3 Clues Your People-Pleasing Is Rooted In Trauma

There's a difference between being nice and being terrified of conflict. Here's how to tell if you are stuck in the 'Fawn' trauma response.

By Mark Travers, Ph.D. | July 23, 2025

When you grow up in unpredictable environments or experience something traumatic at any point in life, your nervous system doesn't just default to one "right" reaction. Instead, it adapts in a way that helps you feel safest. Over time, these survival patterns become automatic ways of responding to stress and impact the way you behave in life and love.

These are known as trauma responses. The ones you most certainly would have heard of would be fight or flight, and perhaps even freeze. But there's a fourth, even more subtle response known as "fawn."

When you're stuck in this trauma response, you begin to survive by people-pleasing or being too accommodating.

The tricky part about this is that it can often simply look like "being nice." However, if your niceness stems from fear rather than kindness, it's a self‑protective survival strategy driven by the fawn response.

Understanding your trauma response can be a gateway to real change. With awareness, you can step into your ability to choose healthier responses and allow kindness to come from authentic generosity.

Here are three signs you might be stuck in fawn mode.

1. You Apologize By Default

When you're stuck in fawn mode, "sorry" can become your go‑to response. It can become your reflex even when there's nothing to be sorry for. This serves one purpose for you and that is to keep you safely "small" and unthreatening.

In everyday life, it can look like constantly scanning for ways you might have caused some inconvenience to someone and apologizing before they even react. For instance, apologizing when someone else accidentally bumps into you, saying "sorry" after sharing an opinion just in case it offends anyone or prefacing every request with "Sorry to bother you…" as if asking for something is immediately a burden.

A 2021 study explored the concept of an "apology baseline," that is, how often someone tends to apologize across situations. Researchers examined how a person's general tendency to say "sorry" influences people's perceptions of their character and their relationships.

Participants were asked to evaluate characters or romantic partners who either apologized frequently or rarely.

Researchers found that those who apologized often were seen as more "communal," meaning they were assumed to be more caring and cooperative. However, at the same time, they were also seen as "less agentic," meaning they were seen as less assertive, decisive or confident, especially when their apologies felt vague or low in quality.

What this research brings to light is that while frequent apologizers may be perceived as kind or "easy to get along with," they also risk being seen as lacking strength or clarity.

For someone in fawn mode, chronic apologizing may win short-term safety or approval, but it can quietly erode how others (as well as you) perceive your authority, boundaries and self-worth.

Understand that becoming aware of your apology reflex isn't about removing "sorry" from your vocabulary. By being careful about when and how you apologize, you are simply restoring its meaning.

When you loosely use apologies as a way to shrink yourself or manage others' reactions, you disconnect from your own needs and also strip the apology of its sincerity.

The goal is to be honest in your kindness. The way to do this is to keep your apologies for moments that truly call for them. That way, when you do say "I'm sorry," it actually carries weight and reflects accountability instead of just anxiety.

2. You're Disconnected From Your Own Needs

When you're operating in fawn mode, you become so attuned to other people's needs that you lose touch with your own.

This often shows up when you constantly say, "I don't mind," "Whatever works for you" or "I just want everyone to be happy." On the surface, it seems accommodating and friendly but underneath, it's a fear of being seen as too much or causing conflict.

Eventually, this external focus makes it hard to identify what you genuinely feel, need or prefer. You may even freeze when you are asked about what you want. This can happen because you're probably out of practice when it comes to choosing yourself.

Research published in Frontiers in Psychiatry explored how childhood trauma affects "interoceptive accuracy" — the ability to sense internal bodily cues like your heartbeat, especially under stress.

To study this, researchers used a standardized stressor (the "cold pressor" test) to trigger a stress response in participants. Post this, they measured the participant's ability to perceive their heartbeat before and after the task.

Researchers found that individuals with higher levels of childhood trauma had significantly lower interoceptive accuracy after the stressor, meaning they became more disconnected from their bodily signals.

This disconnection wasn't due to physical changes like heart rate or cortisol levels but was instead mediated by chronic emotional discomfort, that is, a state of baseline unpleasantness common in trauma survivors.

Traumatic early experiences may impair brain-body communication, making it harder to interpret internal states. This helps explain why many people in fawn mode lose touch with their own needs and feelings. Your nervous system may have learned to prioritize emotional survival by tuning out your internal cues.

Over time, it can leave you relying on external validation and others' preferences, rather than a clear sense of self.

Reconnecting with your own needs starts with rebuilding communication with yourself. You can begin by asking small questions like, "What am I feeling right now?" or "What do I want, even if I don't say it out loud?"

Such internal check-ins may feel unfamiliar and even uncomfortable at first. But with time, this can help you shift from being a mirror for others to becoming a clearer reflection of yourself.

Remember that your needs aren't a threat. So, you must learn to give yourself permission to take up space and honor how you feel. This is how you begin to exist fully and not just in relation to others.

3. You Avoid Conflict At All Costs

If the thought of someone being even slightly upset with you gives you anxiety, you might be in a fawn response.

Conflict, in this case, may not just feel uncomfortable but also unsafe to you. Your nervous system may register disagreement as a threat to connection. This may cause you to go into overdrive trying to fix things, smooth things over or say whatever will keep the peace.

This might look like agreeing outwardly while disagreeing inwardly, taking blame just to end the tension or constantly monitoring other people's moods to avoid triggering discomfort.

This behavior often stems from lived experiences or early relationships where you may have learned that the best way to stay emotionally safe is to avoid tension entirely.

A 2020 study explored how people with PTSD respond to conflict, including situations where pursuing a positive outcome also involves facing something emotionally distressing. Participants were asked to complete a task where they could earn rewards (points), but some choices came with the cost of viewing trauma-related images.

Researchers found that individuals with PTSD consistently chose to avoid the distressing option, even when it meant earning fewer rewards. These findings showed that their nervous systems prioritized emotional safety over personal gain.

The stronger their PTSD symptoms, the more likely they were to avoid discomfort, even when avoidance was irrational or self-sacrificing.

If you're stuck in fawn mode, you likely avoid conflict, tension or assertiveness because your system has registered emotional discomfort as a danger. This kind of self-silencing can diminish confidence and authenticity.

To begin unlearning this, start by practicing staying present through small moments of discomfort. Every time you resist the urge to shrink or smooth things over, you teach your nervous system that honesty and safety can coexist.

Healing Begins With Self-Compassion

When you recognize your trauma response, do not forget that you developed it at a time when it genuinely helped you stay emotionally safe. There is nothing wrong with having adapted in this way. But as you begin to recognize these patterns now, you also begin to access the power to change them.

Now that you get to know better, you can remind yourself that you're allowed to outgrow the identities that once kept you small. You don't have to stay stuck in the same response or shape yourself around fear anymore.

You're now learning how to stop living your life in a constant state of fear. If that feels difficult to do alone, remember you can always reach out for professional support. With the right support and awareness, you can begin to feel safe in your own body and honor your needs without guilt.

Is the fawn response making you put others before yourself? Take this science-backed test to find out if you're caught in codependent relationship patterns: Codependency Scale

A similar version of this article can also be found on Forbes.com, here.