Fawning as Way of Abandoning Yourself

Changing yourself to fit what others expect, or fawning, may be your nervous system’s way of trying to keep you safe. A way of showing that it loves you.

“I don’t know what I am,” I said during a session with my therapist, after a long pause to look at the painting of a moose on the wall. The creature’s body was formed out of trees and mountains, making it seem like the moose was towering over the landscape. It was painted in a soothing blue color, which helps me find space around the activation that often rises up in my body during these meetings.

We had been talking about masculine and feminine energies, with our discussion touching on how these concepts are shaped by patriarchy, and then moving into how I saw myself as a person, both individually and in romantic relationships.

Down the rabbit hole

My lack of knowledge about something so fundamental as my own identify reminds me of Alice Adventures in Wonderland, a book I was fascinated with when I was a child. I read it over and over, each time feeling the same surreality I’ve had throughout much of my life, which often shows up as a disconnection from my body and the world around me.

In one scene, Alice comes face to face with her own identity:

The Caterpillar and Alice looked at each other for some time in silence: at last the Caterpillar took the hookah out of its mouth, and addressed her in a languid, sleepy voice.

‘Who are you?’ said the Caterpillar.

This was not an encouraging opening for a conversation. Alice replied, rather shyly, ‘I — I hardly know, sir, just at present — at least I know who I was when I got up this morning, but I think I must have been changed several times since then.’

‘What do you mean by that?’ said the Caterpillar sternly. ‘Explain yourself!’

‘I can’t explain myself, I’m afraid, sir’ said Alice, ‘because I’m not myself, you see.’

‘I don’t see,’ said the Caterpillar.

‘I’m afraid I can’t put it more clearly,’ Alice replied very politely, ‘for I can’t understand it myself to begin with; and being so many different sizes in a day is very confusing.’

Even a few weeks later, I am still wondering how to answer the question my therapist asked me. During our session, though, I felt the urge to say whatever I thought she wanted me to say, not because that was what I believed, but because it felt safer.

Pausing to stop fawning

What saved me from saying something that wasn’t true—or saying something that was true, but saying it only because I thought it was expected—is the pause that I took before I answered my therapist’s question.

In these kinds of pauses, in the space between a stimulus and your response, wisdom blossoms, like a flower blooming in the desert when it finally rains.

I’ve spent decades trying to settle into these pauses while meditating, trying to find the openness between one breath and the next, between one thought and the next.

However, it’s only recently that I’ve been able to apply these pauses to something that has affected me for most of my life. Fawning. 

If you aren’t familiar with this term, fawning is a protective response where you make yourself small, agree with others, or change aspects of yourself or your life in order to keep yourself safe. It’s like being an emotional chameleon, becoming whatever you need to be in that moment. This often isn’t a conscious choice; although sometimes it feels like it is, because you may see it happening, without being able to stop it.

Back to my therapist’s question. Growing up, I never really thought about what I am. I just did my own thing. I was my own whimsical creature. Aloof from the world.

Or so I thought. Recently, though, I realized that I’ve spent much of my life becoming exactly what others have needed me to be, especially in romantic relationships.

This might be why I have always had so many friends, many of them with nothing in common with each other. I used to tell myself that I was a bridge between different groups, bringing people closer together, simply by getting along with all of them.

Becoming what others expect

More like a Bridge of Fawning … which is an exhausting job to have.

Whenever I hung out with friends, if one of them wanted to play a board game, I would do that. Drive around in a beat-up old car listening to classic rock? I’m there. Video games? Sure. I’ve never liked video games, but if my friends suggested it, I would play for hours, and one time for days.

I would laugh at whatever jokes they told, listen to the same music they did, eat whatever food they did. I even became a vegetarian in high school when my friend asked me to join him after his girlfriend insisted he give up eating meat. I did. For moral support, I told myself.

That last one stuck. Decades later, I’m still a vegetarian, while my friend gave it up shortly after his relationship ended.

This doesn’t absolve me of my fawning tendencies. Eventually I was bound to give a response that matched my own desires. I also have more examples, stretching over the decades.

In my late 20s, I agreed to marry my long-time girlfriend when her mother took the two of us to a country club for lunch, after which we had a surprise meeting with the club’s event planner to pick a date for our wedding. 

I loved my girlfriend, very deeply. But I was so shocked at being asked to pick a date for my wedding when I hadn’t even asked my girlfriend to marry me (or the other way around), that my fawning part kicked into overdrive in order to keep me safe. So I picked a date for the wedding and we got married a few months later. Even so, it’s hard to know what I would have chosen if the situation had felt more emotionally safe.

Fawning and depression

The fawning doesn’t stop there. I also did two years of medical school, simply because someone said to me, “I think you’d be good at it.” It turns out I was very good at it … until I sank into severe depression and had to drop out.

Years later, when I told a friend the story of my failed attempt at becoming a doctor, she suggested that my depression was a sign that I wasn’t meant to be a doctor. Looking back, that feels like she was dismissing the grief I still have around that time in my life, almost as a way to make me feel better.

I’ve heard other people talk about depression in a similar way, framing it as a misalignment of the soul rather than an illness to be treated.

I had to pause for a moment after I wrote that last bit. It brought up quite a lot of stuff for me. So I walked away from my computer to make a tea and watch the barn swallows flying around outside, before coming back to finish my thought.

The thought that depression might be connected to following the wrong path in life resonates a little bit with me. But that’s not the entire story, and I doubt anyone with severe depression would be okay with having their condition reduced to a misalignment of their soul.

I have struggled with depression for most of my life, with some really dark times, starting when I was really young. It has only been during the past year, after beginning somatic trauma therapy, that I have felt like I am finally emerging from the darkness. However, there are still many days where I feel the emptiness and flatness hovering nearby.

Cost of living inauthentically

 So for anyone else who has been through this kind of deep depression, I want to acknowledge that what you have felt—or continue to feel—is very real. It is entirely up to you to decide whether your experience is connected to your soul. Most of all, I hope you can hold space for the complexity of your own story.

When my friend suggested that the reason I developed depression while in medical school was because my soul was suffering, I didn’t question her or push back. I immediately agreed. My fawn response had taken over even without me realizing.

Later, when I was alone, I started to question that. I saw more clearly that my story is more complex than a misalignment of my soul. I had depression long before I even thought about going to medical school. I’ve been lost in darkness both in the middle of turmoil in my life and on beautiful summer days. Even today, as I was exercising outside in the morning sun, I felt the darkness appear as I looked at the laundry hanging on the clothesline.

However, I believe there is a cost to living inauthentically. Even when you have a complex history like I do.

Throughout my life, I didn’t just fawn around friends, family, and romantic partners. I would do it at work, at medical appointments, and even in public while talking to strangers. I would subtly shift my personality to fit whomever I was with. Never consciously. But later when I was alone, I could feel how much energy I had spent to maintain my shape-shifting.

Slowing down fawning response

Real chameleons, which are capable of color-shifting camouflage, shed their skin regularly, a process that can take a couple of hours. For me, it takes a few days of solitude for the “costumes” I put on when I’m around other people to slough off.

When no one else is around, I can be more myself, and my soul starts to emerge from its protective shell. Not entirely, though. Even when I am alone, I am still thinking about other people, and I will often fawn in response to those thoughts, almost as if in anticipation of seeing certain people again.

So what is the solution? If you are a fawner, do you have to become hyper-independent and listen only to yourself?

That’s tempting. I’ve done it … several times. I have swung from being a complete fawner to being a loner who only does what he wants. Neither one, though, felt authentic.

What worked for me is slowing things down, finding the pauses between being activated and responding instinctively. Because fawning is an instinct. You don’t think, “I’m going to get small here to keep myself safe.” Your autonomic nervous system does it for you. That’s not a sign of dysfunction, though, it’s your nervous system doing whatever it needs to keep you safe. That is love.

Building safety in your own body

Before I could work on shifting my fawning patterns, I spent a lot of time building safety in my own body—through therapy and somatic work. Then I started to slow things down, finding the pauses between the activation and my response—between someone saying or doing something that made me think they were upset, and me apologizing, appeasing, joking, going silent, getting small, or changing my whole life just to make them feel better, and to help me feel safer.

I would ask myself questions like: When do I find myself getting smaller? When do I agree with someone even without thinking? If someone suggests a restaurant or a movie, do I agree even if that’s not something I would like? In this moment, what do I really want?

At first, I could only see that I had been fawning after it happened. But with practice, I was able to notice it in the moment. For a long time, I watched myself fawn, but couldn’t stop it from happening—like watching an emotional train crash in slow motion. Slowly, though, I have been able to find the pauses between activation and acting, like the one I experienced in the conversation with my therapist.

I still have a long way to go. Not just with shifting my pattern of fawning, but also with figuring out what lies underneath. Because when you’ve spent your entire life trying to become whatever people around you need you to be, it’s hard to know who the real you is.

As I hike through the forest, I often see boulders covered in layers of dirt, moss, ferns, and sometimes a tree perched atop with its roots wrapped down the side. I often wonder what’s underneath all that. If I stripped away the layers of dirt and vegetation, what would I find? Would I find the true essence of the boulder?

Soul’s journey to earth

Also, I often think about the old stories, which talk about souls sitting like birds on the branches of the tree of life, waiting to be born. These stories go:

When a soul looks down at earth and decides that it has something to accomplish there, it flies down from the world tree to find a womb with an infant waiting to be born. Along the way, the soul joins up with spirit, which becomes like a companion to the soul, one that will shape the kind of life the two of them will have on earth.

Before the soul and spirit can enter the infant in the womb, they pass through a garden with a beautiful tree. It is so beautiful that the soul can’t resist embracing it. When it does, the soul forgets its reason for going down to earth and also everything the spirit told it about the life it is going to live.

The soul, having forgotten, enters the infant in the womb, along with the spirit. When the infant is born, it doesn’t remember why it came into the world. The infant is also born into a family and society, both of which place their own plans and expectations on them. In order to survive and be loved, the infant adapts to those expectations. Yes, the child fawns.

As the child grows into an adult, it will often continue to live according to what its family and society expects of it. If a person is lucky, though, they will re-discover their soul’s calling, which was forgotten as the soul and spirit passed through the garden with the beautiful tree on the way to the earth.

Finding your authentic self

Often this remembering happens when a person becomes lost in darkness, when they wander off the path laid out before them by their family and society. Away from the safety of the known, they enter a tangled forest shrouded in mists or a deep cave far away from the light of the world. It is there that they do the deep work of remembering their soul’s purpose.

A person may be forced off the path and into darkness, like when they go through severe illness or a traumatic event, or suffer the loss of a beloved relationship, especially a betrayal. Or maybe all of those together. This is sometimes called the dark night of the soul.

Or a person may be drawn away from the path by their soul calling out to them. That is the quiet voice that is inside all of us, a voice that can only be heard when you find stillness, away from the distractions of the modern world. Like the stillness you find in the pause that happens before answering.