Someone acts inappropriately toward you, and instead of setting a boundary, you smile, laugh, and pretend to be unbothered.

Hours later, when you’re alone, you’re haunted by all the words you should have⁠ said.⁠ You’re so frustrated with yourself for not speaking up, and you wonder⁠—once again⁠—why it’s so hard to address these things in the moment.

Can you relate?

I know the feeling intimately.
In fact, I just experienced it last week.

An acquaintance made me uncomfortable with his behavior, but in the moment, I didn’t say anything. I felt all the blood rush into my face and I merely smiled. I played along.

I was on autopilot; I couldn’t find the words to speak up.

Two hours later, alone, I was so frustrated with myself. “Hailey, why didn’t you just say something?” I wondered.

But then I realized that my experience was the perfect opportunity to share some little-known information about the fawn response⁠—and offer 3 tools to counteract it in real time.

What You Didn’t Know About Fawning

People-pleasing isn’t always a trauma response⁠, but oftentimes, it is. In 2003, psychotherapist Pete Walker expanded the well-known “fight, flight, freeze” to include a fourth addition: fawn.

When feeling threatened, a person with the fawn response will please, accommodate, or be extra friendly toward the source of threat instead of fighting back, running away, or shutting down.

Sound familiar?

Walker explains that especially if someone experienced abuse in the past, they likely learned that protesting led to retaliation, so they “deleted ‘no’ from their vocabulary and never developed the language skills of healthy assertiveness.”

It’s important to understand that the fawn response can be our nervous system’s default response long after the original source of threat has passed. Now, we may still fawn even when the situation poses no actual harm.

This can explain our confusion when we leave a situation and think: I didn’t feel unsafe; I didn’t think they would hurt me. But still, I fawned. What gives?

In these cases, our bodies weren’t reacting to the present situation; they were reacting to the past.

Understanding this helps us have compassion for ourselves when we don’t speak up in the moment. Our bodies are trying their best to keep us safe by using old coping skills that worked before.

However, the coping skill that kept us safe then actually harms us now, because it prevents us from setting the boundaries that we need to feel safe and respected. Here are three tools that help us move through the fawn response and advocate for ourselves with confidence:

Before you keep reading: Have you ordered my debut book yet, STOP People Pleasing and Find Your Power? STOP People Pleasing is a practical, inspiring, and nuanced guide for recovering people-pleasers who are ready to honor their needs, find their voice, and build the vibrant life that they deserve. Pre-order your copy here!

Three tools that ACTUALLY help with fawning

While learning how to set boundaries is critical for those of us who fawn, in the moment it can be hard to remember⁠—much less use⁠—those teachings. We’re on autopilot, and in that activated state, much of our cognitive capacity goes out the window.

That’s why these three practical tools help me navigate my fawn response in real time 👇

(Please note that the tools below are for situations where you are not actively being harmed or abused. If you are unsafe, the best tool is to leave a situation entirely. These tools are best for lower-stakes situations where you would ultimately like to address others’ behavior with them.)

Tool 1: Take a Time-Out if You Can

When we fawn, our body is perceiving our present situation as unsafe even if it’s not.

The best way to interrupt this response is to temporarily step away from the interaction (if possible) long enough to remind ourselves that we are, in fact, safe, and to make a conscious plan for how to move forward.

If we’re on a date, we might say we need to use the restroom. (I use this one a lot.)
If we’re at a family gathering, we might say we need to refill our drinks.
If we’re at work, we might say we have an urgent phone call.
If we’re on the phone, we might say we have another call coming in and we’ll call back in five minutes.

Any of these will do; the goal is to go somewhere that we can be alone for a few minutes.

Once alone, we can take a few deep breaths to allow our nervous system to settle. We might splash some cold water on our face or do some mild stretches to get back in our bodies.

From here, we can create a plan for how we’ll proceed when we return from our time-out. I recommend planning exactly what words you will say and exactly how you will say them. (My Boundaries 101 workshop can help you with this.)

Since I know I might get nervous when I leave my time-out, I usually practice the words aloud a few times, too. I recommend this; practicing them aloud helps them come more easily later.

Tool 2: Regulate Your Nervous System in Real Time

In order to understand the fawn response, we have to understand what’s going on in our nervous system. Buckle up, because this is truly mind-blowing!

So here’s the deal: Our autonomic nervous system⁠—the same system that controls our unconscious bodily functions like breathing and digestion—is constantly scanning for cues of safety and danger. This process of scanning, called neuroception, happens outside of our conscious awareness (the same way that our digestion happens outside of our conscious awareness).

Our autonomic nervous system is really smart: it remembers patterns. If, in the past, disagreements, moments of conflict, or mismatches in needs led to danger, it will remember those cues and trigger a danger response now⁠—even if we’re not actually in danger.

When our nervous system perceives danger, we shift into one of three states: fight/flight, freeze, or fawn.

In fight/flight, we feel agitated, hyper-active, hyper-vigilant, and restless. We may feel anxious, panicked, stressed, or angry. Our hearts race; our breath is shallow.
In freeze, we feel shut down. We’re totally depleted of energy; maybe even numb. It feels impossible to truly connect.
Fawning is widely understood to be a mixture of both: external activation mixed with internal shutdown and dissociation.

It can be enormously healing to recognize⁠ what’s actually going on inside of us, from a nervous system perspective, when we’re afraid of standing up for ourselves. Even if we’re not consciously experiencing a sense of un-safety, our nervous system is, and it’s that sense of danger that requires our attention and soothing.

When we recognize that we’re in an activated state, our task is to take a specific, tangible step to cue our nervous system that we are actually safe⁠.

One of the simplest cues (that has infinitely helped me speak up in difficult moments) is to feel my butt on my chair or my feet on the floor—to really take a moment to ground deep in my body—and to mentally say to myself, “I am here, now, and I am safe.” It sounds simple, but this tool really helps us access that felt sense of safety in the moment.

An additional tool—which can help especially if you have a hard time being in your body⁠—is to use your five senses to ground in the present moment: to notice what you see, hear, and smell.

(I teach more of these specific steps⁠—and help you customize them based on your unique nervous system profile—in my on-demand workshop, The Self-Soothing Survival Guide for Courageous Self-Advocacy. In this hands-on, 2-hour workshop, you will practice a repertoire of strategies for reframing, practicing self-compassion toward, and regulating your nervous system through the difficult emotions that arise when standing up for yourself.)

Tool 3: Access Your Anger

Pete Walker (who coined the fawn response) writes that it’s normal to feel a sense of grief and loss for all the years we spent fawning. This grief, he writes, “tends to unlock healthy anger… which can then be worked into recovering a healthy fight-response that is the basis of the instinct of self-protection.”

Many of us tend to be afraid of our anger, but anger is a powerful motivator for change. Studies show that it’s typically accompanied by effort to remove obstacles⁠, rectify injustices, and create better conditions for ourselves and others.

In the moment, during our time-out, or after the interaction has ended, we can remember to intentionally access our anger so we can benefit from its motivating force.

We might be angry at the original trauma that led us to develop the fawn response; we might be angry at the interaction we just had, especially if the person was treating us inappropriately in some way.

Allow yourself to really tune into your anger. Notice how it feels as it fills your chest, stomach, and limbs. You might think to yourself:

“How dare they speak to me this way!”
“What a jerk!”
“They may think they have power over me, but they absolutely don’t!”

We don’t have to express this raw, unfiltered anger to the other person directly. Instead, we can think of it as fuel that gives us the power us to act in a strong and self-respecting way by voicing our boundaries and refusing to tolerate mistreatment.

Self-Compassion Is Required

Trust me: I’m very familiar with the frustration of fawning.

I know the temptation to beat yourself up after not speaking up.
I know the pain of feeling like you didn’t have your own back.
I know the incredible dissonance of feeling one way inside but acting another way outside.

I wanted to share my experience with you in this article because I think it’s telling that someone who has been working on personal boundaries for over five years⁠ can still fawn in a moment that provokes an old response.

These old patterns run deep, having compassion for ourselves is absolutely critical as we work through them.

I like to remind myself that my fawning is a sign of how desperately my body is trying to keep me safe. It’s holding onto those old protective mechanisms tooth and nail, and my work is to gently, with great compassion, show it a new way.

If this article resonates with you, be sure to pre-order my debut book, STOP People Pleasing and Find Your Power: an empathetic, practical, and nuanced guide for recovering people-pleasers who are ready to find their voice, speak their truth, and get what they deserve.

Pre-order your copy here today. You can also pre-order the e-book here and audiobook here!