What Is the Fawn Response and Why Do I Keep Doing It at Work? A Therapist’s Complete Guide
LAST UPDATED: APRIL 2026
If you’ve ever agreed to something you didn’t want to do before the question was even finished. If you’ve ever swallowed your own opinion in a meeting, absorbed a colleague’s frustration as if it were your job to fix, or volunteered for extra work while your own plate was collapsing. You may be living in the fawn response. This guide explains what fawning is, why it’s the fourth and least recognized trauma response, how it manifests specifically in the workplace, and why driven women are particularly vulnerable to confusing it with collaboration.
Last reviewed: June 2026 by Annie Wright, LMFT
- The Meeting Where She Disappeared
- What Is the Fawn Response?
- The Neurobiology of Fawning: Social Engagement as Defense
- How the Fawn Response Shows Up at Work for Driven Women
- Fawning vs. Genuine Collaboration: How to Tell the Difference
- Both/And: You Can Be Kind and Still Be Fawning
- The Systemic Lens: Why Workplaces Reward Women Who Fawn
- How to Begin Unwinding the Fawn Response at Work
- Frequently Asked Questions
The Meeting Where She Disappeared
Amy is in a conference room on the seventh floor of a building in downtown Austin, her laptop open, her posture perfect, her face arranged in an expression of engaged attentiveness. The head of product is presenting a timeline that is, by any objective measure, unrealistic. Everyone in the room knows this. Amy knows this more than most. She’s the one whose team will be crushed by it, the one who’ll be working weekends and pulling her engineers off other critical projects to meet a deadline that exists because someone promised something to a board member without checking with the people who actually build things.
If your nervous system learned the safest way to exist was to manage everyone else's world, my self-paced course Enough Without the Effort is the recovery map.
Her manager turns to her. “Amy, does this timeline work for your team?”
And here it is. The moment. The fork. The place where what Amy knows and what Amy does diverge completely.
She feels it first in her body: a tightening in her solar plexus, a slight constriction in her throat, a rush of heat to her face. And then, before her prefrontal cortex has finished formulating the honest answer. No, this timeline doesn’t work; here’s what we’d need to make it realistic. Something else takes over. Something faster. Something automatic.
“Absolutely,” she hears herself say. “We’ll make it work.”
She even smiles. A real-looking smile. The kind that reaches her eyes. The kind she learned to produce as a child when her father came home in a mood and the safest thing to do was to make everything smooth, everything easy, everything fine.
Thirty minutes later, sitting in her car in the parking garage, Amy puts her head on the steering wheel and cries. Not because the timeline is impossible (it is). Not because she’s frustrated (she is). But because she did it again. She fawned. Again. She knew what she needed to say, and her body said something completely different. The thing that would make the room comfortable, the boss satisfied, the conflict avoided, the moment smooth.
“I don’t understand,” she told me in our session that week. “I’m not afraid of my boss. He’s a reasonable person. I’ve seen other people push back on him and he respects it. So why can’t I do it? Why does my body just… override me?”
Because Amy isn’t responding to her boss. She’s responding to every person who ever had power over her. Starting with the one she couldn’t push back against without consequences.
What Is the Fawn Response?
The fawn response is a trauma-driven survival strategy first identified and named by Pete Walker, MA, psychotherapist and author of Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving. It is the fourth fundamental trauma response, joining the more widely recognized fight, flight, and freeze responses. Fawning involves an automatic, often unconscious pattern of appeasing, people-pleasing, and self-abandonment in the presence of perceived threat. Particularly interpersonal threat. Unlike fight (confrontation), flight (avoidance), or freeze (immobilization), fawn uses social compliance as a survival strategy: the individual manages the threat by becoming whatever the threatening person needs them to be. Walker describes fawn as developing primarily in children who learned that fighting back was dangerous, running was impossible, and freezing didn’t stop the mistreatment. Leaving appeasement as the only remaining option.
In plain terms: You know fight, flight, and freeze. The three ways your body responds to danger. Fawn is the fourth one, and it’s the one nobody talks about. Fawning means your survival strategy is to make the other person happy so they won’t hurt you. You agree. You accommodate. You become what they need. You abandon your own position. Not because you’re weak, but because your nervous system learned early that compliance was the safest way to survive a threatening person. It happens automatically, often before you even realize you had a choice.
Most people know about fight, flight, and freeze. They’re the trauma responses that get all the cultural attention. The adrenaline surge, the impulse to run, the paralysis of a deer in headlights. But Pete Walker, MA, whose clinical work with complex PTSD survivors spans decades, recognized that these three responses didn’t account for what he was seeing in a significant portion of his clients: people who responded to threat not by fighting, fleeing, or freezing, but by merging with the threatening person’s needs.
Walker named this the fawn response, and its recognition has been quietly revolutionary in the field of trauma psychology. For millions of people. Disproportionately women, disproportionately survivors of childhood relational trauma. The fawn response explains a pattern they’ve been living in for decades without a name for it.
Here’s what makes fawn particularly insidious: it doesn’t look like a trauma response. Fight looks like anger. Flight looks like anxiety. Freeze looks like depression or dissociation. But fawn? Fawn looks like niceness. It looks like agreeableness. It looks like being a “team player,” a “good sport,” an “easygoing person.” It looks like everything the world rewards. Especially in women.
This is why so many driven women can spend years. Even decades. In a full-blown fawn pattern without realizing it. The world isn’t telling them something is wrong. The world is telling them they’re doing great. They’re getting promoted for their fawning. They’re getting praised for it. They’re building entire careers on a trauma response. And they’re burning out from the inside, confused about why success feels so empty and exhausting.
The Neurobiology of Fawning: Social Engagement as Defense
The social engagement system, as described by Stephen W. Porges, PhD, Distinguished University Scientist at Indiana University and creator of the Polyvagal Theory, is a neurological circuit involving the ventral vagal complex. The myelinated branch of the vagus nerve that regulates the muscles of the face, middle ear, larynx, and pharynx. In safe conditions, this system facilitates connection: it enables eye contact, vocal prosody, facial expression, and the ability to listen and respond socially. However, Porges’s Polyvagal Theory reveals that when higher-order defense strategies (fight/flight) are unavailable or ineffective, the social engagement system can be co-opted as a defense mechanism. Using social behaviors (appeasing, smiling, agreeing, soothing) not to connect, but to manage threat. This co-opting of social engagement for survival is the neurobiological basis of the fawn response. (PMID: 7652107)
In plain terms: Your body has a social system designed for connection. It’s what makes you smile, make eye contact, modulate your voice to sound warm. Normally, this system is about genuine relating. But when you grew up in an environment where connection was the only way to stay safe. Where charming the angry parent, soothing the volatile sibling, or pleasing the controlling authority figure was your primary survival tool. Your social engagement system got repurposed. Instead of connecting, it started defending. Your smile became armor. Your agreeableness became a shield. And now, decades later, your body still deploys that shield automatically. Even when the “threat” is just a boss asking about a timeline.
Stephen W. Porges, PhD, creator of Polyvagal Theory, provided the neurobiological framework that helps us understand why fawning is so automatic and so hard to override.
In Porges’s model, the autonomic nervous system operates in a hierarchy. The first line of defense is the ventral vagal system. The social engagement system, which attempts to manage threat through connection, communication, and co-regulation. If social engagement fails, the sympathetic nervous system activates. Fight or flight. If fight or flight fails or isn’t possible, the dorsal vagal system takes over. Freeze or shutdown.
For children who grew up in homes where fighting back was met with escalated punishment and running away was impossible, the social engagement system became the primary defense. The child learned to manage the threatening parent by reading their mood, mirroring their needs, soothing their emotions, and making themselves indispensable as a source of emotional regulation for the very person who was supposed to be regulating them.
This is the fawn response at its origin: the co-opting of the social engagement system. Designed for connection. As a defense mechanism. The child who fawns is using every tool in their relational toolbox. Empathy, attunement, agreeableness, warmth. Not to connect, but to survive. And because these tools look prosocial, nobody recognizes them as a survival strategy. The child looks like a “good kid,” an “easy child,” an “old soul.” In reality, they’re a child in survival mode, reading the room with the hyper-attentiveness of a hostage negotiator.
Janina Fisher, PhD, psychologist and author of Healing the Fragmented Selves of Trauma Survivors, describes how this adaptation creates what she calls a “going along to get along” part of the self. A part that developed specifically to manage threatening relationships by abandoning the authentic self. This part becomes so practiced, so automatic, and so reinforced by external approval that many people don’t realize it’s a part at all. They think it’s just… who they are. “I’m just a people-pleaser.” “I’m just easygoing.” “I just don’t like conflict.” (PMID: 16530597)
But there’s a difference between genuinely not liking conflict and being unable to tolerate conflict because your nervous system codes it as a survival threat. There’s a difference between being naturally accommodating and being unable to stop accommodating because your body won’t let you. The first is a preference. The second is a trauma response.
And when that trauma response follows you into the workplace. As it does for virtually every woman who developed it in childhood. It creates a very specific set of problems that get worse the more successful you become.
How the Fawn Response Shows Up at Work for Driven Women
The workplace is, for many people, the primary theater where the fawn response performs. And for driven women, it’s often where fawning does the most damage. Precisely because it’s so effectively disguised as professional excellence.
Here’s what I see in my practice, again and again:
Saying yes before the request is finished. Amy described this as “the autopilot yes.” Someone asks if she can take on an additional project, and the word “yes” is out of her mouth before her brain has even evaluated whether she has the capacity. The yes isn’t a considered response. It’s a reflex. The same reflex she developed as a child when her father would walk in and the safest thing was to agree to whatever he wanted before his mood had a chance to darken.
Absorbing other people’s emotions as if they were your responsibility. A colleague is stressed. A direct report is frustrated. A client is unhappy. And the fawn-response woman doesn’t just notice these emotions. She takes them on. She adjusts her behavior to soothe them. She de-prioritizes her own work to manage their emotional state. She leaves meetings exhausted not from the work but from the emotional labor of making sure everyone in the room felt okay.
Inability to advocate for yourself. You can advocate for your team. You can advocate for your direct reports. You can go to bat for a colleague’s promotion, a client’s needs, an underdog’s case. But when it comes to advocating for yourself. Asking for a raise, pushing back on an unreasonable deadline, saying “this isn’t working for me”. The words dissolve. Your throat closes. You smile and say, “It’s fine.”
Over-explaining every boundary or decision. When you do manage to set a limit, you can’t just say no. You say no and then provide a twelve-paragraph justification. You over-explain, over-apologize, over-contextualize. Because the fawn response can’t tolerate the possibility that someone might think you’re being unreasonable. The over-explaining is a preemptive strike against their displeasure: If I explain enough, maybe they won’t be upset. If I justify enough, maybe I’m allowed to have this limit.
Chronic over-functioning. You do your work and other people’s work. You anticipate problems before they arise and solve them before anyone asks. You stay late. You answer emails at midnight. You’re the person everyone calls when something falls apart, because you always fix it. Not because you want to, but because you can’t not. The over-functioning isn’t ambition. It’s a trauma-driven need to make yourself indispensable so that nobody has a reason to be dissatisfied with you.
The phantom “no” you never deliver. Rachel, another client, described it perfectly: “I have this whole internal conversation where I’m assertive and direct and clear. I rehearse exactly what I’m going to say. And then I get into the meeting, and the other person looks at me, and the whole script vanishes. I smile and agree and then hate myself in the parking lot.”
Rachel is a senior director at a healthcare company. She manages a team of forty people. She is, by any external measure, powerful. But in any one-on-one interaction with someone she perceives as having authority. Her VP, a difficult stakeholder, a vendor who’s pushing back. She becomes the child in the kitchen, reading the room, adjusting herself to keep the peace.
“I can be a leader for everyone except myself,” she told me. “The second it’s about my own needs, I disappear.”
That disappearing is the fawn response. It’s not weakness. It’s not a personality flaw. It’s a nervous system adaptation that was once essential for survival, and it’s now running automatically in contexts where survival isn’t at stake. But where your body doesn’t know that.
Fawning vs. Genuine Collaboration: How to Tell the Difference
Here’s where it gets tricky. And where many driven women get stuck. Because the behaviors associated with fawning look, from the outside, exactly like the behaviors associated with being a good colleague, a thoughtful leader, an empathic collaborator. The actions are often identical. The internal experience is completely different.
So how do you tell the difference between fawning and genuine collaboration? Here’s the diagnostic I use with clients:
Choice vs. compulsion. Genuine collaboration feels like a choice. You can say yes or no, and both feel available to you. Fawning doesn’t feel like a choice. The yes is automatic, compulsive, and happens before your rational brain has weighed in. Ask yourself: “Did I choose this, or did it happen to me?” If you can’t remember making a conscious decision. If the agreement just… happened. That’s fawn.
Presence vs. absence of self. In genuine collaboration, you’re present. Your needs, perspectives, and limits are in the room alongside everyone else’s. In fawning, you disappear. Your needs leave the building. You become an extension of the other person’s agenda, their emotional state, their preference. You can feel this as a literal sensation. A hollowing out, a going blank, a feeling that “you” have stepped away and something else is running the show.
Energy after the interaction. Genuine collaboration. Even when it involves compromise or disagreement. Tends to leave you feeling energized, engaged, or at least neutral. Fawning leaves you depleted, resentful, or empty. If you consistently feel exhausted after interactions with a particular person or in particular types of meetings, and the exhaustion feels emotional rather than cognitive, you’re likely fawning.
The presence of resentment. This is the biggest tell. Genuine generosity doesn’t breed resentment. If you volunteered for something freely and it’s costing you, you might feel tired, but you don’t feel bitter. Fawning breeds resentment because it involves a transaction you didn’t consciously agree to: I gave up my needs to manage your comfort, and now I’m angry about it. But I can’t express the anger because that would create the very conflict I fawned to avoid. If you find yourself keeping a mental tally of all the ways you’ve accommodated and feeling increasingly bitter about the imbalance, you’re in a fawn pattern.
What happens when you imagine saying no. Picture yourself declining the request, disagreeing in the meeting, stating your actual opinion. What do you feel? If you feel a measured discomfort. The normal awkwardness of disagreement. That’s healthy social calibration. If you feel panic, dread, a tightening in your chest, a flash of “they’ll think I’m difficult” or “they won’t like me anymore”. That’s the threat response underlying the fawn. You’re not avoiding disagreement because you prefer harmony. You’re avoiding it because your body interprets it as existentially dangerous.
Amy, after we worked through this framework together, told me: “I realized that literally everything I’ve been praised for at work. My flexibility, my willingness to take on anything, my ability to ‘read the room’. Is my trauma response. My entire professional reputation is built on fawning.”
That realization is painful. It’s also liberating. Because once you can see the pattern, you can begin to build something different in its place. Not by dismantling everything, but by gradually introducing choice into a system that’s been running on autopilot.
Both/And: You Can Be Kind and Still Be Fawning
One of the most common defenses against recognizing the fawn response is the belief that it’s “just who I am.” That the agreeableness, the empathy, the accommodation. These aren’t symptoms. They’re character traits. And to call them a trauma response feels like an erasure of something genuine.
I understand that resistance, and I want to honor it: you are empathic. You are kind. You are attuned to others. Those qualities are real, and they are yours. The trauma didn’t create them from nothing. What the trauma did was hijack them. Put them in service of survival instead of choice, deploy them automatically instead of intentionally, make them compulsory instead of freely given.
The both/and is this: you can be genuinely empathic and your empathy can be operating, at times, in service of the fawn response. You can be authentically kind and your kindness can be, in certain contexts, a defense mechanism rather than a choice. You can be a naturally collaborative person and your collaboration can sometimes be driven by a terror of conflict that has nothing to do with the present situation.
The goal of healing the fawn response isn’t to become unkind. It isn’t to stop being empathic. It’s to put yourself back in the equation. It’s to develop the capacity to be kind and honest. Empathic and boundaried. Collaborative and self-preserving.
Right now, for many women who fawn, it’s an either/or: either I take care of your needs or I take care of mine. Either I’m the good colleague or I’m the difficult one. Either I keep the peace or I speak my truth.
You've been holding everything together. You're allowed to put some down.
A focused self-paced course on overfunctioning, achievement-first self-concept, and the trauma response that masquerades as a personality. Not a productivity problem. Not a boundary problem. A nervous system that learned competence was the only safety.
Healing the fawn response means learning that both can coexist. That you can disagree with someone and still be kind. That you can say no and still be a good team member. That you can advocate for yourself and still care about the people around you.
Rachel worked on this explicitly in coaching. We called it her “and” practice. Before every meeting where she anticipated a potential fawn trigger, she’d write down one sentence that contained both her care for the other person and her own position. “I understand the urgency, and my team needs a more realistic timeline.” “I value your input, and I see it differently.” “I want to help, and I’m at capacity right now.”
The “and” didn’t come naturally at first. Her body resisted it. The first few times she delivered one of these sentences in a meeting, her hands were shaking under the table and she felt nauseated afterward. But the world didn’t end. Her boss didn’t fire her. Her colleagues didn’t abandon her. And slowly. Very slowly. Her nervous system began to update its map: I can hold both. I can be kind and honest. I can be empathic and boundaried. And I can survive it.
The Systemic Lens: Why Workplaces Reward Women Who Fawn
We can’t talk about the fawn response at work without talking about the system that makes fawning adaptive. Even rewarded. In professional settings.
Here’s the uncomfortable truth: most workplaces are designed to benefit from women who fawn. The woman who always says yes. The woman who absorbs others’ stress. The woman who smooths conflict, manages emotions, takes on the extra work, and never complains. That woman is valuable. To the system. She’s not valuable to herself. She’s burning out. She’s resentful. She’s losing herself one accommodation at a time.
Research on workplace dynamics consistently shows that women are expected to perform “organizational citizenship behaviors”. Helping, accommodating, volunteering for non-promotable tasks. At higher rates than men, and are penalized more harshly when they don’t. When a woman declines a request, she’s more likely to be perceived as “not a team player” than a man who declines the same request. When a woman disagrees in a meeting, she’s more likely to be perceived as “aggressive” or “difficult” than a man making the same point.
This means that for women. Particularly driven women who are already navigating the double bind of being competent enough to be respected but not so competent that they’re threatening. The fawn response isn’t just a personal trauma adaptation. It’s a survival strategy for a system that punishes female assertiveness and rewards female compliance.
The impostor syndrome that so many driven women experience is often, at its root, a fawn response that’s been promoted: the woman who doesn’t believe she deserves her success because her success was built on self-abandonment. She didn’t get where she is by being her authentic self. She got there by being whatever the room needed. And deep down, she knows that the person who got promoted isn’t really her. It’s the fawn mask she’s been wearing since she was eight years old.
This is why individual healing isn’t sufficient on its own. Yes, a woman needs to do her own work. Understanding her fawn response, building the capacity for authentic expression, developing tools for self-advocacy. But the system also needs to change. Workplaces need to stop rewarding women’s self-sacrifice as if it were professional excellence. Leaders need to stop confusing a woman’s inability to say no with a willingness to say yes. Organizations need to create cultures where all genders can set limits, disagree, and advocate for their needs without relational penalty.
Until that happens. And we’re not there yet. Women who fawn at work are navigating a dual challenge: healing a personal trauma response while operating in a system that was designed to exploit it. That’s hard. It’s worth naming as hard. And it’s worth pursuing anyway, because the cost of not healing it. The burnout, the resentment, the panic attacks, the quiet despair of living as a performance. Is too high to sustain.
How to Begin Unwinding the Fawn Response at Work
If you’ve recognized yourself in this article. If you’re sitting in your own version of Amy’s car, crying in the parking lot because you did it again. Here’s where we start.
Start with awareness, not action. The first step isn’t to become a boundary-setting machine overnight. The first step is to notice. For one week, simply pay attention to the moments when you agree to something without consciously choosing to. When you swallow your opinion. When you absorb someone else’s emotion. When you feel yourself disappear. Don’t try to change anything yet. Just observe. The awareness itself begins to create a tiny gap between the trigger and the automatic response. And that gap is where all the change will eventually happen.
Track the body signals. The fawn response has a physical signature. For Amy, it was a tightening in her solar plexus. For Rachel, it was a sensation of her face going “blank”. As if a mask were being pulled on. Learn your body’s version. What does fawn feel like in your chest, your stomach, your throat, your hands? When you can recognize the body signal, you can catch the fawn response in its first seconds. Before it’s fully deployed. That’s the window for choice.
Buy yourself time. The fawn response is fast. Faster than conscious thought. So you need strategies that slow the interaction down enough for your prefrontal cortex to catch up. Phrases like: “Let me think about that and get back to you.” “I need to check my calendar/capacity/team’s bandwidth.” “Can I have until tomorrow to give you an answer?” These aren’t boundaries. They’re speed bumps. Ways to interrupt the autopilot yes long enough for the authentic answer to arrive.
Practice with low-stakes situations first. Don’t start by pushing back on your CEO. Start with the barista who gets your order wrong. The colleague who asks if you want to grab lunch when you’d rather eat alone. The email that doesn’t require an immediate response. Build the muscle of authentic response in situations where the stakes are low enough that your nervous system can tolerate the discomfort. Each successful low-stakes moment teaches your body: “I can be honest and survive this.” That learning compounds over time.
Name the internal experience when it’s safe to. With a trusted colleague, a mentor, or in therapy: “I noticed that I agreed to something in that meeting that I didn’t actually want to agree to. I’m working on catching that pattern.” Naming it externally does two things: it makes the invisible visible, and it enlists witnesses. People who can gently reflect back when they see you fawning. Rachel eventually told her closest colleague about her fawn pattern, and that colleague started texting her a thumbs-up emoji after meetings where Rachel expressed her actual opinion. Small gesture, enormous impact.
Expect grief. As you begin to see the fawn response clearly. As you recognize how many years you spent performing instead of being, accommodating instead of advocating, disappearing instead of showing up. Grief will arrive. Grief for the promotions you earned through self-abandonment. Grief for the authentic self who was never safe enough to appear at work. Grief for the decades spent managing other people’s emotions at the expense of your own. This grief is not a sign that you’re doing it wrong. It’s a sign that you’re finally seeing clearly. Let it come. It’s part of the healing.
Get specialized support. The fawn response is deeply wired. It’s not something you can think your way out of, no matter how many books you read. Working with a trauma-informed therapist who understands parts work and nervous system regulation, or a trauma-informed executive coach who can help you translate these insights into specific workplace behaviors, can accelerate the process significantly. You didn’t develop the fawn response alone. You developed it in relationship. And healing it also happens in relationship.
Amy, after nine months of therapy and coaching, told me about a meeting where her VP proposed another unrealistic timeline. She felt the old tightening in her solar plexus. She felt the autopilot yes rising in her throat. And then she paused. Three seconds. That’s all. Three seconds. And in those three seconds, she said something she’d never said in a meeting before: “I want to support this initiative, and I need to be honest that this timeline isn’t feasible for my team. Here’s what we’d need to make it work.”
Her hands were shaking. Her heart was pounding. She felt, for a full hour afterward, like she’d done something terrible.
And her VP said, “Good point. Let’s adjust.”
That was it. No explosion. No retaliation. No abandonment. Just a reasonable response to a reasonable assertion of reality. The thing her nervous system had been catastrophizing about for her entire career. The moment of honest disagreement. Turned out to be survivable. Not just survivable. Respected.
“I’ve been protecting myself from something that wasn’t even a threat,” she said in session afterward. And then, quietly: “I’ve been protecting myself from a threat that stopped existing twenty years ago.”
Yes. That’s exactly right. And now she’s learning. Slowly, bravely, one meeting at a time. To stop.
If you recognize the fawn response in your own professional life and you’re ready to begin working with it. Whether through individual therapy, trauma-informed executive coaching, or structured self-study. I want you to know that it’s possible to keep your empathy, your kindness, and your collaborative spirit and put yourself back in the equation. You don’t have to choose between being good at your job and being true to yourself. The woman who can do both. The one who was hiding underneath the fawn mask all along. Is worth meeting.
ANNIE’S SIGNATURE COURSE
Fixing the Foundations™
The deep work of relational trauma recovery. At your own pace. Annie’s step-by-step course for driven women ready to repair the psychological foundations beneath their impressive lives.
Q: Is the fawn response the same as people-pleasing?
A: They’re closely related, but not identical. People-pleasing is a behavioral pattern. The tendency to prioritize others’ needs and seek approval. The fawn response is the neurobiological trauma mechanism that drives the most entrenched forms of people-pleasing. You can be a mild people-pleaser without having a fawn response (some people-pleasing is cultural or temperamental). But if your people-pleasing is compulsive, automatic, impossible to override, and accompanied by a genuine fear of conflict or disapproval. If it feels less like a choice and more like something that happens to you. It’s likely rooted in the fawn response. The distinction matters because it changes the intervention: you can’t just “decide to stop people-pleasing” if the fawn response is driving it. You need to address the nervous system, not just the behavior.
Q: Can you have more than one trauma response?
A: Absolutely. Most people have a primary trauma response. The one that activates most frequently and automatically. And secondary responses that emerge in different contexts. You might fawn at work and freeze at home. You might fawn with authority figures and fight with peers. The response often depends on who you’re interacting with and what dynamic from your childhood the interaction resembles. In my practice, I commonly see driven women who fawn in professional settings and either flight (overwork, overbusyness) or freeze (emotional shutdown, dissociation) in personal relationships. Understanding your full constellation of trauma responses. Not just your primary one. Is an important part of healing.
Q: Why do I fawn more with certain people than others?
A: The fawn response is typically triggered by people who resemble. Consciously or unconsciously. The original person you developed the response for. This resemblance doesn’t have to be obvious. It might be a tone of voice, an energy, a dynamic (someone with power over you, someone whose approval you need, someone who seems emotionally volatile). Your nervous system is pattern-matching constantly, and when it detects a pattern that reminds it of the original threat, it deploys the original defense. Even if the current person is nothing like your parent. Understanding who triggers your fawn response, and mapping those people back to the original relational template, is a powerful part of the therapeutic process.
Q: How do I stop fawning at work without jeopardizing my career?
A: This is the question I hear most from driven women, and it’s a valid concern. The key is gradual, strategic change. Not a sudden personality overhaul. Start by buying yourself time before responding (this disrupts the automatic yes). Practice expressing disagreement in low-stakes situations. Build alliances with colleagues who support authentic communication. And critically. Separate the fawn from the skill. You’re not trying to become less empathic, less attuned, or less collaborative. You’re trying to add self-advocacy to your existing toolkit. In most healthy workplaces, a woman who can collaborate AND set appropriate limits is more respected, not less. A trauma-informed executive coach can help you navigate this transition strategically.
Q: Can therapy help with the fawn response?
A: Yes. And therapy is often necessary because the fawn response is wired at the nervous system level, not just the behavioral level. Effective approaches include somatic therapy (which works directly with the body’s threat responses), EMDR (which can reprocess the childhood experiences that created the fawn pattern), parts work (which helps you build a relationship with the fawning part of yourself with compassion rather than judgment), and trauma-informed executive coaching (which translates therapeutic insights into specific workplace skills and behaviors). The combination of therapeutic work on the underlying trauma and practical skills-based coaching for the workplace context tends to produce the most durable change.
Related Reading
Walker, Pete. Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving. Azure Coyote Publishing, 2013.
Porges, Stephen W. The Polyvagal Theory: Neurophysiological Foundations of Emotions, Attachment, Communication, and Self-Regulation. W.W. Norton & Company, 2011.
Fisher, Janina. Healing the Fragmented Selves of Trauma Survivors: Overcoming Internal Self-Alienation. Routledge, 2017.
Gibson, Lindsay C. Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents: How to Heal from Distant, Rejecting, or Self-Involved Parents. New Harbinger Publications, 2015.
References
Books & Cultural Sources (Chicago Author-Date)
- Fisher, Janina. Healing the fragmented selves of trauma survivors. Taylor & Francis Group, 2017.
- Walker, Pete. Complex PTSD. CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2013.
Read Annie’s weekly essays on rebuilding after relational trauma.
Weekly Substack essays from Annie Wright, LMFT on relational trauma, recovery, and the House of Life framework. For driven women who want a structured path back to themselves.
WAYS TO WORK WITH ANNIE
Individual Therapy
Trauma-informed therapy for driven women healing relational trauma. Licensed in 11 jurisdictions.
Executive Coaching
Trauma-informed coaching for driven women navigating leadership and burnout.
Fixing the Foundations
Annie’s signature course for relational trauma recovery. Work at your own pace.
Strong & Stable
The Sunday conversation you wished you’d had years earlier. 25,000+ subscribers.
Annie Wright, LMFT
LMFT · Relational Trauma Specialist · W.W. Norton Author
Helping driven women finally feel as good as their résumé looks.
Annie Wright is a licensed psychotherapist (LMFT #95719) and trauma-informed executive coach with over 25,000 clinical hours. She works with driven women. Including Silicon Valley leaders, physicians, and entrepreneurs. In repairing the psychological foundations beneath their impressive lives. Annie is the founder and former CEO of Evergreen Counseling, a multimillion-dollar trauma-informed therapy center she built, scaled, and successfully exited. A regular contributor to Psychology Today, her expert commentary has appeared in Forbes, Business Insider, Inc., NBC, and The Information. She is currently writing her first book with W.W. Norton.
Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist (LMFT #95719)
15,000+ direct clinical hours
California · Connecticut · Washington DC · Florida · Maine · Maryland · New Hampshire · New Jersey · Texas · Virginia · Washington
Creator of House of Life™ and Fixing the Foundations™
The Everything Years (W.W. Norton)
Founder & former CEO, Evergreen Counseling
Regular contributor to Psychology Today. Expert commentary has appeared in Forbes, Business Insider, Inc., NBC, and The Information.
