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. Hopefully, we’re empowering them to heal the fawning trauma response, so they can begin to say no, set boundaries, become more authentically themselves, and spare their nervous systems the chronic dysregulation that rides shotgun with fawning, which leads to immune system dysfunction, chronic inflammation, and many different types of illnesses and physical symptoms.
To get a preview of the content of RELATIONSICK, join LOVE SCHOOL here.
It bears noting that fawning isn’t just people-pleasing. It’s a reflexive trauma response that belongs to the same family as fight, flight, and freeze. Where fighting spurs you into confronting danger, fleeing leaps you out of your seat to escape it, and freezing stops you in your tracks to play dead, fawning mobilizes you to appease it. It’s not a conscious choice; it’s as quick a reflex as hitting your knee with an orange hammer. It’s the nervous system’s attempt to ensure safety through compliance, obedience, caretaking, or self-erasure.
When you fawn, you abandon your own body, your own preferences, your own instincts, and your own self-protection- to stay in someone else’s good graces. You monitor micro-expressions. You laugh at jokes that sting. You offer help before it’s asked for, trying to pre-empt conflict. You may even feel a strange comfort in being indispensable- because in childhood, that was what kept you safely attached. It’s what prevented you from getting kicked out of the house, disowned, or beaten. To a child, sacrificing your agency is a fair trade if the alternative is being out on the streets.
But beneath that caretaking, compliant impulse is an exquisitely sensitive nervous system that learned early: If I disappoint you, I could lose connection—and connection equals survival. When you’ve spent your life making other people comfortable by silencing your truth, the hardest part of healing isn’t learning to speak up—it’s learning to pause. If someone issues an entitled demand, PAUSE. When someone makes even a reasonable request of you, PAUSE.
In IFS language, Self is in the pause. A fawning part might jump to an insincere yes or an action you might later regret. But if you can break the compulsion to fawn by adding just a beat of time, you buy yourself time to allow other parts to cast their votes. Even a one minute pause can change everything.
That tiny space between stimulus and response, between the moment someone’s face tightens and your nervous system rushes to smooth it over—that’s the threshold where your freedom lives. But when fawning is wired into your survival code, pausing can feel impossible. It’s not that you don’t want to pause; it’s that your body thinks your safety depends on not pausing.
Why Pausing Feels So Hard
Fawning happens in milliseconds, before conscious thought. The body reads threat in another’s tone or tension, in even the slightest hint of disappointment on someone’s face or in their voice, and the switch gets flipped, instantly shifting into appeasement mode. The brain barely registers it until afterward.
To pause, you need interoception—the ability to feel what’s happening inside your body in real time. But if you grew up in relational environments where tuning in was dangerous (where noticing your body meant noticing fear, or noticing anger meant punishment), you may have learned to tune your body out, to quiet your spidey senses, to ignore the hairs on the back of your neck when someone controlling and narcissistic does not want you to have the option of consenting or declining.
Reclaiming interoception is like building new sensory equipment. You begin to notice your throat constrict when someone’s disappointed in you, or your heart races when you’re about to say “no.” These cues become early warning signs. They’re your body whispering, “I’m about to fawn. Please slow down.”
From Reflex to Choice
Healing is not about never fawning again. It’s about catching the impulse sooner, shrinking the gap between awareness and action until, one day, you feel the tightening in your belly and realize: “I don’t have to follow this impulse. I can pause.”
That pause is the birthplace of self-trust. It’s where neuroplasticity happens—where old survival pathways loosen and new ones begin to form. So how do we build it? By training the body, not just the mind. The pause must be embodied.
Practical Tools For Building the Capacity To Pause
1. Name What’s Happening
When you notice yourself leaning forward to fix, placate, or reassure—pause and silently name it:
“I feel the urge to please.”
“I notice tension in my chest.”
“I feel frightened of letting this person down.”
Naming shifts activity from the amygdala (fear center) to the prefrontal cortex (choice center). It’s like turning on a light in a dark room. The moment you name the temptation to fawn, you’re no longer blended with that part; you’re with it, in Self.
2. Find Your Exhale
In Somatic Experiencing, the exhale is medicine. Fawning traps the breath high in the chest, keeping the body in vigilance. Try this:
- Inhale gently through your nose for a count of four.
- Exhale slowly through your mouth for a count of six.
- As you exhale, imagine softening the back of your heart.
The extended exhale signals safety to the vagus nerve and invites the body to settle. You can’t choose wisely when your physiology is hijacked; you can only react. The exhale reopens the door to choice.
3. Pendulate Between Activation and Safety
Somatic Experiencing teaches pendulation—the art of moving attention between what feels tense and what feels safe. It’s like dipping your toe into cold water and then taking it right back out. Then dipping again, until you can tolerate more of the cold. When we pendulate into a feeling or sensation we think is going to be intolerable, we increase our window of tolerance for that very feeling.
If disappointing someone is the worst feeling you can imagine, you can just notice what happens in your body when you even imagine letting someone you love down. Notice the tightness in your stomach (activation). Then shift your awareness to your feet on the floor or the texture of the chair supporting you (safety). Go back and forth between activation and safety a few times- somatically.
This gentle oscillation builds capacity. Instead of being flooded by activation, your system learns it can feel discomfort and still stay present. Over time, you develop the muscle of staying with yourself even when someone else is displeased.
4. Orient to the Present
Fawning is fueled by implicit memories. Your body is reacting as if an old danger has returned, even when you’re with someone safe and trustworthy, someone who will not abandon you or beat you if you don’t do what they want. To remind your nervous system you’re in the present time, use the Somatic Experiencing tool of “orientation.”
- Slowly turn your head.
- Let your eyes land on something neutral or pleasant in the room.
- Name it silently: “There’s the window with a tree outside. There’s a bird song outside. There’s a pretty painting I like on the wall.”
Orientation brings your system out of the old story and into the now. It tells the body: You’re not a child anymore. You can stay, breathe, pause, and make a conscious choice that involves not just your fawning part, but other parts who may have other opinions and preferences.
5. Anchor Your Pause
Choose a simple physical cue—a hand on your heart, a press of your feet into the ground, or touching two fingers together. Practice linking that gesture to the internal message: I have time.
Do it throughout the day, not just when there’s potential conflict. Every repetition lays down a new neural groove: pause first, act second. Eventually, the gesture becomes automatic—a body-level reminder that you can protect yourself through presence, not pleasing performance.
6. Practice Micro-Pauses
Don’t wait for high-stakes moments to practice. Try micro-pauses in safe relationships:
- When someone texts you, wait at least thirty seconds before replying. Over time, wait longer. Prove to your nervous system that nothing bad happens if you wait.
- When a loved one shares an emotion, notice your automatic impulse to fix it—and breathe once before responding.
- When you feel an urge to say yes, experiment with “Maybe,” “Let me think about that,” or “I’ll get back to you when I’ve had a chance to consider this.”
Each micro-pause rewires your sense of safety. You’re teaching your nervous system that connection doesn’t require instant compliance, that most healthy people can tolerate uncertainty or being disappointed with reasonable relatability. Highly narcissistic people might fly off the handle or threaten to abandon you if you don’t instantly obey them, but the majority of people are not like that.
7. Meet Your Fawning Part with Compassion
Shaming your fawning part only deepens the wound. The fawning part developed to keep you safe, protected, and alive. Instead of scolding your fawning part, thank it. “Thank you for trying to keep me safe. You don’t have to work so hard now. I’m here. I’ve got this.”
Compassion invites integration. You’re not banishing the fawn—you’re re-parenting it. Over time, those protective parts learn they can relax because an adult Self is in charge.
In Real Time: What a Pause Looks Like
Imagine a friend asks for something that feels like too much. Your stomach tightens; you feel the reflex to say “Of course!”
Pause.
Exhale.
Feel your feet.
You might silently name: “I feel pressure to say yes.”
Then orient: notice the room, the light, the air. The danger isn’t here. You have time.
From that grounded place, you can say something like, “I want to help, and I also need to check my capacity. Can I get back to you later?”
That’s a pause in action. You didn’t abandon yourself, and you didn’t abandon the relationship. You stayed in connection with both. Once you’ve paused, you can take an inventory of the parts that might want to say yes and the parts that might prefer to say no. Then, from Self, you can mediate between them to make a real consenting yes or a clear, decisive no.
Integrating Trauma Healing Modalities
IFS-Informed Awareness: When you sense the fawn impulse, recognize it as a part—a protector trying to maintain harmony. You can dialog internally: “Hey sweetheart, I know you’re scared of conflict. I’ve got us.”
Polyvagal Theory: Learn your body’s cues of safety (open eyes, relaxed breath) and danger (collapsed chest, shallow breath). The more you map your states, the more interoception you can develop, the faster you can self-regulate.
Mindful Exposure: Gently practice tolerating small doses of relational discomfort—someone’s mild disappointment, a moment of silence after someone expresses a need. Each time, let your body feel that nothing catastrophic happens.
Boundaries Work: Remember that saying “no” isn’t rejection—it’s clarity. Healthy boundaries protect intimacy; they don’t destroy it. Healthy people want to know where your edge is and will prioritize respecting your limits. Unhealthy people might bulldoze right over any limits you set, but that’s helpful discernment information, isn’t it? How will you know if someone is healthy or unhealthy unless you periodically let someone down and see how they react?
From People-Pleaser to Truth-Teller
Every pause is an act of rebellion against your conditioning. When you build the muscle to pause, relationships change. You stop attracting people who require your instant obedience and self-betrayal. You magnetize those who can meet your authenticity, with respect for your autonomy and their own.
And most importantly, your body starts to believe what your mind already knows: love that costs your integrity isn’t love at all.
So try it! Be gentle. Pausing is hard when your body equates slowing down with danger. Celebrate small victories. Notice the moment you almost fawned and didn’t. Notice the moment you caught yourself mid-sentence and took a breath. Each one is a rewiring of your nervous system—a reclamation of your truth, neuroplasticity in action.
If you want support practicing this inside relationships—with guidance, nervous-system tools, and a community of people learning how to love from authenticity rather than survival—that’s what Love School is for. We’re working on breaking the fawn reaction- and what others who love people who fawn can do to support their healing. It’s where we learn to pause, breathe, and love without losing ourselves.
Learn more and register for LOVE SCHOOL here.
LOVE SCHOOL students will be the first to get the chance to preview the Six Steps From Fawning To Freedom that will be published next year in RELATIONSICK. I hope you’ll join this wonderful IFS community for those committed to relational recovery, whether you’re single, in a relationship, or healing from past dysfunction so you can prepare to be healthier in the future.
