Why You Say Yes When You Want to Say No: Understanding Fawning

Ever find yourself nodding along, agreeing to something—even when your stomach twists and your throat tightens? Maybe you apologise when no one’s expecting it. Maybe you shape-shift in relationships, becoming who you think someone needs you to be. Maybe you pride yourself on being “easygoing,” but feel quietly resentful or invisible.

This might not just be people-pleasing. It might be fawning—a deeply ingrained, often unconscious trauma response that helped you stay connected and safe in relationships where your needs weren’t welcome.

What Is Fawning?

Fawning is a survival response—just like fight, flight, or freeze. But instead of running, shutting down, or lashing out, the fawn response seeks protection through appeasement. It’s a way of managing threat by trying to be so agreeable, so accommodating, so likable that you avoid danger altogether.

It’s the internalised instinct of:

If I keep everyone happy, maybe I’ll be safe.

If I don’t rock the boat, maybe I won’t be abandoned.

If I’m useful, maybe I’ll be loved.

This strategy doesn’t come from weakness—it comes from early wisdom. From learning, often young, that your emotional or physical safety depended on keeping others regulated, even if it meant disconnecting from your own needs in the process.

Where It Comes From

Fawning typically develops in relational environments that lacked emotional safety. This could include:

• Households where love had to be earned through compliance or perfection

• Families where conflict was dangerous, unpredictable, or met with withdrawal

• Experiences of neglect, emotional abuse, or living with a caregiver who was volatile, anxious, or unwell

• Cultural, systemic, or identity-based conditioning (e.g. being a POC, being raised as a girl, being queer, having a disability, or belonging to a marginalised group where appeasement became necessary for survival)

When you couldn’t express anger, disappointment, or even preference without it backfiring, your system learned to go quiet, go kind, go invisible. Fawning isn’t about manipulation—it’s about connection. Your body learned that it’s safer to be small, than to be real.

What It Looks Like in Everyday Life

Fawning is rarely dramatic. It shows up in the tiny, persistent ways we abandon ourselves:

• Saying yes when you mean no

• Feeling responsible for others’ emotions

• Avoiding any conversation that might lead to conflict

• Going along with group decisions, even if they hurt you

• Overexplaining yourself or justifying your feelings

• Feeling guilty for having boundaries or asking for space

• Keeping the peace, even when it costs you your truth

It often gets praised—people might say you’re so thoughtful, so easy, so selfless. But inside, it can feel like you’re vanishing. You might find yourself wondering: Does anyone actually know me? or Why do I feel so tired all the time?

The Cost of Fawning

Fawning may protect your relationships, but it rarely nourishes them, and it almost always harms your relationship with yourself.

When your nervous system is constantly scanning for how to prevent discomfort, rejection, or anger in others, there’s little room left for your own needs, emotions, or identity. Over time, this can lead to:

• Chronic anxiety or burnout

• Depression or numbness

• Low self-esteem or identity confusion

• Resentment in relationships

• Difficulty trusting yourself or making decisions

• A sense of living life on autopilot or in performance mode

Peace isn’t peaceful when it costs you your voice. You may feel hypervigilant—always watching for micro-shifts in others’ moods. You might struggle to name your own desires. You may feel deeply lonely, even when surrounded by people.

You might feel an aching kind of loneliness—not because you’re alone, but because you’re not fully in your relationships. When you’re constantly managing how you’re perceived, protecting others from your truth, or anticipating their needs before they’re spoken, there’s no room for you to actually exist in the dynamic. The version of you that others are connecting to isn’t the full you—it’s the one you’ve curated for safety. And that means you may never feel truly seen or loved, only accepted conditionally. To be known is to be loved—and fawning makes that kind of knowing incredibly difficult.

Beginning to Heal

Healing from fawning isn’t about becoming combative or “less nice.” It’s about becoming more honest, more embodied, more whole. The goal is not to stop caring about others—it’s to care about yourself too.

Here’s what the early stages of healing might look like:

• Noticing when you override your body’s cues to accommodate someone else

• Naming your needs—even if you don’t act on them yet

• Creating pause before reflexively saying “yes”

• Allowing discomfort in relationships without immediately fixing it

• Building capacity to stay in connection while also being real

Healing often involves re-parenting yourself: validating your feelings, setting boundaries, and choosing self-trust over perfection.

Working with a trauma-informed therapist can help, especially approaches that honour your nervous system and relational patterns—such as gestalt therapy, internal family systems (IFS), somatic therapy, or polyvagal-informed work. You don’t have to do this alone.

It also helps to practice with people who welcome your “no.” People who don’t need you to abandon yourself in order to be close.

You Don’t Have to Change to Be Loved

Fawning often begins as a smart response to a not-so-safe environment. It’s something you did to stay connected, to belong, to survive. That deserves compassion—not shame.

And yet, it can be deeply tiring to keep shape-shifting, to always be the peacekeeper, the agreeable one, the version of yourself you think others want.

If you’re starting to notice the cost of that pattern—emotionally, physically, relationally—you’re not alone. There’s nothing wrong with you. You’re just becoming aware of something that once protected you and now feels no longer in service to where you’re currently at.

This isn’t about fixing yourself. It’s about slowly coming home to yourself.

At your own pace. In your own way.

Bit by bit, you get to choose something different.

If this resonates with you, feel free to reach out

Whether you’re just starting to notice these patterns or already deep in the work of unlearning them, support is available. And I’m excited for you, and where this life-affirming exploration will lead you :)

With care,

ess