The fawn response: The survival instinct behind people-pleasing

Are you mad at me? It’s a question “Hyperfocus” host Rae Jacobson has asked more times than she can count.

So when Rae saw a book with that exact title, she was a little unnerved. The book is by psychotherapist Meg Josephson, and it’s about the fawn response: a survival instinct that can look like people-pleasing.

In this conversation, Meg breaks down what fawning is and why it’s hard to spot — and even harder to stop doing

Meg explains how fawning overlaps with (but isn’t identical to) rejection sensitive dysphoria and why it shows up as masking for a lot of neurodivergent people. And she talks about the moment she realized that years of people-pleasing meant she really didn’t know herself at all.

In this episode of “Hyperfocus,” learn about a pattern a lot of us have been running on autopilot without realizing it. And learn subtle strategies for change.

• Watch: Is ADHD a disability or just the shape of your brain?

• Listen: The brain is the last frontier of privacy. And you’re the target.

Rae Jacobson: It's called people-pleasing, but it's not pleasing many people, including ourselves. "Are You Mad at Me?" It's a question that I've asked more times than I can count. Sometimes out loud, sometimes in an anxious text, sometimes silently to myself.

So when I saw a book with that exact title, to be honest, I was a little bit unnerved. The book is by psychotherapist Meg Josephson, and it's about something called the fawn response — a survival instinct that can look like people-pleasing, over-apologizing, or constantly scanning everyone around you for signs that something might be wrong.

00:00 Rae Jacobson explains the fawn response and how it relates to the ADHD experience.

Rae: When Meg's book came out, everyone I know with ADHD was sending it to each other, going, "Did you see this? This sounds just like us." Because if you have ADHD, you probably have a lot of practice with people being upset with you. You forget texts, you forget birthdays, you didn't call that person back, you forgot something important again.

Thanks to learning executive functioning skills late in life, it's something I've gotten better at and about as I've gotten to understand my own ADHD. But old habits and the feelings related to those habits die hard. For many of us, those experiences can leave behind an alarm system that never quite switches off. So today on "Hyperfocus": "Are You Mad at Me?", the fawn response, and how to stop people-pleasing all the time.

Hi, Meg. Thank you for having me. I'm so happy you're here. Your book has my favorite title of any book ever, because it is something that I think I have thought or written or been concerned about more than almost anything else.

Meg Josephson: I get it. I get it.

Rae: Like if you were going to write a horror movie, that could be the only text. That could be the full script, and I'd be like, "Agh!"

Meg: The title was the first thing I had, actually, because I knew that that question summed up this feeling that is certainly familiar to me and what I saw was really familiar to my clients as well. I just felt like this question — are they mad at me? Did I do something wrong? Am I okay? — I think it really captures that anxiety and that feeling that a lot of us experience but maybe don't always have the words for.

What that experience is really putting words to is something called the fawn response, which we can I'm sure talk about. The fawn response. You know when you hear about something and you're like, "Man, I really wish I had known about that earlier"? That's how I feel about fawning, because it is a perfect way to describe an extremely familiar feeling.

The way Meg explains it, fawning is one of the four ways that people respond to danger. You've probably heard of fight or flight. Those are the really famous ones where you act aggressively or you run away when you're feeling threatened. Then there's freeze, which is basically checking out or dissociating. Finally, there's fawning, the newest addition to this extremely sucky hit list and one that many people with ADHD have definitely experienced.

When our body is detecting some sort of threat, whether it's real — there's an abuser, there's a tangible threat in front of us — or perceived — like your boss is being kind of weird and cold and you're like, "Oh gosh, did I do something wrong? Are they upset with me?" — we appease the threat. We go into impressing mode. We ask if everything's okay. We try to butter them up to really just go back to a place of feeling liked once again.

Once we know we're liked by them, we can feel safe. Sometimes we need this. I think this is a really important nuance. Sometimes it's very useful and effective, and we need to survive in society, whether it's to get a paycheck or whether it's to ensure our safety in a dangerous situation.

But when we're doing it all the time, when we're doing it with our best friend who's super understanding and our loving partner, that's when it becomes very exhausting and leads to many things: anxiety, burnout, resentment in our relationships. So that's sort of an overview of the fawn response.

Rae: There's so much in that that I feel like governs so much of the way a lot of us live. Do you work with a lot of people with ADHD in your practice?

Meg: I don't specialize in ADHD, but what I find is people with ADHD or neurodivergence in general will come my way because of the overlap that exists, I think, in the nervous system with hypervigilance, people-pleasing, anxiety, having an unreliable narrative happening within the mind, not knowing how to differentiate what's real, what do I believe?

Rae: This idea of having people be mad at you, it is kind of like the thing that a lot of us perceive as the constant danger. You're hypervigilant against it. You're so worried about it. People with ADHD, I feel like maybe we're a little more worried about it because people do get mad at us a lot for a lot of reasons.

So one of the ways that you talk about this so much in your book, people handle that is by trying to stop anyone from ever being mad at them ever for any reason by being super amazing and great all the time so that everything will feel safe and no one will be mad ever. Is that not the most adaptive and sensible way to live your life, Meg?

Meg: Well, it is — that's exactly the right word — is extremely adaptive. It also is very successful. For a child being hypervigilant and wondering if you've upset your caregiver or being as perfect — air quotes for listeners — perfect or as good as possible, that is a very adaptive safety strategy. That is the fawn response, which is appeasing the threat.

Rae: As a person with ADHD, I do have a tendency to do this kind of thing, and I think a lot of us do. We're not great with executive function. We may not have been listening when you were telling us something important. We missed the thing, we were late for the thing, we forgot the thing.

You have all these, I think of them as pitfalls in the obstacle course of life where you can get into a situation that puts you on the back foot, afraid of making people mad, often maybe with good reason. Then the fawn response kicks in. But I had always heard it called people-pleasing. Are those the same thing?

Meg: Such a great question. I think of people-pleasing kind of just as the behavior, but I think of the fawn response more as the root. We can people-please without feeling threatened. We can people-please out of habit, whatever it may be. But I think of the fawn response as we feel unsafe in some way or we have in the past, and so that's how we're reacting from that place.

Rae: If like me you spend a lot of time steeped in the language of neurodivergence, this behavior might call to mind another phrase, rejection sensitive dysphoria, or RSD. RSD is not an official diagnosis, but it's a condition that's often linked to ADHD where you have a very strong reaction to perceived criticism or rejection. So I asked Meg, is RSD related to fawning, or is it its own thing?

Meg: Rejection sensitivity with ADHD, I think of that as it's the sensitivity to rejection, right? Then I think of the fawn response as, "Here's what I'm going to do to prevent the rejection from happening." I'm sensitive to the rejection, and so I'm going to stay ahead of it, and I'm going to make sure that they can't reject me at all by being perfect and by changing my personality and catering my preferences to match whoever I'm with.

So I think there's such an overlap. I think of it as they're different processes but such similar manifestations. But the core is the same, which is we're trying to keep ourselves safe.

Rae: It's so interesting you bring up perfectionism, which is also a big problem for a lot of people with ADHD, which I think can be easy to forget because it's like, "Oh, ADHD, you're a mess, you're all over the place." But there's also this deep perfectionistic streak.

Meg: The fawn response I think is inherently perfectionist. Because if I'm perfect, there's nothing to criticize. Of course that's not true, but that's what our survival brain thinks. As I said, it often starts from a — it's learned from a young age. It works, and then we get older, we go into adulthood, we leave the environment that it was the most effective in, and it kind of becomes outdated software in a sense and doesn't fit anymore.

Rae: That makes so much sense, but I also find like, when you said it works, I feel like it works up to a point. You're always like, "All right, I can fix it. I can make sure that no one's going to be upset and I'll be so perfect." But especially for everybody, but for people with ADHD, that road is not that long. You're going to fail.

Meg: Remember, this is a threat response. We're only supposed to be in it for a few minutes at a time. But for many of us, it's a default state of being for decades, for a lifetime. Oh my gosh, it's so exhausting for the nervous system. We're not supposed to be on high alert in that way for that amount of time. It's a lot of energy is exerted. So the road is short, leads to burnout, we feel resentful in our relationships, we have fake arguments in our heads with friends because we want to say no but we say yes. It's a lot. There are a lot of layers.

07:44 The heavy toll of masking and why the fawn response is so difficult to stop.

Rae: The way these learned coping skills affect us isn't always obvious, and it can look really different from person to person. For Meg, a lifetime of people-pleasing manifested in a sense that she'd spent so long chameleoning herself to suit the needs of others she wasn't really even sure who she was.

Meg: I've spent my whole life people-pleasing, and I share this example in my book where I had just graduated college and I was looking for towels at Bed Bath & Beyond for my apartment. I was looking at these towels and thought to myself, "I don't even know what my favorite color is."

Then I thought, "Let me go on Instagram and see what other people are doing and putting in their apartment." Just this shameful feeling of who am I? Am I just a medley of people's personalities? Do I even exist? Because I'm just so hyper-attuned to what other people think that I've completely lost connection with what's happening internally. That manifests in so many ways. Feeling like I don't know my opinions, I don't know my preferences. I just say, "Whatever you think," when someone says, "What do you want for dinner tonight?" Even if you do have some sort of opinion, you're definitely not going to say it.

Rae: For me, this type of self- erasure showed up as masking. I wasn't concerned about people liking the parts of me that I liked. I knew I could be a good time or a supportive friend. It was the things I didn't like about myself I felt the need to bury.

The parts of my neurodivergence like disorganization or being late or forgetting things that really needed to be remembered — the things that wreaked havoc on my life and my relationships — that was the stuff I tried to cover for by donning my fawn ears. I still do it sometimes.

I don't know about you, but with this type of reaction, I spend a lot of time masking. I think a lot of people who are neurodivergent do, to sort of cover up the fact not just that you're other neurodivergent stuff is going on. If I just mask hard enough, people won't see that I am failing, and they won't be upset with me, and my relationships won't suffer, my work won't suffer. I could just mask hard enough to be good enough. I feel like in some way that feels related to the fawn response. Is it?

Meg: Yes, 100 percent. I'm so glad you brought that in, because I think that is the way that the fawn response comes through with neurodivergence is through masking. Our identities affect the different ways in which the fawn response comes through. If you're a person of color in society and you're trying to feel safe in a very white-dominant space, someone might find themselves changing their behavior to feel safe in that setting.

The same can apply for someone who is neurodivergent. It's that active morphing that is the fawn response. So I think that neurodivergence adds that heightened sensitivity on top of already probably being quite hypervigilant in the first place.

Rae: I feel like all of this — it's so exhausting, like you said. It's so unrealistic. It's so hard to keep it up. Why is this such a hard cycle to break? Why do we stay in this?

Meg: I think it's from the most basic sense. We are hardwired to find safety in familiarity. If you have found safety, if you have been liked through people-pleasing and it's worked for you, saying no will feel like aggression to the body simply because you're breaking the script.

Another element of the fawn response, it's the only threat response that we are rewarded for. If you were to fight, flight, freeze at work, there's some punishment for that if you were chronically doing those things. But if you're chronically in a fawn response at work, girl, you got a promotion. You got a raise. So that's very reinforced in even in adulthood.

In childhood it's, "Oh, you're such a good girl. You're so easy." She's such a good kid. It feels good to be validated, and we get a lot of validation at least on the surface in the fawn response. But I think what a lot of people find, and what I have found, it's on the surface. It's very lonely because no one's really getting to know us if we are only showing people the masked version of ourselves. It's tiring.

Rae: It's tiring, and I have a question that I don't know if it has an answer, which is — this is going to sound ridiculous — but I feel like as a kid and even as an adult sometimes, especially when I didn't understand my ADHD, when I wasn't really aware of how to manage some of the things, the fawn response really stood in for any type of ability to actually handle stuff, right?

I was incredibly good at apologizing, but not very good at change. It was partially because I didn't understand what you would do to do something different. So I'm so interested in the idea that this is this overwhelming, exhausting, masking thing that it seems almost — and this is going to sound like I'm saying something terribly harsh — that people with ADHD, we even fail at that sometimes.

Meg: Well, I think you're speaking to something which is very true, which is it's called people-pleasing, but it's not pleasing many people. No. Including ourselves. It's very short-term. Like what you said of "I would apologize but not change my behavior." It eliminates the threat by just blaming yourself, right?

But part of accountability is self- reflection of, "What happened here? What did I do wrong? How do I want to correct this? What triggered this?" We're slowing down, and I think the healing is becoming aware. When am I doing this when I don't need to be doing this?

Rae: If you were to adapt that type of advice for people with ADHD who are neurodivergent, knowing that we have all this other stuff coming in, is there anything you can offer that's especially helpful for us?

Meg: Well, I think the ADHD neurodivergence layer is that it can be really hard to slow down, right? You may not have the ability to see it in the moment because you're just hyper-attuned, you're focusing on other things, whatever it may be. That awareness still counts when it's after the fact to be able to look back and say, "Hmm. I said yes to this friend, and now I'm feeling resentful. Okay, what is this resentment telling me?"

This resentment is telling me something. It's telling me that I have a need that isn't being met, that how I'm behaving is out of alignment with how I'm feeling. Having forgiveness that it doesn't have to look a certain way. Breaking these patterns, it can be at the pace that is possible for you and your brain. That awareness can happen at any time, but just noticing the ways in which the fawn response is seeping in is the foundation of breaking the pattern itself.

Rae: I find that so helpful and sensible. I also have to wonder, how do you develop a thoughtful process around that reflection to prevent yourself from falling into the more self- criminatory version of it?

Meg: Oh, that's a great distinction. There is a felt difference between the two. Ruminating, obsessing, fixating is all happening in the head. It's all up here. It feels like you're repeating the same script scenario trying to find a solution. We all know that feeling. And if you don't know that feeling, oh my gosh, tell me your secrets. Please refer me to your therapist. That'd be great. Let's all go to that therapist. Where is she? How much does she cost?

But reflection is — it's happening in the head, but it's also happening from the neck down as well. We're slowing down with it. Again, even if you're just slowing down one percent, it doesn't have to mean you're feeling super peaceful by no means. But we're slowing down, we're in our conscious mind, we're being curious. It's a daily practice of regulating the nervous system and rewiring these core beliefs. It's so subtle, and it's so not a one — time thing. It's forgetting it, remembering it, coming back to it, hating ourselves, hating ourselves less. It's just a constant dance of that, and it's kind of repetitive and boring.

Rae: I have to say, even with my novelty-seeking ADHD brain, I will take repetitive and boring if it works. Thank you so much for coming on.

Meg: Thank you so much for your time and your thoughtful questions and conversation. I really appreciate it.

Rae: Thank you so, so much to the absolutely lovely Meg Josephson. And congratulations on your new baby. We had this conversation while Meg was very, very pregnant. If you're interested in learning more about some of the ways that ADHD and RSD can affect you, check out our episode on "Climbing Out of Anxiety Rabbit Holes" with Dr. Jody Gold. It's basically eavesdropping on a therapy session — mine. We'll have a link to that and to Meg's work in the show notes. Thank you so much for tuning in, and we'll see you in two weeks.

"Hyperfocus" is hosted by me, Rae Jacobson. Our producer is Cody Nelson, and Anna Rothschild is our senior podcast producer. Julie Subrin helps with booking. Our music comes from Blue Dot Sessions. Our research correspondent is Dr. KJ Wynne. Our associate director of content development is Calvin Knie. Briana Berry is our production director, and Neil Drumming is our editorial director.

If you have any questions for us or ideas for future episodes, write me an email or send a voice memo to hyperfocus@understood.org. This show is brought to you by Understood.org. Our executive directors are Laura Key, Scott Cocchiere, and Jordan Davidson. Understood.org is a nonprofit organization dedicated to empowering people with learning and thinking differences like ADHD and dyslexia. If you want to help us continue this work, donate at Understood.org/give.