Fawning. A Trauma Response

Or: People-Pleasing and its Impact on Well-Being

People-pleasing is when you censor the voice within to make someone outside of yourself comfortable, and according to technical psychological analyses, it usually stems from a fear of abandonment, judgement or betrayal.

People-pleasing requires a nuanced understanding. One that doesn’t lump its definition in with generosity of spirit.

This behaviour/way of being is intended to keep you safe and can present itself as fawning or flopping, diluting your power before another person or circumstance that feels dangerous, even life-threatening, especially if it includes confrontation. 

It is not however the same as extending your spirit from a place of wanting to simply share love towards another, expressing fondness and affection, and stretching yourself to meet them where they are. The difference between warmth of being, and people-pleasing, is that the first has an anchoring in its sense of self and takes a gesture of bravery to take the self outside of its usual parameters to connect with another through acts of kindness. People-pleasing moves inwards more so, and hides the self out of some form of fear. 

As a trauma response, fawning begins as a form of self-preservation during childhood, when our small bodies could feel a caregiver’s inability to provide the sense of security we require for survival. So we twisted ourselves into metaphorical pretzels to get the love we needed. In many cases, love ended up feeling conditional, based on how well we managed to please the adult with power. 

As we grow up, people-pleasing can evolve into a constant way of being and relating with others, normalizing self-suppression even when it’s no longer necessary as a survival tactic. iIt has simply become enmeshed in our persona as a way of being, often mistaken for 'personality'. It can also become a chronic state of inner disconnect, prioritizing the need to control external factors over the ability to regulate emotions and thus feel comfortable in our skin irrespective of others'.

People-pleasing is ultimately a denial of how we feel about ourselves. This is where it can lead to perfectionism and burnout, and an array of relationships that never quite feel safe; where we chase the approval of others who really aren’t that good for us, or those who purposefully manage approval and connection as a form of power within the relationship.  

When this behaviour originates in a dysfunctional or traumatic childhood, people-pleasing can show up preemptively as a foundational approach to relationships, subconsciously ensuring the other person that they need never feel threatened by our presence. Sadly, this often attracts people who thrive off feeling dominant, exacerbating and enabling the people-pleasing dynamic. In other cases, people-pleasing can develop into a form of manipulation initially birthed from a need to control pain, but which then mutated into a habit of protecting the Self by strategizing how to control others to get what we need without having to risk asking for it. 

Many of us people-please as a result of the conditioning we experienced in our Family of Origin upbringing. Social expectations blurring the lines between being well-mannered or empathetic, and self-abandonment.

This is where compassion becomes a really powerful force for authenticity, helping us gracefully find and embrace those parts of ourselves we threw away before we knew that's what we were doing. Self-compassion helps by shedding light without shame on this form of self-sabotage. Compassion becomes a lighthouse, an allowing. A stillness within the chaos of ruminating worry.

If we can forgive ourselves for what we did to cope with a lack of security, emotional

stability, and powerlessness, we can then begin to build new inner resources that empower us to feel safe discovering and being who we are. This often translates as a gentler energy to be around, and when done efficiently with effective therapy, an emergence of healthy boundaries that includes investing in people by choice, rather than a trauma response.

Created to protect the inner peace we come to find with self-embrace, boundaries feel graceful, and allow an anchoring in the Self which then can lead the way to authentic generosity of spirit.

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