“We are so accustomed to disguise ourselves to others, that in the end we become disguised to ourselves.” ~François de La Rochefoucauld
“So, in your relationship, do your partner’s needs always dictate how things go?”
My therapist looked at me quizzically after I’d just shared with him that our dinner plans had suddenly changed the night before because my partner was tired from a long day at work, and I just went along with what he needed.
He had initiated a night out, I had dressed up and prepared for a restaurant meal, and when I arrived at his place, he was exhausted and decided he wanted to stay in and defrost something instead. In the moment I said, “I don’t mind—happy to do whatever you want,” and I meant it. I genuinely, completely meant it.
Except that later, as I recounted the story sitting in the therapy chair and on the other side of my therapist’s question, I noticed myself defending him and defending my position. Being a therapist myself, I know that when I defend anything, something is amiss.
As I sat with myself, I realized that the truth was the last thing I wanted that night was a defrosted meal.
I have been a fawner for most of my life, though I didn’t always have that word for it. I just thought I was easy-going, flexible, accommodating, and deeply attuned to the people around me.
I’ve always thought my flexibility was a virtue and the sensitivity I had to others was a gift, and in many ways that’s true. They make for great skills as a therapist.
What I could not yet see was that underneath those qualities, woven so deeply into my personality that they had become almost indistinguishable from who I believed myself to be, were patterns of self-abandonment so subtle and so refined over decades that they no longer felt like patterns at all. They just felt like me.
That is partly why fawning can be so difficult to recognize. It doesn’t feel like trauma. It feels like being thoughtful, accommodating, emotionally intelligent, and deeply attuned to the people around you.
You are praised for it. You become the easy one, the loving one, the person who keeps everything harmonious and connected.
It can genuinely feel good to be needed in this way, and when you get the external validation for it as well, it becomes a reinforcing loop that keeps you loved externally. But eventually the body and your relationships begin carrying the cost of everything the personality has learned not to feel.
The larger and more visible expressions of the pattern become easier to catch over time. You build awareness, feel them showing up in your body before they take hold, and learn to respond differently.
But the subtle ones… they very sneakily become part of your identity. Built into the way you view yourself and the way you do life. The super easy, completely convincing way I would say, “I don’t mind, you choose,” and I believed it and commended myself for it. After all, I was flexible.
Which makes sense, really, because fawning is ultimately about one thing, the terror of disconnection.
In intimate relationships especially, where the connection is your anchor of safety, rupture can be felt as genuine terror.
The fear is that if I am too much, not enough, or inconveniently myself… you will leave, and I will be alone. So I lean in, read your temperature, and adjust myself accordingly, attune and give you what you need, because as long as I do that, the connection holds.
From the outside, fawning looks like consent. But the body is always saying no.
As a fawner, my sense of safety lives entirely outside of my own body, in the temperature of yours. As a result, I become extraordinarily skilled at reading that temperature. I know, before you have even said a word, whether you are okay or not okay, present or absent, open or closed, and I shape myself accordingly. We are master shapeshifters.
Who do I need to be so that I can keep this safe?
That question hums beneath the surface of so many interactions, so subtly and for so long, that I stop hearing it and just become who I need to be.
And in order to bring all of that attention to you, I have to leave myself. I have to override my own body, my own feelings, instincts, and needs, and I do it so automatically and completely that after long enough it no longer registers as a choice. This is just me.
Until, of course, a life event comes along and rattles the cage.
To be clear, fawning is not a pattern I want to demonize. It is an incredibly intelligent safety strategy; it is the nervous system finding a pathway toward safety through connection and accommodation when fighting, leaving, or shutting down does not feel possible.
The issue is not the response itself, but when it becomes so chronic and so embedded that we lose contact with who we actually are beneath it.
The cost of this disconnection always comes. Often with a disconnection with the body. We cannot unconsciously fawn and also be connected to our physiology at the same time.
It also comes with a sense of resentment that builds in the background, without a clear place to pin it because you were never allowed to have it in the first place.
Maybe with a relationship that feels close but somehow isn’t, because you are performing inside it rather than living inside it. Maybe it comes as the persistent sense that people don’t really know you, understand you, or appreciate you. Feeling unseen, unheard, and unvalued is commonplace. Maybe the cost is in your health. After decades of suppressing who you are, the body begins screaming with symptoms you can no longer ignore.
Underneath all of the accommodation, there is a part of you that is always waiting.
Maybe if I just do enough, you will finally see me.
Maybe if I give you what you need, you will be who I need you to be.
Maybe if I am very, very good, you will then be good to me.
The hope that someone will finally see you, finally reciprocate, finally show up the way you keep showing up for them, is the very thing that keeps the pattern alive and breathing.
Hope, for a fawner, keeps you waiting and waiting for something to finally change. It is what keeps the loop open.
And the moment connection wavers or breaks, when silence or distance shows up or uncertainty settles between two people mid-conflict, we can find ourselves suddenly adrift. I have felt it so many times, that feeling of swimming in open water with no ground beneath me, not knowing what I am feeling, where I am, or what comes next, reaching for something, anything, to hold me in place.
In those moments, the mind gets very, very busy. If the thing that was keeping me anchored—the warmth of the connection, the felt sense of being okay in your eyes—is suddenly gone, the mind will clutch, grasp, and reach for anything and everything.
Sometimes it goes to fixing. Sometimes to a fantasy of a different life, a different future, a different partner. Sometimes to fault-finding, building a very convincing case for why I am better off without them. And when you look closely at all of it, you begin to see the same impulse moving through each one—the nervous system reaching for any lever that might restore a sense of control or safety.
It is a beautiful, exhausting illusion. A cognitive loop that keeps you activated and stressed and distanced from yourself.
What we actually need to feel in those moments is the groundlessness itself. This is the gateway.
The unsteady ground is the passage to our own inner ground. To feel the loss of connection, the emptiness and aloneness that arrives in its absence as something that can be survived, something that does not have to be immediately fixed or fled from or explained away. And to discover that in this groundlessness and in this aloneness, you are not only still here, but you are in fact at home. That something inside you that holds strong, even when the external anchor is gone.
It is only from here that anything real becomes possible. Including the thing that frightens most fawners more than the disconnection itself.
Speaking.
When we try to speak up, the terror can genuinely be visceral. Something in the body contracts and shuts down, the voice gets crackly or disappears completely, the mouth goes dry and the body can be shaky. All because the nervous system has learned over a very long time that conflict, rejection, and criticism are all deeply unsafe. And it is not going to let you forget that, no matter how many times you tell yourself that was then and things are different now.
The body continues to protect you the only way it has ever known how.
Breaking this pattern is ultimately about learning to feel again.
Underneath the performance and all the years of shaping yourself to the needs of others, there is a whole emotional world that has been waiting.
In so many people I work with, we meet a well of fear that was never allowed to be felt, stores of anger that had nowhere to go and got stuffed down, depths of grief for all that was lost or never possible, and a tenderness toward yourself that perhaps nobody ever modelled for you.
Coming back to yourself means growing the capacity to feel all of it—slowly and at a pace that feels safe, in the body and in the presence of someone safe enough to hold it.
We hurt in relationships, and we heal in relationships.
If you are someone who fawns, please do not be hard on yourself. This pattern is woven into your identity, your relationships, and the way you move through the world. The threat your nervous system feels when you consider speaking up, disappointing someone, or risking a loss is very, very real.
It is a deeply embodied survival response, shaped by everything—culture, gender, religion, family systems—and it asks for patience and compassion, not self-criticism. Whatever the origin of your particular flavor of fawning, it made enormous sense given the world you were navigating. It kept you safe.
So be kind to yourself. Be genuinely, tenderly kind.
The pathway out is not to hold tighter. It is to learn to be with the open water. To cultivate, slowly and with enormous patience, an internal ground so rooted and so genuinely yours that the uncertainty outside loses its power to undo you.
It took me years, a deeply embodied practice, a great deal of time in my own company, therapeutic relationships where I was held safely enough to try something different, and an intimate relationship where both of us have named our patterns and agreed to hold space for each other to move through them. Where I can practice saying the thing I would once have swallowed whole and be met with understanding rather than reaction.
What made all of this possible was safety. Inside myself, inside the therapy room, and inside my intimate relationship.
And what I know to be true is that when you build enough inner ground, when you are genuinely not afraid of being alone, not afraid of conflict or rupture or someone’s disappointment, something profound shifts. Life begins to rearrange itself around the truth of you. What needs to go goes. What is truly meant for you stays. And you finally land in yourself.
There will almost certainly be losses. People who needed your smallness and silence will struggle with your changing, but that disintegration is the pattern breaking. And what becomes possible on the other side—the relationships, the life, and the version of yourself that is actually, truly, fully you—is worth every uncomfortable moment of getting there.
About Maraya Rodostianos
Maraya is an integrative somatic therapist offering in-person sessions in Melbourne and online worldwide. Blending modern neuroscience on trauma and the nervous system with psychotherapeutic tools and ancient wisdom traditions, she takes a holistic approach that integrates mind, body, spirit, and the nervous system. She works at the intersection of trauma, authenticity, embodied spirituality, and well-being, guiding clients to release what blocks them from living as their most authentic, whole, and embodied selves. You can find her at http://marayarae.com. Facebook / Substack / Instagram
Get in the conversation! Click here to leave a comment on the site.
from Tiny Buddha https://ift.tt/XV9YDNE
