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Explainer | What is fawning? The people-pleasing trauma response that isn’t fight, flight or freeze – it’s about appeasing others to avoid conflict

  • Also known as people pleasing, fawning involves abandoning your needs to appease others and avoid conflict. It’s common in people who have abusive relationships
  • Over-apologising, being hyper-aware of what others think and having an inability to set boundaries are telltale signs, experts say

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Trauma responses go beyond fight, flight and freeze – some people, like Mikah Jones (pictured), choose to fawn, or to abandon their own needs to appease other people and avoid conflict. Photo: Mikah Jones
USA TODAY

Mikah Jones was everyone’s on-call therapist. Since the age of eight, he had provided unconditional advice and comfort to peers, classmates and even adults – which they rarely reciprocated.

Jones knew he was a people-pleaser, but he didn’t realise his inability to say no went deeper than a fear of rejection – it was a trauma response to his father’s emotional neglect. “My father barely ever told me he loved me,” says Jones, now 20. “I thought my father would only be happy whenever I did something that made him happy.”

Years of being berated or underappreciated led to Jones putting his own needs aside to avoid emotional, verbal and physical abuse. This perpetuated a cycle of his “very strong responsibility to give everything” to his father, friends and strangers to gain their approval.

People cope with and survive traumatic childhood experiences in different ways. Most are familiar with the “fight”, “flight” and “freeze” responses when escaping a negative situation, but some – like Jones – engage in what trauma experts call “fawning”, or an attempt to appease the threat to avoid conflict.
Fawning is an attempt to appease a threat to avoid conflict. Photo: Shutterstock
Fawning is an attempt to appease a threat to avoid conflict. Photo: Shutterstock

“Fawners or people-pleasers will be deeply attached to the idea of being too nice. Often, the belief is that by being nice, that will protect me against unpleasant situations with friends or family,” says Katie McKenna, a psychotherapist in Ireland and co-host of the In Sight podcast.

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