The Fourth “F” — Fawning
Most people are familiar with the classic trauma responses: fight, flight, and freeze. But trauma research has increasingly recognized a fourth response that often hides in plain sight: fawning.
Most people are familiar with the classic trauma responses: fight, flight, and freeze. But trauma research has increasingly recognized a fourth response that often hides in plain sight: fawning.
In her book Fawning: Why the Need to Please Makes Us Lose Ourselves — and How to Find Our Way Back, psychologist Dr. Ingrid Clayton describes fawning as a hybrid trauma adaptation—a subconscious survival strategy in which a person moves toward the source of threat rather than away from it. Instead of protecting ourselves through avoidance or defense, we attempt to secure safety by appeasing, pleasing, or over‑accommodating the person who feels unsafe or unpredictable.
What Fawning Is (and Isn’t)
Fawning is often mistaken for people‑pleasing or codependency, but the underlying motivation is different.
People‑pleasing is typically about wanting to be liked.
Codependency involves enmeshment and lack of boundaries.
Fawning, however, is a trauma‑based response rooted in fear, insecurity, and the need for emotional or physical safety.
Fawning shows up when we feel inexplicably drawn closer to someone who causes harm or instability—something that doesn’t make logical sense but makes emotional survival sense. Instead of withdrawing from pain or dysfunction, we move toward it, hoping to minimize conflict or avoid abandonment.
Why Fawning Keeps Us Stuck
Fawning helps explain why people:
Stay in harmful relationships
Remain in toxic workplaces
Tolerate dysfunctional environments
Ignore red flags that seem obvious to others
Like all trauma responses, fawning originally served a purpose—it helped someone survive an unsafe environment. But when it becomes an automatic, lifelong pattern, it can lead to resentment, burnout, loss of identity, and chronic self‑silencing.
Signs You Might Be “Fawning”
If you’ve ever found yourself doing the following, you may be operating from a fawn response:
Apologizing to someone who hurt you in an attempt to defuse tension
Ignoring a partner’s harmful behavior because speaking up feels dangerous
Staying up late or overworking to stay on your boss’s “good side”
Befriending bullies or difficult people to reduce conflict
Worrying constantly about saying the “wrong” thing
Shifting your personality, preferences, or opinions for approval
At its core, fawning is about earning safety through compliance—a strategy that may once have been protective but becomes harmful when it replaces healthy boundaries.
How Therapy Helps Break the Fawn Response
Healing requires learning new ways to experience safety, connection, and self‑expression. Several evidence‑based therapies can support this process:
Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT): Helps identify survival‑based beliefs (“I’m only safe if everyone is happy with me”) and replace them with healthier cognitions.
Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT): Strengthens emotional regulation, boundary‑setting, and distress tolerance.
Internal Family Systems (IFS): Helps explore protective parts of the self that developed the fawn response.
Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR): Reprocesses traumatic memories that created the pattern.
Somatic Experiencing: Helps the nervous system learn safety through body‑based awareness and regulation.
Fawning is not a character flaw—it’s a trauma imprint. With the right support, people can reconnect with their authentic selves, develop healthy relationships, and rebuild a sense of internal safety.
References
Clayton, I. (2023). Fawning: Why the need to please makes us lose ourselves—and how to find our way back.
Herman, J. L. (2015). Trauma and recovery: The aftermath of violence—from domestic abuse to political terror. Basic Books.
Linehan, M. M. (2015). DBT skills training manual (2nd ed.). Guilford Press.
Porges, S. W. (2011). The polyvagal theory: Neurophysiological foundations of emotions, attachment, communication, and self-regulation. W. W. Norton.
Schwartz, R. C. (2021). No bad parts: Healing trauma and restoring wholeness with the internal family systems model. Sounds True.
Shapiro, F. (2018). Eye movement desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR) therapy (3rd ed.): Basic principles, protocols, and procedures. Guilford Press.
van der Kolk, B. A. (2014). The body keeps the score: Brain, mind, and body in the healing of trauma. Viking.