, asking you to take notice, offering you a pathway through. Asking you to feel them, to honour them, to release them.

This isn’t just healing for you, it is healing an ancestral line. Perhaps this is where true freedom lies—in the messy, heartbreaking, awe-inspiring work of becoming more human, more whole, and, ultimately, more authentically ourselves.