How to Stop Fawning and Transform Fawning Into Boundaries
Conflict avoidant? Codependent? A people pleaser? You could be having a trauma response and not even know it.
If you tend to avoid conflict, keep everyone happy, over-accommodate, or feel responsible for other people’s emotions, you might recognize yourself in the concept of fawning. Fawning is often described as a trauma response alongside fight, flight, and freeze. It can involve appeasing, people pleasing, conflict avoidance, becoming highly attuned to other people’s emotions, or adapting ourselves to keep someone else comfortable. From the outside, these behaviors can look like kindness, empathy, flexibility, or simply being a “nice person.” But sometimes there is something deeper underneath. A part of us may have learned that keeping other people happy is the safest way to maintain connection, avoid conflict, or feel secure.
When we understand fawning as a protective response, we can begin approaching it with more compassion. Instead of asking, “Why am I like this?” we can ask, “What happened that taught this part of me that I needed to behave this way?” This moves us away from shame and toward curiosity. These behaviors may have developed for a reason and may once have helped us navigate difficult relationships. The goal isn’t to judge the part that learned these strategies, but to understand what it has been trying to accomplish. From an Internal Family Systems (IFS) perspective, we can become curious about the protective parts behind these patterns.
Fawning can begin as a way of staying connected
Children are dependent on the adults around them and don’t have the same choices, resources, or power that adults have. If a child grows up around unpredictability, criticism, neglect, emotional instability, abuse, or other difficult dynamics, they may become incredibly good at reading the room. They learn facial expressions, tone of voice, footsteps, moods, and subtle changes in someone’s behavior. They learn when it is safe to speak and when it is safer to stay quiet. They may learn to become helpful, agreeable, invisible, entertaining, or exceptionally sensitive to everyone else’s needs.
From an IFS perspective, these behaviors can be understood as protective parts doing jobs they learned a long time ago. A child might learn, “If I keep everyone happy, maybe I’ll be safe.” Another might learn, “If I don’t cause problems, maybe they won’t be angry.” Another might learn, “If I can figure out what everyone wants, I can prevent something bad from happening.” These strategies can become deeply ingrained. Years later, we may still use them automatically, even when the original circumstances are long gone.
What can fawning look like?
Fawning doesn’t always look like obvious people pleasing. It can show up as saying yes when you want to say no, avoiding difficult conversations, feeling responsible for other people’s feelings, constantly monitoring someone’s mood, or walking on eggshells. It can look like apologizing excessively, over-explaining your decisions, struggling to tolerate someone’s disappointment, or becoming especially agreeable around authority figures. It can also involve making yourself smaller so someone else doesn’t feel threatened, hiding your achievements, taking responsibility when something goes wrong, or anticipating what everyone else needs.
Sometimes fawning becomes more complicated because it isn’t simply about avoiding conflict. It can become an attempt to heal, rescue, change, or fix another person. We may stay engaged with someone because we believe that if we understand their trauma, communicate clearly enough, or love them deeply enough, they will eventually become different. We become preoccupied with their potential rather than their present behavior. Underneath this can be a younger part hoping that if we can finally get someone to change, something inside us will finally feel resolved.
When people pleasing becomes trying to fix someone
I work with clients who have fawning parts and codependent parts that try to heal, change, rescue, or fix other people. Many of these clients are incredibly self-aware, emotionally conscious, socially intuitive, and deeply committed to personal growth. They understand boundaries, have tools to regulate their emotions, and may have invested enormous amounts of time and energy into healing themselves. Yet they can still find themselves repeatedly drawn toward relationships where they are trying to change another person. This can feel confusing because they may think, “I’ve done so much healing, so why am I still doing this?”
Sometimes, when we look underneath the pattern, there is a younger part. It may be a child part who was hoping an abusive, unavailable, critical, or unpredictable parent would eventually change. That child may have believed that if they were good enough, loving enough, understanding enough, or helpful enough, the parent would finally become the person they needed. If that part remains stuck in the past, it can continue looking for the resolution it never received. Years later, it may find itself trying to create that resolution with an abusive or controlling partner.
When the past gets replayed in the present
This can become especially painful when a relationship involves controlling, jealous, volatile, coercive, or abusive behavior. Someone might repeatedly hurt us, we explain how their behavior affects us, they apologize, things improve temporarily, and then the same pattern happens again. We may start thinking that we need to communicate differently, understand their triggers better, provide more support, or become even more regulated ourselves. We may tell ourselves that they have trauma and simply need more patience.
This is where a healing part can become recruited into the fawning pattern. People who have invested deeply in their own healing can become incredibly skilled at understanding why someone behaves the way they do. We can see the wounded child underneath someone’s behavior and understand where their reactions came from. But understanding someone’s history does not require us to tolerate their behavior. Compassion does not mean taking responsibility for another person’s healing, and someone’s trauma does not make us responsible for changing them.
Seeing someone for who they are right now
One of the most important boundaries we can develop is learning to see someone based on their current behavior, rather than primarily through their potential. What are they actually doing? How do they respond when you say no? Do they respect boundaries? Do they take responsibility and repair harm? Do they consistently change their behavior, or do they repeatedly return to the same patterns? Their behavior is information, even when another part of us desperately wants to see something different.
For people with strong healer parts, this can be particularly challenging. A healer part may see someone’s potential so clearly that it becomes difficult to see their present reality. We may think, “I can see the wounded child underneath their behavior,” and that may be completely true. But another question matters too: “What are they choosing to do with their wounds?” Someone can have trauma and still be responsible for how they treat other people. We don’t have to deny someone’s humanity in order to have a boundary with them.
Creating an internal boundary
An internal boundary might sound like, “I accept that this person may not change.” This doesn’t mean we can predict the future. It means we stop making our safety, wellbeing, or choices dependent on someone else’s potential transformation. Their healing is their responsibility. Their growth is their responsibility. Their emotional regulation is their responsibility, and their behavior is their responsibility. Our healing is ours.
Sometimes we need to accept that we cannot get a different ending from the person who created the original wound. We may need to stop trying to resolve a childhood experience through an adult relationship. Instead, we can turn toward the younger parts still waiting for something to change. We can help them understand that they don’t have to keep trying to get the same resolution from another person. We can begin creating internal healing resolution rather than continually seeking external resolution from someone who may not be capable or willing to provide it.
Healing fawning parts through IFS
In IFS, we can approach these younger and protective parts with Self energy: curiosity, compassion, openness, warmth, awe, and admiration. We can become curious about what a part has been trying to accomplish and what it is still hoping will happen. We might ask, “What were you hoping would happen?” “What did you need from this person?” or “What are you still waiting for?” A younger part may still be waiting for an apology, recognition, safety, protection, or for a parent to finally become loving.
We can help these parts understand that they don’t have to keep waiting. They don’t have to get another person to change, prove themselves, or earn love by becoming more accommodating. We can also bring Self energy to the healing parts that have been working incredibly hard to help everyone else. Rather than shaming the fawning part, we can meet it with love and genuine admiration for how hard it has worked. The goal isn’t to get rid of the fawning part. It is to help it become less burdened and discover that it has choices now.
Developing assertiveness and boundaries
In IFS, we can also work with the parts that become activated around assertiveness. Maybe one part fears anger, another fears rejection, another believes saying no makes us selfish, and another believes we have to explain ourselves perfectly. Rather than forcing these parts to disappear, we can become curious about them and appreciate the jobs they have been doing. We can help them learn that adult assertiveness is not necessarily the same thing as danger.
Assertiveness isn’t aggression or being harsh. It is the capacity to stay connected to ourselves while remaining in relationship with another person. Sometimes a boundary is saying, “No, thank you,” “That doesn’t work for me,” or “I need some time to think about that.” Sometimes it is allowing someone else to be disappointed without rushing to fix their feelings. Sometimes it is creating physical distance, leaving a conversation, changing our availability, or simply believing what we are seeing. Over time, these experiences can help our parts learn that we can survive other people’s reactions.
Working with fawning and relationship patterns
I work with clients who have fawning parts, codependent parts, healing parts, rescuing parts, and younger parts that are still trying to resolve something from the past. Many are deeply self-aware, emotionally conscious, socially intuitive, boundary conscious, and committed to personal growth. Yet they may still find themselves pulled toward people they want to heal, change, rescue, or fix. Therapy can provide a space to understand why these patterns developed and help bring parts that are stuck in the past into the present.
I am also trained in domestic abuse, and this informs how I work with clients navigating partners and ex partners who have patterns of jealousy, volatile behavior, controlling behavior, coercive dynamics, and other patterns of abuse. When these dynamics are present, I help clients look at behavior as information, rather than a puzzle they have to solve. We can ask, “Who is this person being right now?” “What patterns are they continually showing me?” and “What boundaries can I create to put my emotional safety first?” This can help us move away from hoping for healing from someone else and toward creating internal healing resolution for ourselves.
Work with me 1:1
If you’d like to explore your fawning parts, people pleasing, codependent patterns, boundaries, relationship dynamics, or the younger parts underneath these patterns, you can fill out the form below to begin working with me 1:1. We can use IFS to approach these parts with curiosity rather than shame and understand what they have been trying to accomplish for you. We can explore the younger parts carrying old hopes, fears, and beliefs, while also working with the healer parts that have been trying very hard to make relationships work. Together, we can develop greater internal safety, assertiveness, boundaries, and relational discernment.
IFS retreats
If you’re interested in IFS retreats, we’ll be exploring fawning and people pleasing through a combination of somatic yoga and IFS. We’ll explore these patterns through both the body and our internal systems, with a focus on awareness, compassion, boundaries, assertiveness, and choice. If you’d like to join the IFS retreat waitlist, fill out the form below and write “retreat” so we know you’d like to be added. You don’t have to figure all of this out on your own. Sometimes healing begins by becoming curious about the part of you that has been working so hard to keep everyone else okay, and helping that part discover that you are allowed to be okay too.