I once had a (very brief) romance with a guy who I suspect is a sociopath. He suspects he\u2019s a sociopath too, so it\u2019s not just me. In a book he wrote, he even has a whole chapter about sociopaths and was very openly curious about whether he, too, was one of them. Having just read the chilling <\/span>Confessions Of A Sociopath<\/span><\/a>, about a self-aware sociopath who is not a criminal behind bars, but a law school professor who plays with hearts and gets off on \u201cruining people,\u201d I now feel even more certain that he\u2019s sociopathic.<\/span><\/p>\n But it\u2019s not sociopathy I want to talk about here. It\u2019s the behaviors we find ourselves engaging in if we wind up emotionally attached to someone highly narcissistic, manipulative, or sociopathic, namely, <\/span>fawning behaviors.<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n Looking back, I wonder what kind of spell I had fallen under when I first met the guy who I\u2019ll call Wilder.<\/span><\/p>\n I was frightened of him the first time I met him. I told my best friend, who was with me when we met, that I felt like a dark cloud walked in the room before Wilder did, kind of like the Peanuts character Pigpen. That should have caused me to turn the other way, to trust my gut instincts and keep my distance. But I didn\u2019t.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n The first time I had sex with Wilder, he told me that, even though he was quite promiscuous, we didn\u2019t have to wear condoms- because you can only catch a sexually transmitted disease if you had sexual shame.<\/span><\/p>\n Now, I\u2019m an OB\/GYN, an actual doctor (he\u2019s not). So you\u2019d think I would laugh in his face and demand condoms. But I actually paused and second-guessed myself. What if he was right? And if so, then demanding condoms would mean I\u2019m admitting that I have sexual shame, which I definitely do, because of my fundamentalist Christian upbringing. But he seemed so sexually shameless that I wanted to impress him with my coolness. And it wouldn\u2019t be cool to admit my sexual hangups when we were about to have sex, right?\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n I\u2019m ashamed to admit I wound up fawning him and we had unprotected sex. Fortunately, I did not get an STD from him, but I\u2019m certain it\u2019s not for lack of sexual shame on my part.<\/span><\/p>\n Wilder told me he was married and polyamorous, which was edgy for me. I didn\u2019t know anyone openly poly. I\u2019d always thought opening your marriage was something unhappy couples do prior to breaking up, like a gateway drug to divorce. So I asked if I could meet his wife before he and I hooked up, just to make sure she was okay with it, so we could discuss any boundaries she might need- like condoms.<\/span><\/p>\n I asked if we could set up a virtual meetup with his wife, but he spun some story to explain why that wouldn\u2019t be possible. And once more, I fawned and believed his lie. When he confessed to his wife about his liaison with me, it turned out she was out of her mind outraged over the whole ordeal, but she wanted to meet me.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n I met his wife soon thereafter, and I assumed that she knew about all the other women, since I did. When I casually mentioned the woman in Germany and the dozen others from elsewhere in the world, it turned out that she had no idea he\u2019d been having affairs. I felt sick that I\u2019d been the one to tell her. I had trusted him, not knowing him well enough to know that lying was a daily part of his existence, something I hadn\u2019t figured out, because he\u2019d been so frank and shameless about what he\u2019d told me.<\/span><\/p>\n Wilder\u2019s wife and I tiptoed around each other, trying to bond but trauma-bonding instead. We both fawned Wilder- and each other, I suppose. I felt scared of her, and I suspect she saw me as a threat to her marriage, although I turned out not to be. As far as I know, they are still together.<\/span><\/p>\n At the time, I asked for advice from my wise elder mentor Rachel. Was I being foolhardy? Should I break it off?\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Rachel said, \u201cI don\u2019t care if you have sex with Charles Manson, as long as you know exactly the moment to get out.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n That moment became obvious to me, and I got out before too much harm was done to me, Wilder, or his wife. But that situation did become fodder for a lot of therapy, as I tried to unpack what had happened to me, how I\u2019d become vulnerable, and why I\u2019d fawned someone who was clearly emotionally dangerous to me and others.<\/span><\/p>\n After that relationship ended, I felt nauseated by how small I had become in such a short time. I had ignored my gut. I had silenced my no. I had betrayed my body. And I did it all in the name of being good. Good girl. Good lover. Good spiritual woman who doesn\u2019t carry sexual shame or hold to her value of monogamy and fidelity.<\/span><\/p>\n Only I wasn\u2019t a good girl. I participated in a relationship that deeply hurt another woman who I came to care about, whose husband didn\u2019t care about her feelings one bit- or mine.<\/span><\/p>\n I was, in other words, fawning.<\/span><\/p>\n I\u2019m in the final edits of the book I\u2019m co-writing with Harvard psychiatrist Dr. Jeffrey Rediger- RELATIONSICK. We just got our publication date of October 6, 2026. The book riffs off <\/span>Mind Over Medicine<\/span><\/i>\u2019s Six Steps To Healing Yourself with the Six Steps From Fawning To Freedom.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n What are we talking about when we use the term \u201cfawning?\u201d In <\/span>Complex PTSD,<\/span><\/a> psychologist and trauma therapist Pete Walker coined the term \u201cfawn response\u201d to describe a fourth survival instinct \u2014 alongside fight, flight, and freeze. When fight or flight isn\u2019t possible (especially for children who can\u2019t escape their caregivers), the nervous system defaults to appeasement. We learn to stay safe by pleasing, placating, rescuing, or disappearing into someone else\u2019s needs.<\/span><\/p>\n In her beautiful new book<\/span> Fawning: The Cost of Appeasing Others and How to Stop,<\/span><\/a> Ingrid Clayton, PhD, brings this concept down to the level of lived experience. She writes not as a detached clinician but as a survivor of narcissistic abuse who spent years trying to earn love by being who others wanted her to be. Ingrid names fawning as a trauma response disguised as empathy \u2014 a \u201cnervous system strategy for survival\u201d that masquerades as kindness, spirituality, or caretaking. But underneath it is fear:<\/span><\/p>\n \u201cIf I make you happy, maybe you won\u2019t hurt me. If I meet your needs perfectly, maybe you won\u2019t leave.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n Reading Fawning was like watching my own behaviors under a microscope. I could see how I\u2019d used warmth and flexibility not as true love, but as armor. My \u201copen-mindedness\u201d around Wilder\u2019s polyamory wasn\u2019t genuine acceptance- it was my fawn response trying to earn safety by being cool, evolved, and non-threatening.<\/span><\/p>\n The fawn response develops early. If love is conditional \u2014 if affection comes only when we\u2019re easy, accommodating, or quiet \u2014 then our brains link love with compliance. As adults, this can look like:<\/span><\/p>\n We become experts in reading the emotional weather of a room, shape-shifting to prevent conflict. Our nervous systems register harmony as safety, even when that harmony is achieved by erasing ourselves. In <\/span>Fawning<\/span><\/i>, Ingrid writes that recovery begins when we stop mistaking safety for peacekeeping. The goal isn\u2019t to stay calm at all costs; it\u2019s to feel safe enough to tell the truth.<\/span><\/p>\n When I look back at that story with Wilder, what breaks my heart most isn\u2019t that I fell for his manipulative pseudo-spiritual nonsense about sexual shame. It\u2019s that, in the wake of my divorce and in the throes of unrequited love for a gay man who was encouraging me to get my sexual needs met with Wilder, a part of me was so desperate to be loved that I overrode the wisdom of my own body \u2014 a body trained in science, medicine, and intuition.<\/span><\/p>\n Looking back, I can pinpoint the moment my fawning took over. The part of me that wanted to be chosen whispered, \u201cIf you ask for condoms, he\u2019ll think you\u2019re uptight and won\u2019t find you sexy.\u201d And so I betrayed myself in the very moment I longed to be loved.<\/span><\/p>\n That\u2019s the devastating paradox of the fawn response: the part that wants connection most fiercely ends up losing connection with self- and self-protection.<\/span><\/p>\n Ingrid describes how fawning often goes hand in hand with trauma bonding \u2014 the addictive cycle of idealization, devaluation, and intermittent reinforcement that keeps us hooked on the person who hurts us. Wilder\u2019s mix of charm and danger was intoxicating. He alternated between intense intimacy and cold detachment. Each time he withdrew, my nervous system registered panic. My fawning tendencies scrambled to repair the connection. What did I do wrong? How can I fix it? All along I was unaware of how I was reenacting the survival dance of my childhood under the influence of a mother whose approval of me was very conditional on me being her version of the perfect daughter- perfect Christian, perfect good girl, perfect student, perfect looking, perfect narcissistic extension of herself- until I failed her, of course.<\/span><\/p>\n I\u2019ll never forget my sister in law running out of my mother\u2019s dining room after having tea with my mother. She was fuming. \u201cIf I have to listen to that woman complaining one more time about what an utter disappointment all three of her children are, I\u2019m going to lose my shit.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n I never told my mother about my affair with Wilder. She would have begged me to repent to Jesus Christ, for fear I would burn in hell if I didn\u2019t.<\/span><\/p>\n When love and approval are that precarious, that inconsistent, we cling harder. We confuse adrenaline for attachment.\u00a0 That\u2019s how fawning keeps the trauma bond alive.<\/span><\/p>\n Fawning often hides behind spirituality. In Ingrid\u2019s words, \u201cWe mistake self-abandonment for enlightenment.\u201d Many trauma survivors \u2014 especially those drawn to healing work \u2014 turn fawning into a virtue. We call it compassion, surrender, forgiveness, or radical acceptance. We quote Rumi about the wound being where the light enters us, but sometimes the wound just keeps bleeding because we won\u2019t bandage it.<\/span><\/p>\n I\u2019ve done this myself. I\u2019ve mistaken my tolerance for mistreatment as proof of my spiritual evolution. But authentic spirituality doesn\u2019t demand self-betrayal. Love doesn\u2019t require us to make ourselves small.<\/span><\/p>\n Even outside romantic relationships, fawning is sneaky. You might recognize it if you:<\/span><\/p>\n Fawning isn\u2019t limited to victims of abuse \u2014 it\u2019s woven into our cultural conditioning, especially for women and those socialized to prioritize harmony over honesty.<\/span><\/p>\n Ingrid\u2019s book doesn\u2019t just describe the problem; it shows a path to healing. She invites readers to meet their fawning parts with compassion rather than contempt. Because the truth is, fawning once saved us.<\/span><\/p>\n When confrontation wasn\u2019t safe, fawning kept us connected. When love was conditional, fawning helped us survive. So recovery isn\u2019t about killing the fawn response. Sometimes fawning is still necessary to keep us alive, to keep us safe. When I was held up at gunpoint by two masked gunmen at Pikes Peak National Park, fawning might have been what kept me alive. For many people with various marginalizations, fawning the cops when you\u2019re a young Black man or fawning ICE if you\u2019re an immigrant or fawning a big man who\u2019s trying to hurt you if you\u2019re a woman just might protect you.<\/span><\/p>\n The IFS-informed shift in how we approach our fawning parts is to thank them as protector parts, to appreciate how those parts helped us survive. Then, from Self, we can gently encourage our fawning parts to relax, to realize we\u2019re safe now.<\/span><\/p>\n For me, unlearning fawning has looked like:<\/b><\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n I got into the best therapy of my life right after my mother died, just a few years after I ended my affair with Wilder. A combination of IFS, Somatic Experiencing, Advanced Integrative Therapy, and more recently, Terry Real\u2019s Relational Life Therapy (RLT) has mostly broken me of this reflexive behavioral habit. But it\u2019s taken a decade- and it hasn\u2019t been easy, painless, or inexpensive.<\/span><\/p>\n Healing happens in safe relationships, not just with therapists, but with friends and communities who model safe enough reciprocity. When a recovering fawner meets someone capable of secure love, it can feel boring at first. Our nervous systems miss the highs and lows of danger. Safety feels foreign, almost suspicious. But as Ingrid writes, \u201cThe nervous system can learn that calm is not the same as danger.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n Real love doesn\u2019t require hyper-vigilance. It doesn\u2019t demand we prove our worth. It lets us rest.\u00a0 That\u2019s what I want for myself now \u2014 and for everyone who has mistaken fawning for love: the freedom to rest in relationships that don\u2019t require performance.<\/span><\/p>\n When I first began teaching about trauma and attachment, I noticed how many people, even those deeply committed to the spiritual path, were still confusing fawning for intimacy. They were doing \u201cthe work,\u201d reading the books, meditating, healing, yet still finding themselves drawn to people who needed saving.<\/span><\/p>\n That\u2019s why I created LOVE SCHOOL \u2014 my ongoing relational recovery program for people who want to learn what secure love actually looks, sounds, feels, and acts like.\u00a0 LOVE SCHOOL isn\u2019t about finding \u201cthe one.\u201d It\u2019s about becoming someone who no longer fawns, fixes, or forfeits their truth to be loved. We explore how trauma imprints on attraction, how the nervous system responds to relational danger, and how to cultivate secure attachment, within yourself and with others, using IFS as a foundation, but not as zealots, also integrating many other trauma healing methods.<\/span><\/p>\n If you recognize yourself in my story \u2014 if you\u2019ve ever silenced your intuition to stay connected, or found yourself addicted to someone\u2019s approval \u2014 we\u2019ll be focusing our next few LOVE SCHOOL sessions specifically on fawning and how to heal from it. If you\u2019re tired of walking on eggshells, tired of calling self-abandonment compassion, tired of confusing peacekeeping for peace, we invite you to join us for LOVE SCHOOL.<\/span><\/p>\n Join LOVE SCHOOL here.<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n Maybe your \u201cWilder\u201d wasn\u2019t a sociopath. Maybe it was a boss, a parent, a friend, or a spiritual teacher. Maybe you\u2019ve been the one others fawned, and you\u2019re waking up to the discomfort of realizing that dynamic.<\/span><\/p>\n Wherever you are in the cycle, the medicine is the same: truth, tenderness, psychoeducation, boundaries, self-respect, intimacy with your parts, compassion for yourself, fierce protection of your own rights, emotions, and safety, and time for healing.<\/span><\/p>\n The next time you feel yourself rushing to make someone comfortable at the expense of your own safety, needs, or truth, pause. Breathe. Notice what your body is saying. That\u2019s not defiance; it\u2019s self-love. It\u2019s not rebellion; it\u2019s the YOU-Turn your parts need before you can feel safe in your own skin.<\/span><\/p>\n Learn more in LOVE SCHOOL about how to break free from fawning<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/lissarankin.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/11\/fawning.jpg\")
<\/a><\/p>\nWhat Is Fawning?<\/b><\/h2>\n
The Fawn Response\u2019s Logic<\/b><\/h2>\n
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Fawning in a Lab Coat<\/b><\/h2>\n
Fawning as Trauma Bonding<\/b><\/h2>\n
The Spiritual Bypass of Fawning<\/b><\/h2>\n
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Unfawning<\/b><\/h2>\n
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Unlearn Your Fawn In LOVE SCHOOL<\/b><\/h2>\n