When I Realized I Had Been Fawning My Whole Life

Content note: This post discusses trauma, sexual boundaries, and sexual assault.

Before I get into this, I want to say that I am not a licensed therapist or mental health professional. This is my own experience and introspection based on what I've learned through therapy and my own healing. It should not be taken as mental health advice. If you're going through something similar or something in this post resonates with you, please consider talking to a licensed mental health professional.

It's interesting how life gives you opportunities to learn a lesson.

Sometimes those lessons are told to you over and over again by your therapist, and you don't really connect the dots until something actually happens where you're kind of awoken to what she has been saying the whole time.

I have recently realized that I have fawned in all of the relationships I've ever been in.

Understanding the Fawning Trauma Response

Most of us have heard of fight, flight, and freeze. But there's another trauma response: fawning.

According to Dr. Ingrid Clayton in her Psychology Today article, What Is the Fawning Trauma Response?, fawning is an unconscious attempt to keep ourselves safe and maintain connection in an unsafe environment or relationship. Trauma responses aren't a conscious choice. They're our body's instinctual response to something it perceives as a threat.

For someone who fawns, that can look like over-accommodating, appeasing, submitting, or surrendering our own boundaries in an attempt to create safety.

For me, there's another piece to this: I have an abandonment wound.

So a perceived threat to me doesn't necessarily have to look like a threat in someone else's normal day-to-day life.

A perceived threat to me can be someone leaving.

Which means that in relationships, I might adjust who I am. I might quiet myself. I might keep my emotions at bay just so that I don't scare off the person I'm in a relationship with.

This is not healthy. I just want to preface that.

There are a lot of reasons why I've developed this response, and some of them go back to childhood. But that's a story for another time.

So how did this finally click for me?

Unfortunately, sometimes we learn lessons the hard way.

And I learned this one the hard way.

How Fawning Can Show Up in Dating and Relationships

I went on a date maybe a month or two ago, and I really enjoyed talking to this person.

It was the first person I was actually excited to go on a date with in a long time.

I had been on dates. They had been fine. They were nice people. Sweet men. Nothing bad to say about them.

But also nothing to write home about.

There had never been a second date with any of them because there wasn't anything I could perceive turning into long-term dating.

Then I met this person.

Let's call him the Brazilian because he's from Brazil.

We had only been texting for about two days, but I really enjoyed talking to him.

When I met him in person, he actually looked better than his photos, which is rarely the situation for me. Normally it's the other way around.

He had told me that he was nervous, and in person he seemed a lot quieter than he had been when we were texting.

We met for drinks at a local bar. We only had two drinks, and afterward he suggested that we walk around. We were in an area where there were shops and things nearby, so we walked for a little while.

It was a very short walk, and our cars were actually parked near each other.

He walked me to my car, and I put my bag inside.

I knew he was going to kiss me.

So we started kissing.

It got very hot and heavy, and he became a little more aggressive. He started touching me in places I wasn't ready for.

I said no.

I told him I thought it was time for me to go. I needed to go home.

He asked me to stay.

“Please stay. I want to get to know you better.”

And for me, I was just excited about talking to somebody I felt like I had a connection with.

So I stayed.

We continued kissing.

After about 20 minutes, I told him again, “Listen, I have to go home.”

He kept asking me to go to his car.

I kept saying no because I knew that if we went into his car, things were going to go further than I wanted them to go.

Finally, I said okay.

But I told him he had to pinky swear that we weren't going to go any further.

He pinky swore.

And I wanted to believe him even though, deep down inside, I knew I shouldn't have.

We went into his car and started making out again.

He became more aggressive.

Again, I told him I had to go.

Again, I told him I wanted to go home.

Again, I told him I didn't want to go any further.

Eventually, the last time he tried, I just let him touch me.

After a couple of minutes, I stopped him.

I told him, “Okay, we need to stop. This is the furthest I wanted to go. I want to go home.”

And while he was touching me, I had this moment.

It brought me back to moments in my twenties when I had been sexually assaulted.

It was very scary to be in that moment and recognize that feeling again.

That feeling of just letting something happen because you're hoping that if you let it happen, eventually you'll be able to leave.

Eventually, we went back to my car.

Even then, he continued asking me to go somewhere with him or to go back to my place.

I said absolutely not.

I was going home.

And I did.

When Fawning Makes Consent and Boundaries Complicated

When I got home, I told him I had made it safely.

He said, “I'm sorry for pushing. I know I pushed too hard.”

And I said something that I now realize was a mistake.

“We're two consenting adults.”

The following day, I spoke to a friend of mine who is also my coworker.

He asked me if I was okay.

And I realized in that moment that I wasn't.

He had pushed too hard.

I had said no.

Several times.

And somehow I hadn't really let myself process that yet.

Later, I met with another girlfriend of mine who happens to be a counselor. She and I have a really good bond. We have a lot of similarities in some of the things we've gone through in our past, and mental health is something we talk about a lot.

When I told her what happened, she told me, “Val, that wasn't okay. It wasn't okay that he kept pushing until you felt like you needed to give in.”

That night, my friend and I were drinking wine, talking, having fun. I tried to text him later and realized that I was blocked.

And I was confused.

Why was I blocked?

I hadn't texted him all day. I had actually told him I was going to dress up in costumes with my friend and send him a picture later.

So realizing that I had suddenly been blocked was weird.

But by then I had also started processing what happened.

And I realized:

I don't remember consenting to what happened.

Recognizing a Fawn Response After the Moment Has Passed

The following day, I was on Hinge.

Whenever I meet somebody from the app, I usually mark that I met them. Maybe it helps with the metrics. Maybe that's just the analytics person in me thinking I'm helping their algorithm.

I don't actually know what it does.

But I marked that I had met him.

The app asked whether I wanted to meet him again.

I said no.

I don't remember exactly what the prompt was after that, but I suddenly felt compelled to write:

He took advantage of me.

I felt unsafe.

I felt like I had to fawn to get myself out of that situation.

So I reported him to Hinge.

Not even an hour later, he tried to add me on Snapchat.

I didn't add him back.

Then he unblocked me on WhatsApp.

He messaged me and apologized for blocking me.

Instead of acknowledging what had happened, he basically tried to make it seem like I was upset because he had stopped communicating with me.

He never admitted to doing anything wrong.

And I was blown away by his response.

I told him never to contact me again.

Don't tell me how I'm supposed to feel.

Don't tell me why I feel the way that I do.

I said no several times.

You continued to push through my boundaries.

Eventually, I gave in.

And when I came back afterward and told you that I felt uncomfortable with what happened, you continued to push.

That was it.

How Therapy Helped Me Recognize My Fawning Patterns

The following Monday, I went to therapy.

I told my therapist what happened.

And she said:

“Valerie, you fawn.”

I don't know why that statement shocked me as much as it did.

She said, “I've told you this. I've expressed this to you.”

And suddenly I thought:

Oh my goodness.

After all the times she had expressed this to me, it didn't finally click until something bad happened.

I was very upset with myself because I felt like I was further along in my healing.

My therapist reminded me that it wasn't about whether I had been able to walk away or whether I had said no enough times.

For whatever reason, in that moment, I felt like I couldn't get out of the situation.

And I responded in the way that made me feel safe.

She reminded me that recognizing and understanding what happened to me is a form of healing.

She wanted me to be proud of that.

But I was still distraught.

There was so much shame.

Shame that I hadn't “done better.”

Shame that I hadn't “known better.”

And anger that this person had tried to manipulate the situation afterward so that somehow he wasn't the person who had repeatedly crossed the boundaries I had clearly communicated.

Understanding the Roots of My People-Pleasing and Fawning

My therapist recommended Fawning: Why the Need to Please Makes Us Lose Ourselves—and How to Find Our Way Back by Dr. Ingrid Clayton.

I got the book.

And I could barely listen to the first chapter.

Clayton talks about her childhood and her relationship with her stepfather, and it hit somewhere incredibly personal for me.

There are parts of my own story that made that first chapter incredibly difficult to listen to, and I'm not ready to share those publicly.

But I kept listening.

And every subsequent chapter has felt like a parallel to some part of my life.

Sometimes it makes me shake.

Because I'm now realizing:

I have always fawned in my relationships.

Fawning in Relationships vs. Being Authentically Yourself

Now that I'm realizing this and getting a better handle on who I am, it has completely changed the way I look at finding a person. Finding my person.

Every time I try to date somebody or meet somebody online, I'm trying to come into it from a completely different perspective.

I ask myself:

Am I genuinely being myself?

Do I feel like I have to fawn to keep this person?

Do I feel like I'm changing who I am just so I can make this person comfortable?

Can I actually be myself around this person?

And if they don't meet that criteria, or I feel uncomfortable, or I start feeling like I'm changing myself to make the situation work, I walk away.

There have been many instances where I've been on the apps, paused them, unpaused them, tried again, become disheartened, and paused them again.

Because I'm realizing there are a lot of people out there who cannot provide a safe place for someone who has fawned their whole life to finally just be themselves.

And I'm still learning.

Healing From Fawning Without Losing Myself

I'm still learning.

I'm still growing.

And since that experience, I've made a lot of strides in realizing what it looks like for me to authentically be myself.

It has been a very slow process.

There have been other things that have happened over the past year that have also helped me learn how to approach relationships in a healthier way, in a more secure way.

But as I say to many, many people, we continue to learn. We continue to grow. We continue to self-reflect.

The day that I stop learning and growing is literally the day that I die.

That's just something that is true to who I am.

And I think with this experience, I hope somebody else can read this and realize:

Hey, maybe I'm not being authentically myself in this relationship.

Maybe I'm allowing the person I'm with to dictate who I'm supposed to be when I know, deep down inside, that I'm somebody else.

And if you realize that, that's okay.

Things can change.

I've known people in relationships who have changed the way they approach their partner and changed the way they show up in their relationship.

It might be a little messy.

It might be a little bumpy.

But there can still be light at the end of the tunnel.

As for me, I hope and pray that whoever is next in my life, whoever is significant enough to eventually be in a long-term relationship with me, that we approach that relationship in a way that feels safe for both of us.

I don't want to feel like I have to change who I am to keep someone. I don't want to quiet myself because I'm afraid they're going to leave. And I also want the person I'm with to feel safe enough to authentically be themselves with me.

I'm still learning what that looks like.

I'm still learning how to recognize when I'm fawning instead of being myself.

But I know now that this is what I'm striving for.