I had a very hard time learning to say no to my mother. She didn’t ask me how I wanted to live my life when I was growing up. She ordered me to do what she wanted, which usually was whatever she thought the church wanted. Having grown up in California during my early years and missing it for the whole rest of my childhood, I wanted to go to Stanford and had the grades to have a chance at getting accepted. But my mother told me I wasn’t allowed to go to college west of the Mississippi or north of the Mason-Dixon line. When I threatened to apply to Amherst and Stanford, my mother told me that if I defied her, I’d never qualify for financial aid because my physician father made too much money.
Once I matriculated at Duke, my mother forbid me to drive to my boyfriend’s college to visit him, assuming I’d instantly have sex and lose my precious virginity if she wasn’t there to chaperone. That was the first time I remember pushing back.
“You forbid me?” I asked. “I’m at Duke and you’re in Florida. My roommate is offering to drive me to Jordan’s college. Exactly how are you going to stop me?”
To her credit, my mother loosened up after realizing she was powerless to stop me.
Not until I was a resident at Northwestern, training to become an OB/GYN did we hit another big power struggle. I was pro-choice and all residents at Northwestern learn to do abortions. My mother forbade me to kill a baby, threatening to disown me and shun me from the family if I did.
I cried through my first abortion but did it anyway. To my mother’s credit, she didn’t disown me. Instead, she swore we would never speak of this again. On her death bed, she tried to make me pray to Jesus to forgive me for my sin, but I refused. I didn’t think it was a sin. I was proud of my women’s reproductive rights activism and spent eight years as the only OB/GYN in my San Diego group to offer pregnancy termination services to our patients because I didn’t want them to feel shamed or rejected by us if we referred them out of our practice.
None of these things were easy for me though, because I’d grown up learning to be a compliant, pleasing, accommodating, self-abandoning good girl. In other words, I was fawning. In the words of Anthony “Nippy” Ames from A Little Bit Culty, you might even call me a “fawn star.” It wasn’t until I left home that I realized I had the right to have a different opinion than my mother. My parents were Republicans, but when I registered to vote, I registered Democrat. While my parents were virgins when they got married, I was not. While my parents were tithing members of a Christian church, I left the church the minute nobody was forcing me to go anymore.
I didn’t think of myself as rebelling. I was individuating, breaking out of lifelong enmeshment with my mother and figuring out who I was as a separate person. I didn’t know how to even know whether I was a yes or a no. I just knew that I tried very hard to be pleasing to everyone, but especially to my mother. It took me years of therapy to realize that fawning was a trauma response I developed because it wasn’t safe to defy my mother growing up.
Nobody beat me into submission. Nobody had to. All my mother had to do was threaten to kick me out of the family and disown me if I got pregnant as a teenager, had a drop of alcohol, tried any drugs, got bad grades at school, or otherwise acted like anything other than the perfect teenager.
When you’re a teenager, you don’t question whether your parents really mean it when they threaten you into terrified compliance. You just obey. So my nervous system learned to do just that- with just about everyone, for many, many years.
I joke that my quick rise to public notoriety during the heyday of the Mind Over Medicine, PBS special, TEDx talk years forced me to break my fawning habit. Prior to that, I’d done a pretty decent job of pleasing just about everyone but my mother. But once total strangers started reaching out to tell me their stories, and everyone all at once seemed to want something from me, I had to become what I called a “professional disappointer.” I didn’t want to disappoint anyone. I wanted to please everyone who wrote to me via my website or on social media!
But it was literally impossible. After I stayed up all night trying to save a stranger who sent a suicide note to the contact form on my website, and after she went ahead and killed herself years later after I’d gotten her what I thought was appropriate help, I finally gave up thinking I could save the world and please everyone. I realized that if I didn’t disappoint strangers, I’d wind up disappointing my daughter. In other words, I finally got some boundaries.
But prior to that, I was a porous gap, ready to be bulldozed over by anyone who love bombed me.
What Fawning Really Is
My partner Jeff and I are in the final edits of our book about the health implications of people who fawn. It’s called RELATIONSICK, because that’s what we call people who fawn all the way to illness- relationsick. But lest you think we’re blaming sick people for their cancers and heart attacks, let me reassure you that we’re not.
We are working towards helping individuals heal from the fawning trauma response, enabling them to assert themselves, set boundaries, and be true to themselves. This is crucial in preventing chronic dysregulation associated with fawning, which can lead to immune system dysfunction, chronic inflammation, and various physical illnesses.
For a sneak peek into the content of RELATIONSICK, you can join LOVE SCHOOL here.
It is important to understand that fawning is not just about people-pleasing. It is a reflexive response to trauma, similar to fight, flight, and freeze responses. While fighting involves confronting danger, fleeing involves escaping it, and freezing involves playing dead, fawning involves appeasing the threat. It is not a conscious choice but a quick reflex aimed at ensuring safety through compliance, obedience, caretaking, or self-erasure.
When you engage in fawning, you prioritize others’ comfort over your own well-being, suppressing your true self to maintain a connection. This behavior stems from a childhood need to stay attached and avoid abandonment or punishment. However, beneath the caretaking facade lies a sensitive nervous system that learned to prioritize others’ needs to maintain safety.
Healing from fawning involves learning to pause before automatically complying. By creating a space between stimulus and response, you give yourself the opportunity to listen to other parts of yourself and make a conscious choice. This pause is where your freedom lies, but it can be challenging to achieve when fawning is deeply ingrained in your survival instincts.
Reclaiming interoception, the ability to feel what’s happening in your body, is key to recognizing fawning impulses early. By tuning into your body’s signals, such as physical tension or discomfort, you can identify when you are about to fawn and choose to pause instead.
Healing from fawning is a process of shifting from reflexive responses to conscious choices. By catching fawning impulses early and creating a pause, you can build self-trust and rewire your survival pathways. Training your body to pause and respond consciously is essential for breaking free from fawning patterns.
Practical tools for building the capacity to pause include naming what’s happening, finding your exhale, and pendulating between activation and safety. By acknowledging fawning impulses, regulating your breath, and shifting attention between tension and safety, you can strengthen your ability to pause and make empowered choices in challenging situations. When we gently move back and forth between feeling activation and safety, we expand our capacity to tolerate discomfort. By practicing this pendulation, we can learn to stay present even when faced with feelings that we find intolerable.
If the fear of disappointing someone is overwhelming, we can observe the physical sensations that arise when we imagine letting someone down. By shifting our focus between these sensations and grounding ourselves in the present moment, we can build resilience and learn to withstand discomfort without losing ourselves.
Using techniques like orientation and anchoring our pause, we can remind ourselves that we are no longer in past traumas but in the present moment. These practices help rewire our nervous system to prioritize our well-being and make conscious choices that align with our true selves.
By incorporating micro-pauses and meeting our fawning part with compassion, we can rewire our sense of safety and re-parent our protective parts. This process allows us to integrate trauma healing modalities and move from being a people-pleaser to a truth-teller.
Every pause we take is an act of rebellion against our conditioning. It allows us to transform our relationships and attract people who respect our boundaries and authenticity. Through consistent practice, we can break free from the cycle of self-betrayal and cultivate relationships based on mutual respect and understanding.
You attract those who can embrace your true self, honoring your independence and theirs.
Most importantly, your body begins to trust what your mind already understands: love that compromises your values is not love at all.
So give it a try! Be kind to yourself. Taking a pause can feel daunting when your body associates slowing down with danger. Acknowledge small wins. Notice the moment you almost lost yourself but didn’t. Recognize the moment you interrupted yourself and took a moment to breathe. Each instance is a step towards rewiring your nervous system—a reclaiming of your authenticity, a demonstration of neuroplasticity in motion.
If you’re seeking assistance in practicing this within your relationships—with support, tools for your nervous system, and a community of individuals learning to love from a place of genuineness rather than survival—then Love School is the perfect fit. We’re focusing on overcoming the fawn response and exploring ways for those who love individuals who fawn to aid in their healing. It’s a space where we practice pausing, breathing, and loving without losing ourselves.