You might have experienced something like this. You’re disagreeing with your friends or your partner, you put your point across, they push back, and you fold. Perhaps at work, you can state your point of view, but you cannot fight for it. Or perhaps someone asks you where you want to go for dinner and you say “I’m easy”, even if, perhaps, you’re not. Maybe they suggest a place that you hate, but you go along with it anyway.
In the animal kingdom, when animals sense a threat they either fight it, they flee it, they freeze to avoid detection, or they act submissive and friendly. In animals, we call this fawning. Humans do it too. The fawn response might be, in some situations, second nature to you now. It might be your go-to response. It might even be part of your personality, although perhaps you describe yourself as “easy-going” or chill.
Fawning is people-pleasing in relationships. It’s not good or bad, it’s a survival strategy. At least, it was.
What the fawn response might look like
There are different levels of fawning you might experience. You might find that your energy for arguments and conflicts just seems to be less than other people’s. You might have no problem getting your point across, or making your views known. But you’re not going to sweat the small stuff. If they get upset or angry, maybe it’s not worth it? You don’t need to “win” every argument. You don’t need to “win” at all.
You might notice that this is becoming a pattern. You start off giving as good as you get. But then, it seems to really upset the other person, or it just doesn’t seem to be worth it. Isn’t life easier if you just get along? So perhaps your energy for these conversations gets less and less.
And then one day, perhaps not with everyone and perhaps not all the time, you notice that you don’t have much energy for any kind of conflict at all. “Does it really matter whether we have pizza or burgers for dinner or where we go on our holidays? What’s important is that we’re together.”
And then, perhaps it’s not just about your relationships with others, but your relationship to yourself. Perhaps you’ve got so good at avoiding conflict that your life now takes the path of least resistance. You’ve ended up somewhere, you just don’t know if that’s what you want.
Fawning isn’t right or wrong. Sometimes it is the right thing to do to let an argument slide, to not sweat the small stuff and just have a nice time. Fawning is part of what we do as humans to make our lives easier in community — not everything needs to be a do-or-die big argument. But if fawning has become a default pattern, if you are no longer choosing it, if instead you are automatically rolling over, we can think about that. What might be going on?
The Fawn Response in (adult) relationships
Often fawning is relationship-specific. You might not think of yourself as a people-pleaser, or particularly easy-going. You might have read this post up to this point and been thinking “this is not me”. But there’s that one relationship, or a few, where some of this dynamic creeps in. There are arguments you avoid having because, in the past when you’ve had them, they have not gone well. Sometimes, it’s just easier to pull your punches. But over time, you might notice that the relationship is not really a relationship anymore. You might have noticed yourself pulling back, retreating. You show up to be with this person, but you are absent. You’re in a relationship with this person, but you somehow are not in a relationship with yourself when you’re with them. You have abandoned yourself.
This isn’t good or bad. It might even be practical. When you do stick up for yourself, there might be an outsized reaction. There might be shouting, there might even be violence. Keeping the peace, in that instance, is not just the right choice, it’s a brave one.
The Fawn Response as a child
But perhaps people-pleasing is how you navigate most of your relationships. Perhaps it’s how you manage at work, with your friends, and with your loved ones. If that’s the case, we might wonder why? I wonder what happened when you were a child and you got angry? Or upset? I wonder how your siblings reacted? Your parents?
This is a blog post. I cannot diagnose you, nor would I want to. But therapy for people-pleasing looks to get to the bottom of these questions. We can unpack when you first learned to roll over. How might that have benefitted you? Perhaps, how might you be benefitting now?
Because I suspect if you are reading this, you might have had enough. You might be burnt out at work, invisible in relationships. You might feel like your life lacks direction and purpose. So together, we can explore what happens for you when you make a choice that other people don’t like. How does that feel, and what might it be like to do it anyway?
If any of this sounds like you, the first step is a free 15-minute call — no obligation, just a chance to get a sense of me.