People Pleasing To Protect Ourselves

This guided somatic inquiry gently explores the fawn response—our tendency to people-please when we sense danger or social threat. Through grounding, breath awareness, and self-reflection, you’ll learn to recognize these patterns with compassion rather than shame. We explore core beliefs, early conditioning, and power dynamics that shape these behaviors. You’ll be guided to reconnect with your body, regulate your nervous system, and offer yourself kindness. This practice supports healing through insight and embodiment—allowing you to move toward authenticity, self-trust, and confidence. You’re invited to revisit this exploration over time, as a tender and empowering part of your healing journey.

Transcript

Fawning and people-pleasing,

Something I think that we're all familiar with in many different ways.

It's one of our survival responses that we use to keep ourselves safe when we're under threat.

Be as present and as kind and as aware as we can be.

Emotionally regulated,

Meaning we're not in so much of a fight-flight-freeze-fawn response.

Looking at some of the elements of this,

We're aware that we're doing a practice,

A somatic inquiry around this.

Let's start with some somatic grounding.

Breathing,

Some breath awareness,

Some body awareness.

You might look around the room that you're in.

Just notice what's here.

And as you're doing the practice,

Assess for yourself.

Is this the practice for me right now?

I'm feeling really grounded.

I think this would be very helpful.

Or I'm feeling really activated by something.

I don't think I want to open this can of worms right now.

There's no gold star for pushing ourselves.

Healing trauma is very much an intuitive dance of moving a little closer and coming back and stabilizing.

So if at any point in this it gets to be feeling like,

No,

I don't really want to continue with this,

Or I want to lessen the intensity,

There's lots of ways we can do that too.

I can honor myself,

Give myself what feels right for me in this moment.

And some days that's really looking deeply,

And some days it's being a little bit more sensitive around what I want to do in this practice.

For everybody,

We can start with the nervous system.

Looking around the room,

Notice if there's anything that's alarming there.

During the practice,

You could always come back to that,

Just looking around the room.

So if you're feeling a bit activated,

You might notice five things that are a certain color.

You might hold your own hands,

Use your sense of touch,

Breathe,

Cyclic sighing,

Which is that double inhale through the nose,

And then a long exhale,

Like you're breathing out through a thin straw.

As you're doing that,

Notice your body,

Let your body soften.

And you might choose a certain part of your body to focus on on the exhale,

Maybe forehead,

Eyebrows,

And eyes,

Mouth,

And jaw.

Let go of any worry through your forehead,

Release any clenching in your jaw.

And then on the next exhale,

Perhaps your neck and shoulders,

Your upper back.

So helpful to arrive in our body in a way that's pleasant.

Am I sitting in a way that feels good in my body?

You might notice your arms and legs,

Your feet,

Your seat,

Fully come into the body.

Let's start the exploration.

We're looking at people-pleasing or fawning.

I know we've all had experience doing this,

And we've all had experience watching it done.

We have a culture of shaming people for that,

Feeling bad about ourselves if we do it.

We feel weak or manipulative,

Or there's all kinds of negative things that are assigned to this.

This is a trauma response.

It's a response to feeling some kind of threat.

When we feel like we're in danger,

We might go into a fight or flight.

When we get into a mobilized state,

We take action.

We might go into an immobilized state and go to freeze,

And we might go into fawning or people-pleasing.

There's a continuum here of being cooperative to being compliant,

Fawning,

Or sucking up.

We have a lot of experience with this,

And we have a lot of ideas about what's right and what's wrong here,

What's respected and what is not.

Fawning is very much related to social power,

Social,

Physical,

Financial,

All kinds of power.

People with more power don't fawn to people with less.

That's one of the ways that we can see this through our conditioning and through our society,

Through that lens.

Looking at anything that's this complex,

We need to broaden our lens so that we can really see some of the dynamics.

As we go through the practice,

The main priority is to stay here in this moment where we know that we're safe.

From here,

The safety of this moment,

That's when we dip in a little bit to some of these things that we have a sense are not helping us.

When we look at the sense of power that we have over our lifetime,

Children don't have much power.

Some of the strategies that we use when we're children that come up for us,

Like going into freeze or a fight or flight or fawn,

People-pleasing,

Continue over into our adult life.

In our adult life,

We don't all have the same amount of power,

But what is true is that children generally have not much power or less power.

Pete Walker is a therapist who's known for his insightful deep work around complex PTSD or developmental trauma.

He talks about this as being something that happens that's developmentally arresting.

It's hard for us to have a good sense of ourselves as being a legitimate human being who has a right to be happy and to set the tone for our own life when we have this experience as a child of being pressed into codependent services,

What he calls it.

We're not going to go into all of the details of that,

But I wanted to bring it up just to be clear about the complexity of this.

When we're looking at what are our patterns,

We can look at it through the trauma lens of,

I need to do something to protect myself.

People-pleasing,

Fawning behaviors,

That's all it is.

It's a mechanism,

A behavior to protect ourselves.

We could offer kindness and compassion and understanding to ourselves,

Even though maybe our inner critic might be saying we're being weak.

Settle into all of that and go back into some breathing.

Look around the room,

Notice your breath.

We're going to be working with some memories.

If you have an image and you can look at it over on the other side of the room,

Put it in a frame and our brain knows then that we're looking at an image.

When we're doing these somatic inquiries,

We get a lot of information and we get some healing as well.

And it's really important to take care of ourselves.

What comes to mind when you think about people-pleasing or fawning?

What's going on in your body as well?

Often with this,

There's a feeling of not very comfortable in the body.

Whatever your memories are that are coming up,

Be tender with yourself.

When we're people-pleasing,

What does that feel like in our body as we're bringing up a memory of that?

And it might be a memory from a long time ago.

It might be a memory of somebody else people-pleasing and we were watching them,

We were in the room or we were uncomfortable for them.

So let your body breathe,

Let your shoulders relax or your jaw,

Whatever's going on in your body,

Taking this slow.

So whatever your images are,

If you have a memory that you're bringing up,

Sometimes people have just little flashes of,

Oh yeah,

That.

Sometimes we had a lot of fear in our body at the time and we were trying to talk ourselves out of a dangerous situation.

And sometimes it's a little bit more subtle in a social situation where there's not physical danger,

But there's a social relationship there.

And we are all very sensitive to being excluded or judged.

All of us are,

That's part of the way that our makeup happens,

Our nervous system.

What is the kinds of thoughts that you're having about this?

Enough of us have these patterns that there's a name for it,

People-pleasing,

Codependence,

Fawning,

The term sometimes change,

But we all know what we're talking about.

And we all have a lot of thoughts about that.

And some of them are just unconscious things that we become aware of later.

I can't afford to stand up for myself.

I can't afford to disappoint people.

I can't afford to be rejected.

So those are some of the thoughts that might be happening around the circumstances when we noticed that we were people-pleasing,

Fawning.

As we become more healed and as we become more confident that,

In fact,

There are people in the world who would like to know us,

Who will value us as we are.

We don't actually have to make us over.

We don't have to do anything to improve ourselves to the point where we'd be likable.

So these are core deficiency beliefs coming in here as well.

So with all of that complexity,

One of the reasons I do a lot of positive visualizations is because it helps our whole nervous system and our brain to recognize,

I have all these experiences that are hard.

I also have some memories and I can bring that to mind and into my body of when I was accepted,

When I was included.

Maybe I was even someone who is a social leader in that group of kids or adults.

Our nervous system remembers all the hard and dangerous things.

It doesn't remember all of the other ones.

So it's up to us to bring that forward.

I can afford to be myself.

I can afford to say my truth.

What does that feel like right now?

I don't have to cater to that person.

I prefer it if I'm liked,

But if I'm not,

I prefer to honor who I am.

I'm strong enough to do that at least part of the time.

So there might be a lot of things going on in the body.

Notice if you're here in this moment,

Let your breath be smooth.

You might take a few deeper breaths again.

Release tension out of your body as you breathe out.

One of the things I learned about myself doing this work around healing trauma and in particular around fight,

Flight,

Freeze,

And fawn is that I would often go into a freeze response,

But then I would fawn as a way to try to be protected.

That's one of the dynamics of people pleasing is if we're so nice that they couldn't possibly take offense at us,

Then they're not going to come after us.

They're not going to target us.

I call it the bare throat defense.

If you bare your throat,

You don't feel like a threat,

And then we're hoping that they're not going to rip our throat out.

We're hoping that they're not going to go after us,

That they will protect us,

Or at least that they'll be neutral.

In some situations,

That's a workable strategy.

It might be the only thing that we could do,

But socially and relationally with friends and in our workplace and in relationships,

We pay a big price for that.

Notice if there's any of those dynamics that resonate for you.

This won't be true for everybody.

Some people,

I feel a threat,

I'm right in there,

I'm in a fight response,

I'm going to back them down.

This isn't familiar to everybody,

And it is to some.

If I'm super nice,

They're not going to attack me.

Notice if any memories come up of that,

Either of you or maybe watching someone else do that.

Relax your mouth and jaw,

Your shoulders.

Notice if there's any feelings of shame.

What's going on in your body right now and in your heart?

Sometimes these patterns happen very,

Very early on,

And it makes sense when we look back through this trauma lens.

All of the fight,

Flight,

Freeze,

Spawning responses make sense when we look at them in the context of,

I was experiencing a threat and I was trying to protect myself.

If you are in a position of power,

You're more likely to protect yourself in other ways,

But if you're if you have less power,

You're more likely to be fawning or people-pleasing.

That might be one of the best options at the time,

Maybe the only one.

What does that feel like?

What are your memories of that?

So many opportunities for this to arise in our lives,

And some of them are relatively innocuous,

And some of them are higher stakes.

We have to be careful.

We have to protect ourselves.

It can be dangerous to be who we are publicly,

On social media,

In different ways.

When we're working at these survival responses,

We're never pretending that everything is safe or that everything's okay to do.

We're just looking to see,

What is my nervous system telling me about safety and danger right now?

And am I still able to be here in my body?

I might feel kind of stirred up,

But am I aware that I'm doing a practice?

And when we start to get really dragged back into a memory,

We can come forward into this moment.

Take a breath,

Relax our shoulders,

And bring some kindness.

Anything that's social relations is very complex,

And this one is one of them for sure.

Sometimes when we stand up for ourselves,

It doesn't work well.

We get more defiance or more bullying or something like that.

This isn't about,

I have to do this all the time.

I can never be in a people-please.

I always have to be strong.

I always.

.

.

This isn't practical.

What we're really doing is,

Can I be in this moment?

Then from this regulated state,

We can more accurately assess what's going on in the situation.

Is it as dangerous as my nervous system is telling me?

I need to do something here to protect myself.

Then we look around the room.

We notice,

Okay,

I'm working with this.

I'm safe right now in my body.

I can breathe.

I find that it's very helpful to dip into this kind of thing a little bit at a time and over time.

If this is stirred up some things,

Maybe journal or do some art or something around it,

Bring yourself into connection with your own experience.

Then come back to that a little bit later and a bit later.

When we're working with these things that bring us shame,

What's the matter with me that I was sucking up to them?

I don't even respect them and here I am back in that old pattern.

If you're noticing anything like that,

Any hardening of your heart towards yourself,

Any criticism,

Then let's go into a bit of kindness.

As you're doing these practices,

Always remember to start and end,

And in the middle too,

With kindness,

Patience,

Understanding.

We're not weak because we go into a fawning response sometimes.

Our system has assessed a certain danger and we are trying to keep ourselves safe.

That's all it is.

We have a lot of different ways that we do that,

And this is one of them.

Bring yourself into your own heart.

Offer yourself some kindness.

Take a few deep breaths,

Reminding ourselves that we're okay.

This is a very strong pattern and we need to come up into awareness so that we're aware of what we're doing.

If we're people-pleasing,

We can bring that back a little in the moment,

Or maybe if we've made a commitment that we're not wanting to do because we were fawning,

We could practice pulling that back.

We could work with it and we can change how we work with this long-term,

But also what we might do then to mitigate whatever it is that happened there.

Let's go into the heart.

Breathe.

Give yourself a smile,

Like a real wholehearted,

Open-hearted smile.

Whenever we're working with something this intense,

It's really helpful to stay in connection or to come back into connection with ourself.

Whatever it is you've noticed,

Whatever insights that you've had,

Maybe a somatic release,

Realizing that's really had an effect on me,

And the least that I could do is have some kindness for myself.

Let myself have an open heart.

Hold our own hands.

Look around the room again.

Make a plan for later,

Maybe over the next few weeks you'd like to revisit this a bit.

Work with this through going out for a walk,

Or having a conversation,

Or when we have this pattern with somebody,

To work on it internally.

I notice that I always kind of go into this mode with that person.

I must be feeling some kind of threat,

Or I wouldn't be doing that,

And often that's because of something the other person's doing,

Or it's because of our power positions.

How could I be more aware of that and then gradually start to shift?

And it's not that being cooperative is wrong.

It's not that giving people compliments.

None of that is wrong.

It's just what's the feeling inside as we're doing that?

Are we doing that from a position of just friendliness and cooperation,

Or does it have those tinges of being a survival response?

And then we could work with that.

I hope this was helpful and that you're walking away with a little bit more information about yourself,

But also a sense of friendliness towards yourself.

That's so important.

And it's from that strength we have less fear,

More confidence.

It all works out quite well when we're working with this as a practice.

Reviews

Thanks Lynn for creating a safe place to explore well ingrained auto responses, and hopefully change them

Thank you for this meditation . Very helpful. Appreciate everything you do and share here on IT. ❤️🙏🕊️

Ohhh, that was hard! I did something similar in a live with you and that really landed too as I had no idea how much fawning was a part of my personality. Really helpful though, thank you! 🙏🏻