When people talk about trauma responses, they usually mention fight, flight or freeze. These ones are easier to recognise. They look dramatic. They look like distress.

Fawning doesn’t really look like anything is wrong.

Fawning often looks like kindness. Like thoughtfulness. Like emotional intelligence. It looks like being flexible, understanding, good with people. It looks like being ‘good at relationships”’ And that’s exactly why it’s so hard to spot, and why it can take such a long time to realise the cost.

Fawning is what happens when you learn to stay safe by putting other people first. By smoothing things over, anticipating needs, adapting yourself, making sure nobody is upset or disappointed or feels abandoned; especially not because of you.

A lot of people who fawn are praised for it their whole lives. Y’ou’re so empathetic, you’re so mature, you’re so good at holding space!’ You’re the calm one. The capable one. The one who understands.

What rarely gets talked about is what this costs.

The core of fawning is actually very simple: your own needs come last.

Not just occasionally, not just when things are difficult, but as a default way of being in the world. Over time, you stop checking in with yourself. Hunger, rest, desire, irritation, boundaries — they all get quietly deprioritised because other people’s needs feel more urgent, more legitimate, more important.

At first, this can feel like love, care, like being a good person.

But when your needs consistently come last, they don’t disappear. They just slip underground. And what replaces them is a low-level sense that something is missing, a feeling of being out of step with yourself.

You can have a life that looks full from the outside — relationships, work, purpose, contribution — and still feel oddly shallow, empty, or dejected. Not dramatically unhappy. Just not fully there. That feeling isn’t ingratitude. It’s what happens when you’ve been neglecting yourself for a long time.

This is why fawning is such an insidious trauma response.

Unlike fight, flight or freeze, it doesn’t look like distress. It looks like competence, generosity or emotional maturity. And because it’s rewarded, it slowly becomes part of your identity. Your sense of worth. The way you know how to belong.

You don’t just fawn in romantic relationships. You fawn at work. In friendships. In families. You become the regulator, the translator, the emotional glue. You notice everyone else’s needs before they’re even spoken. You carry the atmosphere.

And because you’re good at it, the world keeps taking, until your body starts to push back.

This is often when people begin to feel chronically exhausted, resentful, numb, or quietly furious. Intimacy can start to feel unsafe. Rest can feel uncomfortable. Saying no can feel loaded. Your nervous system is always slightly on edge, even when nothing obvious is wrong.

And at some point, we start to realise a number of things:

I don’t really know what I need anymore.
I feel guilty when I rest.
I’m always basing myself around other people.
I’m doing an awful lot of emotional work and calling it love.

Letting go of fawning can feel genuinely frightening, because it can feel like becoming selfish, cold or uncaring. In reality, it’s learning something many of us were never taught: that our needs are not a problem.

That boundaries aren’t abandonment, love doesn’t have to be earned by being useful, other people’s emotions aren’t ours to manage.

And perhaps most confronting of all, some relationships only work because we’ve been fawning. When we stop, those systems wobble. People can feel confused, hurt, even angry. They may say you’ve changed, that you’re withdrawing, that you’re giving up.

That doesn’t mean you’re doing it wrong, but usually means the dynamic relied on you over-functioning.

Fawning isn’t unlearned by explaining yourself better or communicating more carefully. It’s unlearned slowly, gently, by choosing yourself again and again. By tolerating the discomfort of not rescuing. By letting other people have their feelings without rushing in to fix them.

It’s not about caring less.

It’s about finally being in your own life.

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