You’ve heard of the trauma responses: fight, flight, and freeze, but have you heard of fawning? I’m obsessed with the new book: Fawning by Dr. Ingrid Clayton. Every person—but really, urgently, every woman—needs to read it.
Dr. Clayton quotes psychotherapist Pete Walker defining fawning as “a response to a threat by becoming more appealing to the threat.” In her book, she writes that fawning isn’t a gendered response, anyone can fawn, which I agree with, but Walker’s definition—becoming more appealing to the threat—seems to describe exactly how women are trained to be “safe” in a patriarchy. Dr. Clayton elaborates her definition throughout the book, but here it is in a nutshell: “Fawners mirror or merge with someone else’s desires or expectations to defuse conflict rather than confront it directly.”
I’ve actually read a lot about trauma, I read Pete Walker’s books years ago, and so I’d heard of fawning. But when I read Dr. Clayton’s in-depth analysis, I understood for the first time that fawning is not a conscious response, something you decide to do. Instead, your nervous system activates a fawning response. This understanding helped me be more aware and compassionate when I fawn, as opposed to getting angry at myself, or judging or shaming myself.
As a feminist, as someone who speaks out for causes she believes in, who debates Tucker Carlson on national TV, I may appear to be someone who doesn’t fawn. But now I see my endless arguing, debating, explaining, is in some ways, an attempt to win others over, to get them on my side, “to connect to protect,” as Dr. Clayton describes fawning.
That is not to say debate, arguing, explaining is wrong, it can be necessary and useful. But it’s also helpful to be aware of when and how I’m choosing to spend my precious time, energy, and brain cells.
But how I find Fawning most helpful and enlightening is in supporting me to be a cycle breaker as a mom of three daughters living in a capitalist patriarchy. The unpaid, unappreciated labor of being a mom, from endless scheduling to filling out forms to driving your kids everywhere, even just the energy and skill you need to value emotions and emotional regulation skills, in a society that doesn’t believe feelings matter, is kind of shocking. At least it was for me.
In her book Discovering the Inner Mother, Bethany Webster writes:
“I once saw a video on Facebook that was geared toward mothers who are feeling stressed, sleep deprived, and unappreciated. At the end it said, ‘Look into the eyes of your child and know that you matter.’ Line after line expounded upon how the mother is elevated in the eyes of the child, implying that should be enough to get you through. The entire point of the video was that a mother need only look into her children’s eyes for validation. I found it odd that it didn’t mention the support of friends, partners, or communities to help women through the tough times as mothers. It didn’t mention self-care. It didn’t help women see themselves as inherently valid and important.
At first glance, this can seem like a harmless video with the intention of honoring the ceaseless work mothers do. It was ‘liked’ by thousands of people. But I found the video disturbing for many reasons. For mothers, it perpetuates the illusion that the approval of one’s children should be compensation enough for the brutally unending, thankless, isolating work of motherhood in the modern world. And it sets up the child for bearing the emotional burden of a mother’s struggles and learning how to overfunction as an emotional caretaker. It sets up the child to feel that she “owes” her mother a version of herself to protect her from her pain…
Our culture, with its hostility toward women as expressed in diminishing access to reproductive healthcare, the wage gap, lack of ample maternity leave, and male violence against women as well as systemic barriers like institutional racism, all combine to isolate the mother and to coerce the child into carrying the burden of emotionally validating the mother in the absence of support from partners, adults, institutions, and society in general. This is a void that a child can never fill.”
Webster is describing how mothers and daughters are locked into a fawning trauma response that can continue for generations unless we forge a different path.
In some ways, when I had kids, I thought I was going to get a fan club! Part of me was surprised that healthy kids are usually not showering moms with love and gratitude.
Dr. Clayton writes: “Those of us with an overactive fawn response might unconsciously want our children to fawn. That is how we survived so it can feel like our children won’t be safe in the world without learning to appease, get quiet, and comply, all under the guise of respect. When our children don’t shapeshift for our benefit, we simply don’t have the skills to help because we haven’t learned regulation ourselves. It’s so important for parents to address their own fawning. By doing so, we take responsibility for our dysregulation and break the cycle of living in survival mode, teaching our children a different path forward.”
My New Year’s resolution for 2026 is to unfawn. Are you with me?
