Fawning as a trauma response; Dr. Ingrid Clayton is moving the needle on understanding this response

When Ingrid Clayton, PhD, released Fawning: Why the Need to Please Makes Us Lose Ourselves—and How to Find Our Way Back, she put words to an experience many trauma survivors already knew in their bodies. Her writing describes what happens when “keeping the peace” becomes a survival strategy—when saying “yes” feels safer than saying “no,” even if it means abandoning your own needs.

Clinicians and researchers have begun mapping this response in scientific terms—sometimes called appeasement, please-and-appease, or affiliative defenses. These are not personality quirks or weaknesses. They are survival patterns: ways our nervous systems protect us when fight, flight, or freeze might not keep us safe. Understanding fawning through both lived experience and peer-reviewed research helps us see the pattern with compassion and opens up pathways to shift out of the parts that no longer serve us.

What Is Fawning?

Working definition (client-friendly): Fawning is a habitual survival response where we downplay ourselves (needs, boundaries, opinions) and take care of others’ emotions to prevent conflict, abandonment, or retaliation.

How research describes the mechanism:

• In situations of entrapment or inescapable threat, mammals (including humans) employ appeasement, behaviors that pacify the aggressor to increase survival. This framework helps explain trauma bonding and complex PTSD patterns. PubMed

• Affiliative/prosocial defenses—moving toward others under stress, are well-documented complements to fight/flight. They’re not weakness; they’re adaptive strategies to regulate threat via connection. PMC

• The classic tend-and-befriend model shows how under stress, especially in relational or caregiving contexts, humans may protect safety by nurturing and affiliating rather than fighting or fleeing. PubMed+1

• Within the defense cascade of threat responses (arousal → fight/flight → freeze/tonic immobility), appeasement can emerge when active defenses are risky, using social engagement to down-regulate the threat. PubMed

• Polyvagal theory helps explain why social engagement (voice, facial expression, prosody) can calm both parties’ physiology—useful when safety hinges on keeping someone else regulated. PMC

Everyday signs of fawning might include: reflexive “yes,” over-apologizing, minimizing your preferences, mirroring others’ opinions, caretaking at your expense, or feeling guilty after setting normal limits.

Why Do Some People Fawn More?

• Developmental learning: If saying “no” historically led to shame, withdrawal, or punishment, the nervous system learns that appeasement = safety.

• Context of constraint: Appeasement is especially likely when the person depends on the other for resources or cannot easily leave (family systems, workplaces with power imbalances, abusive dynamics). PubMed

• Biology & individual differences: People vary in which defenses come online under stress; prior adversity and autonomic patterns shape whether we move to fight, flight, freeze, or affiliative strategies. PubMed

When Fawning Helps and When It Hurts

Helpful (short-term): Defuses danger, preserves a relationship, buys time, prevents escalation.

Costly (long-term): Self-abandonment, resentment, burnout, identity confusion (“What do I like?”), vulnerability to coercive dynamics, and symptoms of complex trauma (CPTSD). The literature cautions that chronic appeasement in entrapment contexts can entangle with trauma bonding and complex PTSD. PubMed

Shifting Out of Over-Fawning

Drawing inspiration from Ingrid Clayton’s guidance on reclaiming voice and boundaries (trade book), plus mechanisms suggested by polyvagal, defense-cascade, and affiliative-defense research, here are gentle, skills-based steps you can practice. The goal isn’t to delete fawn; it’s to add choice.

1) Name the Pattern kindly and with compassion

• Micro-script: “I notice I’m scanning for what they need so they don’t get upset. That’s my fawn part trying to keep us safe.”

• Why it works: Naming lowers limbic arousal and increases prefrontal engagement (awareness before action). PMC

2) Come Back to Your Body First (Regulate → Relate → Reason)

• 60–90 seconds of breath with longer exhales, soft eyes, gentle head turns, orienting to the room, or placing a hand on the sternum to cue ventral vagal pathways.

• Aim: enough physiological safety to try a boundary instead of appeasing. PMC

3) Try “Fractional Boundaries”

Clayton encourages tiny, titrated steps. Examples:

• Instead of a full “no,” try: “I can’t do Tuesday, but I can do Friday morning.”

• Replace reflexive apology with appreciation: “Thanks for understanding,” rather than “Sorry for existing.”

• Use “hold the pause”: “Let me check my schedule and get back to you.”

4) Rehearse One-Sentence Truths

• “I need a moment to think.”

• “That doesn’t work for me.”

• “I want to hear you, and I also need to finish my thought.”
  Practiced offline, these become accessible online (under stress).

5) Re-balance Relationships

• Track reciprocity for a week: Who initiates? Who accommodates? What’s the cost to you?

• Choose one micro-rebalancing act (ask for a small preference, decline one extra task).

6) Parts-Informed Work

• Externalize the Fawn Part with compassion: “It learned appeasement kept me safe.”

• Ask what it’s afraid will happen if you set a limit; meet that fear with present-day resources and co-regulation.

7) Repair After a Stretch

• If a boundary wobbles, repair without self-abandonment: “I care about our connection and I need to adjust what I agreed to.”

8) Safety Planning for High-Risk Contexts

• In genuinely unsafe dynamics, appeasement may remain the wisest choice short-term. Work with a therapist on exit plans and supports.

How This Maps to the Science

• Appeasement as defense: In entrapment, appeasement is an evolutionarily conserved survival pathway; it’s not passivity, it’s a strategic down-regulation of the aggressor. PubMed

• Affiliative defenses: Approaching/befriending under threat is a documented response that can co-regulate physiology and reduce harm, especially in social threats. PMC

• Polyvagal cues: Prosody, facial expression, and safe eye contact can calm both nervous systems, explaining why fawning “works” and why we need alternative ventral-vagal behaviors (assertive warmth, not appeasement) as we heal. PMC

• Defense cascade: When fight/flight aren’t viable, the system shifts toward immobilization or socially mediated strategies; building capacity to pause and choose can interrupt automaticity. PubMed

• Tend-and-befriend: Normalizes the drive to connect as a legitimate, biologically supported stress response, while therapy helps differentiate healthy affiliative care from self-erasing appeasement. PubMed

Gentle Experiments

1. The 10-Second Scan: Before responding, inhale, exhale longer; ask, “Am I about to earn safety by disappearing?”

2. One No per Week: Choose a low-stakes request and practice a respectful “No, thank you.”

3. Preference Reps: State one small preference daily (“Let’s sit by the window”).

4. Replace Apology → Appreciation: Swap “Sorry I’m late” with “Thanks for waiting for me.”

5. Aftercare: Notice sensations, journal two lines: “What I protected today,” “What I need next.”

Further Reading

• Ingrid Clayton, Fawning: Why the Need to Please Makes Us Lose Ourselves—and How to Find Our Way Back (for lived experience + practical scripts).

• Deb Dana, The Polyvagal Theory in Therapy (how safety states shape behavior).

• Bessel van der Kolk, The Body Keeps the Score (trauma and the body; context for defense patterns).

References

• Bailey, R., Dugard, J., Smith, S., & Porges, S. W. (2023). Appeasement: Replacing Stockholm syndrome as a definition of a survival strategy. European Journal of Psychotraumatology, 14(1), 2161038. Open-access review of appeasement as a neurobiological survival strategy. PMC

• Cantor, C., & Price, J. (2007). Traumatic entrapment, appeasement and complex post-traumatic stress disorder: Evolutionary perspectives of hostage reactions, domestic abuse and the Stockholm syndrome. Australian and New Zealand Journal of Psychiatry, 41(1), 9–20. Foundational appeasement framework. PubMed

• Powers, K. E., et al. (2012). Characterizing socially avoidant and affiliative responses to social threat. Frontiers in Integrative Neuroscience, 6, 34. Review of approach/affiliation under threat. PMC

• Taylor, S. E., et al. (2000). Biobehavioral responses to stress in females: Tend-and-befriend, not fight-or-flight. Psychological Review, 107(3), 411–429. Classic affiliative defense model. PubMed+1

• Kozlowska, K., Walker, P., Carrive, P., et al. (2015). Fear and the defense cascade: Clinical implications and management. Harvard Review of Psychiatry, 23(4), 263–287. Explains shifts among defense states. PubMed

• Porges, S. W. (2022). Polyvagal Theory: A science of safety. Frontiers in Integrative Neuroscience, 16, 871227. Overview of autonomic states and social engagement. PMC