How Fawning Fosters Distance in Adult Relationships By Fern Chapman
A childhood trauma response that leads to estranging family and ourselves.
- Fawning, a trauma response learned in childhood, can lead to quiet estrangements from family and one’s self.
- Fawners’ relationships are performative, not genuine connection, so fawners often feel unseen and unheard.
- People-pleasing is a learned strategy or a conscious choice, while fawning is a survival mechanism.
Growing up in an unstable, abusive, or chaotic home is one of the risk factors for estrangement. In these homes, love is conditional, authenticity is not valued, and children often feel unsafe.
To survive an unpredictable environment, children learn to “read the room.” They take the emotional temperature and gauge the moods of unpredictable family members, subsuming their own desires and their true selves in an effort to get along and maintain calm.
Children living in these difficult homes struggle to see themselves and understand who they really are. Instead, these children train themselves to hide their discomfort while minimizing their own needs. They avoid confrontation. They appease.
In her book, Fawning: Why the Need to Please Makes Us Lose Ourselves and How to Find Our Way Back, Dr. Ingrid Clayton explores how this trauma response, developed in childhood, fosters distance in adult relationships. Fawning is an adaptation that kept the fawner safe in childhood, even though it can take a terrible toll in adulthood. “Fawning is not a conscious choice,” she explains. “It is a relational trauma response.”
Though fawning looks like people-pleasing, Clayton makes a distinction. She reframes fawning as a survival skill, rather than a personality trait or character flaw. People-pleasing, she explains, is more intentional; it’s a strategic, transactional behavior to avoid conflict, seek approval, and grease social interactions. “Labels like ‘people pleaser’ or ‘codependent‘ can carry an implicit judgment,” she told the British Psychological Society, “as if the person is simply making bad choices or lacks boundaries.”
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Fawners may have been blamed and shamed for their behavior, but fawning, she explains, is a response to longstanding powerlessness. The nervous system becomes conditioned to expect danger. Other trauma responses, such as fight, flight, or freeze, could have resulted in greater harm to the child.
“When faced with the double bind of ‘keep yourself safe’ or ‘raise your self-esteem, the body chooses safety every time,” Clayton says. “Fawning aids us in surviving the complex reality of our circumstances.”
Hyper-vigilance in childhood can become second nature. This enduring state can disturb relationships, creating a barrier to intimacy in adulthood.
Fawning in adulthood
Those who fawn often are praised and labeled with positive characteristics such as selfless, reliable, and adaptable. “Fawning often presents as socially rewarded behaviour: helpfulness, agreeableness, empathy, selflessness,” explains Clayton. “These qualities are not only applauded in most cultures, they are actively conditioned, especially in women and marginalised groups.”
Cultural systems – patriarchy, racism, classism, ableism, heteronormativity – require fawning, explains Clayton. ”It’s how many people – particularly women, people of colour, queer folks, neurodivergent individuals have learned to stay safe, included, or employable.”
However, fawning doesn’t necessarily look like a trauma response, as it’s difficult to identify self-erasure. “It looks like being ‘a good kid’, ‘the strong one’, ‘the peacemaker’, or ‘the one everyone can count on’,” Clayton explains. “The internal cost of chronic anxiety, loss of identity, somatic distress often goes unseen.”
In the personal sphere, for example, fawners who attend family gatherings may exchange polite words, engage in superficial intimacies, and fulfill expected roles; their conversations and actions likely will be performative, however, rather than genuine connections.
Fawners may perceive their inability to connect as a personal failing. But Clayton says these wounds are simply the byproduct of environments that demanded silence, as self-censoring and perpetually accommodating is exhausting. Even worse, this behavior slowly erodes one’s self and individuality. Not feeling seen and heard, the fawner may have a chronic sense of loneliness, self-doubt, and shame.
Her point is that estrangement can be the absence of contact, but it also can be the presence of distance and disconnection in the contact or relationship. Fawning can lead to a kind of quiet estrangement from family and from ourselves.
What it looks like
Clayton identifies these behaviors as fawning:
- Chronic people-pleasing: Agreeing with others to avoid conflict.
- Over-apologizing, especially when you haven’t done anything wrong. Apologizing can be an attempt to smooth things over or avoid criticism.
- Hypervigilance, shapeshifting, and code-switching: Constantly monitoring others’ moods, shifting tone, body language, or facial expression to accommodate someone else. Clayton notes that “code switching” – the practice of altering speech, mannerisms, and appearance to fit into various social situations – is a form of fawning.
- Compulsive caretaking: Taking responsibility for someone’s well-being or attempting to regulate someone’s emotions to avoid rejection.
- Difficulty setting boundaries: Struggling to state needs and set limits, fearing that boundaries will be perceived as selfish and provoke conflict.
- Being the ‘fixer’ or peacemaker, solving problems, negotiating disputes, or over-empathizing, even to the point of self-erasure.
- Performative agreeableness: Over-agreeing, smiling, nodding, offering praise to be liked — even when you might feel angry or disconnected.
What is to be done
Clayton, who has a Master’s in transpersonal psychology and a PhD in clinical psychology, has a Los Angeles-based clinical practice where she treats adults, adolescents, and couples. She is the author of Believing Me: Healing from Narcissistic Abuse and Complex Trauma and Recovering Spirituality: Achieving Emotional Sobriety in Your Spiritual Practice. She grew up in an alcoholic family, and her work focuses on addiction and trauma. She was emotionally abused by her mother’s second husband through trauma bonding, gaslighting, and grooming. She has spent decades addressing her own alcohol abuse and recovering from her practice of fawning.
Clayton concedes that there is no full recovery from this reflex. Instead, she says reclaiming authenticity is a daily practice that requires mindfulness. She suggests these steps:
- Recognize the fawning response and name these patterns. Identify moments when you accommodate others and self-silence.
- Embrace discomfort. Genuine connection is worth the risk.
- Let go of unrealistic patterns and expectations.
- Practice boundaries. Learn to say no and express preferences to build self-worth.
- Seek professional support in individual or group therapy where you can be vulnerable and build confidence.
“Unfawning ourselves is welcoming ourselves to the party,” Clayton writes, “… to finally be ourselves.”
References
Clayton, Dr. Ingrid, Sept.9, 2025, Fawning: Why the Need to Please Makes Us Lose Ourselves and How to Find Our Way Back, G.P. Putnam’s Sons, New York, NY
Gledhill, Jennifer, Sept. 9, 2025, “Recognising fawning as a trauma response opens the door to compassion, healing, and reclaiming agency” The British Psychological Society
About the Author
Online:
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