If you regularly react this way, you probably look insecure to others

You may be familiar with the “fight, flight, or freeze” survival responses. 

But there’s another “F” word: the fawn response, which is perhaps less recognized, but is the one I most commonly see as a psychotherapist, and one that I have experienced in my own life. 

Fawning is about appeasing a threat, either real or perceived, and satisfying it. When we’re in a fawn response, we move toward the threat instead of away from it. This people pleasing behavior can make you feel insecure when you have absolutely no reason to be.

Here’s how to look out for the fawn response, and how to handle it. 

While there are many circumstances that feed the need to fawn, the thread is the same: “I can’t feel safe until everyone is happy with me.”

When the body detects some sort of threat, whether it is real (a lion chasing you) or perceived (your boss being a little standoffish), it can feel the same to the nervous system. 

Maybe you grew up in a home where you had to hold your breath and monitor a parent’s moods because things could flip in an instant. Or maybe you had a highly critical parent, and being “perfect” was your way of staying ahead of criticism. I can certainly relate. 

A prime example of the fawn response is the instinct you might have to ask someone, “Are you mad at me?” 

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To be clear, fawning isn’t a bad thing. It’s an automatic survival mechanism, and sometimes we need to fawn, whether it’s to get a paycheck or to ensure immediate safety. 

But in order to hyper-attune to other people’s moods, reactions, and perceptions, we often disconnect from and neglect ourselves. Here are some common fawn response behaviors to watch out for:

• Constantly overthinking social interactions.
• Not being able to say no or set boundaries, and then feeling resentful.
• Feeling terrified of conflict or of people thinking you disagree with them.
• Morphing yourself into a “chameleon” in relationships.
• Fearing that you’re about to get in trouble.
• Being drawn to people who are emotionally unavailable, critical, or hard to please, because they feel like “home.”
• Feeling like you don’t know who you are anymore because you’ve silenced your own opinions.

All of this adds up to seeming and feeling insecure. If these patterns resonate, I imagine that at some point they were genuinely helpful and protective. So the body thinks: Hey, this works, let’s keep doing it. What feels familiar will always feel safe, even if it no longer serves us. 

The fawn response is an unconscious pattern, so noticing it and bringing it into the forefront of your mind is the first step. Here are a few practices I like to recommend to my patients. 

1. Pause. Before you go to over-apologize, shrink yourself, shove your needs down, get lost in an overthinking spiral — pause. Check in with yourself. Ask “What do I need right now? What do I think of this? What am I feeling?” It’s great to care about others, but not if you abandon your needs in the process.
2. Lean back. Let’s say your parent sends you a text while you’re in the middle of something, and your immediate instinct is to respond so you won’t disappoint them. Instead, finish what you were doing and respond when you’re free. This is all about releasing urgency where it’s not necessary or helpful. By slowing down, we’re communicating to our bodies that we’re safe.
3. Look inward. Practice expressing your needs in relationships that feel safest to you, in everyday ways. For example, when your partner asks what you want for dinner, instead of saying, “Whatever you want!” take a moment to ask yourself: “What do I actually want?” Can you allow yourself to express it? And then don’t be afraid to do so. 

When we’ve been conditioned to believe that we aren’t allowed to have needs, that we’re responsible for managing other people’s emotions, boundaries may be hard for us to set. Many of us may fear that if we set boundaries, we’ll be seen as cold or mean. But I like to think of boundaries as a way to strengthen the relationships we really want in our lives. 

Meg Josephson is a licensed psychotherapist and the author of the bestselling book, “Are You Mad at Me?: How to Stop Focusing on What Others Think So You Can Start Living for You.”

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