We can feel the tension in an ordinary interaction. Laura Steinel notices the impulse to offer a little more, become a little more agreeable, and pacify someone just enough to get the response her old brain wants. The alternative is to stay with her own feelings, let the other person keep theirs, and accept that reassurance may never come.
The choice seems small, but it shows how a survival mechanism can change shape. We may no longer erase ourselves as completely as we once did, yet still reach beyond our boundaries for proof that we are okay. Fawning persists because we fear conflict and because another person's approval can briefly make us feel visible.
Fawning persists because we fear conflict and because another person's approval can briefly make us feel visible.
The cost is that everyone else begins to matter more than we do. Interrupting the pattern requires us to notice when we are overextending, tolerate possible disapproval, and ask a difficult but clarifying question: what do we need?
When keeping a mean girl mom happy becomes a safety mechanism
Fawning is the fourth stress response alongside fight, flight, and freeze, with a fifth F-word response Steinel says she would also include. Therapist Pete Walker identified fawning as a trauma behavior: placing another person's needs and feelings before our own to prevent conflict. We people-please, apologize when we have done nothing wrong, adopt someone else's opinion, ignore our boundaries, and allow others to cross them.
These habits make painful sense in a home shaped by demanding, neglectful, critical, or frightening figures. Steinel describes a mean girl mom who would report that her friends had been together at the grocery store without inviting her. The detail was almost absurd. Why would all her friends gather at a grocery store? Still, the message landed: doubt your relationships, your social standing, and whether anyone truly wants you.
The competition grew more pointed in high school. Steinel remembers one boyfriend arriving to take her out while her mother tried to persuade him to stay for jerk chicken. Steinel heard an assertion beneath the invitation: "I'm your mother. I can take your boyfriend. You're nothing." When the person who should provide safety instead makes us feel insignificant, we learn to track her mood and manage her comfort.
When the person who should provide safety instead makes us feel insignificant, we learn to track her mood and manage her comfort.
Repeated criticism and emotional instability can slowly erode the sense that we deserve a place in our own lives. We step outside our experience to monitor someone else, holding their feelings while abandoning our own. Repeated often enough, this turns us into a human doormat. We use the same response with everyone because the brain has confused another person's comfort with survival.
Fawning light: performing for proof that we still exist
Fawning does not always look like total self-erasure. Sometimes it appears as "fawning light," a subtle urge to pacify someone, offer something extra, or create the right emotional atmosphere so their response will tell us we are okay. We do not necessarily fear that the interaction will ruin our day. We simply want that extra bit of reassurance.
This longing becomes more complicated when we lose touch with family. We may have a partner, friends, or a small support system and still miss those familiar sources of reflection. As a strange orphan, we can start to believe visibility must be earned. Rather than trusting that we matter and are loved, we perform until someone confirms it.
Steinel experienced this tension in writers' rooms, where she became convinced that other women hated her. Fear distorted the interaction before it could develop naturally. She might become too guarded and ice them out, or grow overly accommodating and kind. Her attempt to prevent rejection created the awkwardness she feared others would notice.
The search for reassurance may look like currying favor, proving how good we are, or accepting responsibilities that exhaust us because we cannot bear to disappoint someone. Anger can reveal the arrangement. When frustration rises, we can examine where we are overextending, where our boundaries have disappeared, and what we are giving away simply to receive validation.
A favorable response purchased through self-abandonment cannot provide the reassurance we wanted. We supplied the effort that produced it, so it never feels entirely genuine. The more we perform for proof that we exist, the farther we move from the self we wanted another person to confirm.
The more we perform for proof that we exist, the farther we move from the self we wanted another person to confirm.
Letting people dislike us without leaving our own orbit
Imagine Martha from work becoming the highest authority in our lives. We placate her, anticipate her reactions, and give up our authority so she will think well of us. Her approval quietly outranks our own judgment. Martha is hypothetical, but the hierarchy is real whenever another ordinary person's comfort matters more than our truth.
The practice is blunt: let people dislike us. For those shaped by maternal rejection, disapproval does not feel like a minor difference of opinion. It can bring back the old threat of lost love, exclusion, or humiliation. Learning to stay grounded while someone misunderstands or dislikes us is how we stop abandoning ourselves.
Learning to stay grounded while someone misunderstands or dislikes us is how we stop abandoning ourselves.
Carl Jung's idea of the shadow can help us ask what fawning conceals. We may have pushed the qualities our families shunned or disliked out of awareness because expressing them seemed to cost us love or safety. What was denied entry into the house? What did we hide because it made an unstable parent critical, competitive, or emotionally volatile?
Fawning may conceal power. A child's strength may have been noticed early, then clipped, criticized, or denied room to develop. We learned the protective dance because openly expressing that power felt unsafe. Recovering it does not demand another performance. It requires us to stop apologizing for having it.
We can begin with the body. Steinel describes dropping the energy she is holding as though it were a ball, then waiting for something truthful to arrive. The pause may be uncomfortable, especially when the old brain wants a sunny response immediately. In that moment, though, Martha is no longer the most high. We stay with ourselves long enough to hear what we need and recognize that our existence does not depend on applause.