"Growing up in an unstable, abusive, or chaotic home is one of the risk factors for estrangement. In these homes, love is conditional, authenticity is not valued, and children often feel unsafe. To survive an unloving, erratic environment, children learn to "read the room," taking the emotional temperature and gauging the moods of unpredictable family members. In response, fawners subsume their own desires and their true selves in an effort to get along and maintain calm."
""Fawning is not a conscious choice," she explains. "It is a relational trauma response." Though fawning looks like people-pleasing, Clayton makes a distinction. She reframes fawning as a survival skill, rather than a personality trait or character flaw. People-pleasing, she explains, is more intentional; it's a strategic, transactional behavior to avoid conflict, seek approval, and grease social interactions. "Labels like 'people pleaser' or ' codependent' can carry an implicit judgment," she told the British Psychological Society, "as if the person is simply"
Fawning develops in unstable, abusive, or chaotic childhoods where love is conditional and authenticity is unsafe. Children learn to read emotional cues and subsume their desires to maintain safety and calm. As adults, fawners engage in performative relationships, avoid confrontation, and minimize their own needs, which produces feelings of being unseen, unheard, and estranged from self and family. Fawning functions as an automatic relational trauma response rather than a conscious choice or mere people-pleasing tactic. Distinguishing fawning from strategic people-pleasing reframes it as a survival adaptation that requires repair to recover authenticity and genuine connection.
Read at Psychology Today
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