Why Can’t I Say No? Is Your ‘Niceness’ Actually the Fawning Trauma Response?

Am I Just a People Pleaser? How to Stop Fawning and Finally Set Boundaries That Stick

Struggling to set boundaries? You might be dealing with fawning, the often-missed fourth trauma response that mimics people-pleasing. Learn how to distinguish toxic appeasement from genuine kindness, understand the roots of complex trauma, and find practical somatic tools to reclaim your authenticity in this expert guide.

Stop abandoning yourself to keep others comfortable—read the full guide below to learn the simple somatic exercises that will help you break the cycle of fawning today.

Genres

Psychology, Communication Skills, Mindfulness & Happiness, Personal Development

Break free from the invisible survival pattern keeping you stuck.

Fawning (2025) reveals a little-known trauma response that explains why some people react docile and sweet in response to threat. Analyzing real-life stories of trauma survivors, this thoughtful guide shows how behaviors like people-pleasing and avoiding conflict develop as ways to stay safe, but become harmful habits. It offers practical tools to spot harmful patterns in your own life and break free from the cycle to become your true self again.

Ever find yourself saying yes when you mean no, or staying in situations that hurt you? You might be fawning – enacting a subconscious trauma response that keeps you trapped in harmful patterns while appearing perfectly functional on the surface.

This summary reveals why traditional advice to “just set boundaries” often fails with this pattern, and offers a radically different approach rooted in neuroscience and somatic healing. You’ll discover practical tools to recognize fawning in your daily life, reconnect with your authentic needs, and reclaim the parts of yourself that went into hiding for survival.

Whether you’re wrestling with people-pleasing tendencies or supporting someone who is, these insights provide both validation and a concrete path forward toward genuine self-trust and healthier relationships. Let’s begin.

The hidden fourth trauma response

Have you ever wondered why you automatically agree with difficult people, even when every fiber of your being wants to speak up? You might be “fawning” – a survival mechanism that flies under the radar of our typical understanding of trauma responses.

Most people know about our ingrained fight, flight, and freeze response when facing threats. But there’s a fourth response called fawning, where we become more appealing to the very person or situation that’s harming us. But unlike regular people-pleasing, fawning isn’t a conscious choice – it’s an unconscious survival strategy that emerges when other options feel impossible.

Consider the story of the author Ingrid Clayton. When she was 13, her choleric stepfather made inappropriate advances at her in a hot tub. He appeared caring, yet Clayton felt that something was off. Her options of response were limited. She couldn’t fight him – he was twice her size; couldn’t flee – she was a dependent child; and for some reason, didn’t freeze. Instead, her body chose a fourth option: act normal and agreeable while internally terrified. She played along just enough to stay safe, appearing sweet and docile to her predator to manage his mood. She was fawning.

This pattern stems from what psychologists call complex trauma. Complex trauma stems not from a single dramatic event, but ongoing threats to our safety in relationships. It involves persistent emotional danger, often from people we depend on. When a parent is volatile, a workplace is toxic, or a partner is controlling, we learn that connection equals protection, even when that connection requires self-abandonment.

The tragedy is that fawning can look like success. Take Anthony, a Harvard-educated lawyer who spent decades climbing corporate ladders. His childhood was filled with emotional invalidation, so he lived a life entirely oriented around external validation while feeling fundamentally empty inside. It was only when he heard a cruel voicemail his parents recorded by accident that he realized he’d been performing for them his entire life – and that they actually didn’t care. For him, this realization opened the doors to true healing.

The path forward involves recognizing fawning not as a weakness, but as intelligence. Your nervous system made the best choice available at the time. Healing begins with honoring these protective mechanisms while gradually expanding your capacity to be authentically yourself in relationships.

People-pleasing as social necessity

When actor Dax Shepard was 12, a grown man slammed his head against a telephone pole. His immediate response to this awful assault was to flatter and appease his aggressor. This automatic people-pleasing reaction saved him from further violence. Later, when Shepard grew to 6’2″ in his adolescence, he built more confidence. He could finally fight back instead of fawn, literally outgrowing his need to appease dangerous people.

Many of us aren’t so lucky. The structures around us actively reward and sometimes require fawning behavior, especially for people with less social power. Apart from obvious characteristics such as size, we find ourselves embedded in all kinds of social hierarchies that demand compliance.

Patriarchal systems reward traditionally “feminine” traits like deference and caretaking. Corporate cultures expect employees to be “team players” who don’t rock the boat. Family systems often require children to manage their parents’ emotions rather than the reverse.

For people of color, the stakes are even higher. Code-switching – adjusting your entire presentation depending on your environment— becomes a daily necessity. You might need to appear “cool” and tough in one setting, then switch to accommodating small talk in another, never getting to be authentically yourself.

Francis’s story reveals how multiple systemic forces can trap someone in chronic appeasement. Her childhood laid the foundation: an abusive, alcoholic mother who beat her then demanded comfort during tearful apologies, teaching Francis that her job was to manage her mother’s emotions. Her father reduced her worth to physical appearance and appeal to men – a reflection of patriarchal values about women’s currency in the world. By the time she met Colin, chaos felt like safety.

During each of Colin’s outbursts, Francis instinctively managed his emotions and protected his image in front of others – doing exactly what these systems had trained her to do. Her breakthrough came when she finally said no to one of Colin’s demands. His disproportionate rage revealed the truth: she wasn’t in a loving relationship, but in an abusive one upheld by learned trauma response.

Her story illustrates why telling fawners to “just stop people-pleasing” misses the point: the structures around us actively require and reward this behavior, making individual change require a fundamental reimagining of which systems we participate in and how.

The subtle signs of fawning

Perhaps you’re starting to think of instances in which you’ve shown signs of fawning. Maybe you’ve noticed that you always anticipate everyone’s needs before your own, are constantly apologizing, or morphing into whoever the situation demands? Self-minimization is perhaps the most common pattern of fawners. They treat relationships like math problems: if someone else takes up 80 percent of the emotional space, they learn to survive in the remaining 20 percent. They justify others’ harmful behavior, lower their expectations, and engage in magical thinking that things will improve “if only” they do more.

Consider Grace’s traumatic childhood experience about pizza toppings. When her father asked if she wanted onions and she said no, he flew into a rage, dragged her by her hair, and kicked her out of the house. Her crime was simply having a different preference than his. This taught her that her job was to anticipate what others wanted, not to have authentic desires. Today, sharing meals still terrifies her because any choice could be the “wrong” one.

The pattern of shapeshifting follows naturally for fawners. They adopt different personalities in different contexts to meet perceived expectations. Fawners become master storytellers, reframing dysfunction as love stories to avoid seeing painful truths. They develop chronic anxiety from constantly scanning for threats and mood changes in others.

If you want to investigate these patterns in your own life, start by identifying the specific systems that reward your compliance over your authenticity. Look for double binds where people tell you to “set boundaries” but criticize you as inflexible when you do. These contradictions signal systems that require fawning.

Next, recognize that fawning often hides in plain sight because it’s labeled with positive terms such as being “nice” or a “team player.” Ask yourself: Do I minimize my needs to make others comfortable? Do I soften my tone to avoid seeming difficult? Pay attention to physical signs as well: anxiety about someone’s mood, reflexive apologizing, or feeling like your safety depends on pleasing others.

Recognition is the first step toward healing. If these patterns feel familiar, know that fawning developed as intelligent adaptation to unsafe environments. Recovery involves learning to choose yourself, setting genuine boundaries, and finding safe relationships where authenticity is possible. The end goal is to reclaim the parts of yourself that had to hide for survival.

Reclaiming your inner compass

Have you ever kept something that reminded you of pain, simply because getting rid of it felt too difficult? One woman held onto her abusive ex-boyfriend’s French press for years, enduring reminders of his cruelty with every morning coffee. When it finally broke and she bought her own, each cup became what she called “fresh-brewed self-esteem.”

This story illustrates a crucial truth about healing from fawning: we often unconsciously maintain connections to what hurts us. Breaking free requires developing what trauma therapists call “unfawning”, the process of shifting from external validation to trusting your own inner wisdom.

The foundation of this work begins with Orienting, a practice borrowed from trauma therapy. Simply look around your environment slowly, letting your eyes settle on whatever draws your attention. Notice sounds, textures, or smells around you. This conscious engagement with your senses signals safety to your nervous system and pulls you out of autopilot mode. When you’re constantly focused on pleasing others, you lose touch with your immediate surroundings and your own needs.

Next, practice resourcing by asking yourself: What do I need right now? This isn’t a mental exercise – tune into what your body knows. Maybe you’re hungry, need movement, or crave quiet time. The key is learning to listen to these internal signals rather than immediately scanning for what others want from you.

Consider Francis, who’d never traveled alone despite being in her late thirties. When she finally spent a weekend at a friend’s empty cabin, the change was immediately visible on a video call. She described feeling an invisible “tether” to others finally severed, allowing her to fully inhabit her own preferences and desires.

Taking space – even ten extra minutes in your car before entering the house – helps you reconnect with yourself outside others’ expectations. This practice reveals how much of your daily life might be shaped by anticipating others’ reactions rather than honoring your own needs and boundaries.

Your body holds the key

Everyone on a healing journey can attest to a simple truth: knowing something intellectually doesn’t always translate to emotional processing. Consider Sadie, who understood everything about eating disorders but couldn’t stop her destructive patterns. Despite years of traditional therapy, she remained trapped in cycles of bingeing and purging. The breakthrough came only when she moved beyond her thinking mind and into her body.

Traditional talk therapy often keeps us stuck in our heads, analyzing and understanding trauma without actually processing it. But trauma lives in our bodies, stored as physical sensations and nervous system responses. This explains why somatic approaches, which focus on bodily experiences rather than thoughts alone, can unlock healing that purely cognitive methods cannot reach.

During an EMDR or Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing session, Sadie engaged in bilateral stimulation of her body using the “butterfly hug”. She simply crossed her arms over her chest and slowly alternated taps on each shoulder. In EMDR, this rhythmic left-right pattern helps the brain process stuck material, possibly by mimicking the way our brains naturally consolidate memories during REM sleep.

Rather than talking through her experiences, Sadie witnessed what arose: everything that had ever happened to her played like a movie. She realized her eating disorder had been her longest-known protector, holding all the overwhelming experiences she couldn’t otherwise handle. The bingeing numbed her pain while the purging provided relief from responsibility.

Through this somatic processing, her body finally released what it had been storing for years. She felt “liberated” for the first time and hasn’t returned to those behaviors since. Her breakthrough demonstrates how intellectual understanding alone can’t heal what the body continues to hold.

Simple somatic techniques can begin this body-based healing process. So-called bilateral stimulation through gentle shoulder tapping, breathing exercises that emphasize longer exhales, and movement practices like walking or dancing all activate your body’s natural healing responses.

The core insight is as powerful as intuitive: healing trauma requires moving from mental analysis into felt experience, where your body can finally process and release what it’s been carrying.

The road to healing

The journey out of fawning requires more than just internal healing work. It demands fundamental changes in how you show up in relationships, and that process can be surprisingly painful.

Lily’s experience reveals how growth can shatter long-standing relationships. After years of telling her best friend Ava everything, she decided to keep some dating details private – a small step toward autonomy. Ava’s explosive reaction revealed the truth: their friendship only worked when Lily remained completely compliant and transparent about every detail of her life. When Lily refused to apologize for having boundaries, the lifelong friendship ended.

This illustrates a harsh reality of unfawning: asserting your needs often triggers negative reactions from others. Some relationships simply can’t survive your growth.

The unfawning process involves several key stages. First, you must reconnect with your healthy anger – that inner fire that signals “I’m not okay with this.” Somatic practices like the ones described earlier can be a great path toward this. Many people who fawn are disconnected from their body and its natural emotions. Learning to feel and express anger safely, whether through physical movement, creative outlets, or direct communication, becomes essential.

Next comes the challenging work of setting boundaries. This isn’t about controlling others’ responses, but rather, clearly communicating your limits and following through with consequences. Sometimes this means walking away from relationships entirely, as Clayton discovered when she finally cut contact with her mother who continued calling her a “liar” about childhood abuse.

Start small with boundary-setting: practice saying what you actually want to do instead of defaulting to “whatever you want is fine.” Create safety nets by telling trusted people about the changes you’re making. Most importantly, remember that feeling uncomfortable when asserting yourself is normal and doesn’t mean you’re doing anything wrong.

Unfawning ultimately means embracing your authentic self and claiming your rightful place in your own life instead of constantly serving others while denying your own needs.

Conclusion

In this summary to Fawning by Ingrid Clayton, you’ve learned to spot and navigate a little-known trauma pattern.

Fawning is the fourth trauma response beyond fight, flight, and freeze – an automatic survival strategy where you appease those who harm you. Unlike conscious people-pleasing, fawning emerges from complex trauma and becomes embedded through social systems that reward compliance, especially for those with less power.

Common signs include self-minimization, shapeshifting to meet others’ expectations, and chronic anxiety about others’ moods. Healing requires “unfawning” – reconnecting with your body through somatic practices, reclaiming healthy anger, and setting genuine boundaries. This process often reveals which relationships cannot survive your growth.

Recovery involves orienting yourself to the present, listening to your body’s needs, and gradually choosing authenticity over automatic appeasement. The goal isn’t eliminating protective responses entirely, but developing flexibility to be genuinely yourself in safe relationships.