Fawning makes it hard to set boundaries in the moment. These 3 tools will help.
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.
This is the fawn response in action. (You can take a peek at this reel to see what it looks like in real time.)
Instead of fighting, fleeing, or freezing, a person with the fawn response will please, accommodate, or be extra friendly when feeling uncomfortable or threatened.
At some point in the past, the fawn response probably kept us safe. But in the present, as adults with agency and voice, fawning is at the root of many people-pleasing tendencies—and it can prevent us from speaking up when we need and want to.
In this article, I’ll explore where the fawn response comes from—explain why it can't be "reasoned with" using logic—and offer three powerful tools for moving through it so we can advocate for ourselves with confidence.
“Why Didn’t I Speak Up In The Moment?”
In 2003, psychotherapist Pete Walker expanded the well-known “fight, flight, freeze” model to include a fourth addition: fawn.
When feeling threatened or uncomfortable, a person with the fawn response will go out of their way to accommodate or be extra friendly toward the source of threat instead of getting angry (fight), running away (flight), or shutting down (freeze).
Walker explains that especially if someone experienced abuse in the past, they probably learned that speaking up only led to retaliation—so they “deleted ‘no’ from their vocabulary and never developed the language skills of healthy assertiveness” (Walker, 2003).
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. Our nervous system was trying its best to keep us safe by using an old strategy that worked before.
However, the strategy that kept us safe then actually harms us now, because it prevents us from setting the boundaries that we need to feel protected and respected.
Three tools that ACTUALLY help with fawning
Though learning how to set boundaries is crucial, in the moment, it can be hard to remember—much less use—the boundary tools we’ve learned. We’re on autopilot, and in that activated state, much of our cognitive capacity goes out the window.
These 3 practical tools will help you navigate your fawn response in real time so that you can access the boundary-setting tools you need to take good care of yourself👇
(Please note that the 3 tools below are for situations where you’re not actively being harmed or abused. These tools are best for lower-stakes situations where you’d ultimately like to speak up and assert yourself.)
Tool 1: Regulate Your Nervous System in Real Time
In order to understand why this tool is the most effective strategy for working with fawning, we have to understand what’s going on behind-the-scenes 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—constantly scans our environment for cues of safety and danger. This process of scanning, called neuroception, happens outside of our conscious awareness.
Our autonomic nervous system 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.
In fawn, on the outside we seem social and connected, but inside, we’re shutdown and dissociated.
Even if we’re not consciously experiencing a sense of danger, 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.
Tool 2: Take a Time-Out If You Can
As we discussed: 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 3: Access Your Anger
Pete Walker 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.
For hands-on practice soothing through guilt and fear when boundary-setting, watch my on-demand workshop, The Self-Soothing Survival Guide for Courageous Self-Advocacy. In this hands-on, 2-hour session, you’ll learn and practice a toolbox of powerful reframes, gentle self-compassion practices, and grounding nervous system regulation strategies that will give you the inner confidence you need to bravely self-advocate.