Unfawning

What if fawning is not only a trauma response, but one of the ordinary disciplines of modern life, trained early, rewarded often, and mistaken for maturity?

Madonna Demir

17 Apr 2026 — 9 min read

A young fawn in the grass, already making itself smaller before it knows what is coming. Corporate life teaches the same reflex early.

Fawning is modern shorthand for a recognizable reflex: appeasing, smoothing, pleasing, yielding before conflict has fully arrived. In therapeutic language, it refers to a survival strategy, a way of becoming agreeable enough, useful enough, undemanding enough that danger might move past without landing.

The term is everywhere now. It is usually described as a trauma response. But what if it is also a culturally trained response, so normal, so banal, that many people no longer recognize it as self-erasure at all?

This habit of pleasing others at the expense of ourselves is trained early. Children are praised for handing over a new birthday toy to a playmate. By adulthood, the habit has acquired more flattering names: professionalism, collaboration, emotional intelligence, maturity, good attitude, team spirit.

The body keeps a harsher ledger: exhaustion, depletion, the feeling of having been spent and emptied out.

There is a particular kind of depletion that has little to do with hard work. It comes from spending the day allowing the self to be consumed. You come home worn thin rather than the honest type of tired from the work itself. You replay a meeting and realize you nodded at a point you did not believe, because the speaker carried more political weight than you did. You volunteered for one more task, one more meeting, one more rescue offer of assisting a colleague, then felt regret arrive almost before the sentence was finished.

Months pass this way. Sometimes years.

You have still not asked for the work assignment or role you actually want. You have still not made a claim on your own time, your own ambition, your own appetite, or even your own needs.

You have been busy making the environment easier for other people to inhabit.

The Meeting That Changed the Baseline

I did not understand how thoroughly I had absorbed this habit until my first year in the Netherlands.

I walked into a brainstorming meeting led by a product line CEO, a woman.

I remember the room with unusual clarity because it shifted my sense of normal almost immediately. She wore a dress with a leather jacket over it, rather than the standard blue wool suit jacket. She swore. Interrupted people. Other people interrupted too, men and women. Called some ideas dogshit. And yet, the mood was convivial, joyful.

The room did not feel hostile in the slightest. It felt alive with possibility.

That was the revelation.

I had been in plenty of aggressive meetings by then, and in plenty of polished ones, the sort where everyone speaks in finished sentences while quietly rearranging themselves around rank, vanity, and fear. This was neither. People were actively trying to make the work better. They were not occupied with cushioning every exchange around the major egos in the room or hierarchy. Nobody seemed especially invested in protecting the dignity of a weak idea. No one was treating deference as a synonym for cohesion.

It was the first room I had seen that felt almost entirely free of fawning.

The absence of it made the room smarter, quicker to decide. Braver.

The experience did not strike me as a charming national quirk, though culture surely had something to do with it. It struck me as evidence. It exposed how much of what passes for professionalism elsewhere is really a form of managed appeasement. A room can hold interruption, bluntness, even profanity, and still remain convivial. I learned that candor and warmth do not sit on opposite ends of a spectrum.

Signs of fawning

How to recognize if you have habituated to fawning without a trip to a meeting room abroad:

1- You come home depleted, not just tired, feeling that you have been giving pieces of yourself all day, or had bites taken out of your soul.

2- You catch yourself mid-nod to a person in a meeting with more political pull than you, to smooth the tone of the meeting, rather than for pure agreement.

3- You find yourself volunteering for a task, a project, a meeting, and then immediately regretting it.

4- You haven’t asked for a new juicy assignment or role, haven’t applied to other jobs outside, either. For months (or years).

5- You work longer hours than ever, beyond management expectations, just because it seems to make the team happy.

The Uses (and Limitations) of Niceness

A little precision helps here.

The word fawning names something narrower than kindness, tact, restraint, or social skill. Adults living together in any institution will always need timing, judgment, modulation, generosity of spirit. Life would be unlivable without them.

Fawning names something more specific.

It is the repeated lowering of oneself or making the self smaller in the presence of power. Agreement offered before inner conviction has settled. Labor offered before any request. Emotional smoothing offered as tribute. A reflex of accommodation that develops wherever an organization demonstrates that directness carries penalties and refusal will be treated as a moral defect.

School children are praised early for being pleasant, flexible, generous, easy. University students are given team projects and grade one another on how nice they are to work with.

Interns arrive in their first corporate jobs with a near-cellular understanding that part of their job is to manage the emotional weather around them. The habit then gets refined and professionalized.

In office life, the model employee is often the person who notices what others need before it is spoken, absorbs friction before it surfaces, volunteers for extra labor without visible resentment, and keeps the room orderly even when that order is being purchased with her own time and force.

That arrangement is frequently described as emotional intelligence.

Sometimes the description is deserved. Often, though, it is the polished language of self-suppression. Fawning.

Institutions have strong incentives to blur the difference. A person who makes the environment easier for senior people often becomes legible as valuable sooner than a person who makes the work more honest. Someone who can read tension and quietly absorb it may be rewarded precisely because the surrounding system has decided her self-erasure is useful. In that environment, ugly facts get softened, bad ideas get overdressed, and debate narrows long before anyone admits it. Under those conditions, fawning stops looking like a private coping mechanism and starts to resemble a job requirement.

What It Does to a Room

The damage is not only personal. It is structural.

Once appeasement becomes ordinary, meetings begin to lie. Agreement appears where caution is doing the actual work. Weak ideas stay alive because nobody wants to be the first person to drive a blade through them in public. Strong people become strategically selective, saving their clearest thoughts for side conversations while the official room fills with polite, padded language and ornamental consensus.

Meanwhile, the most fragile or dominant temperaments begin to exert disproportionate force, not because they are right, but because everyone else has quietly agreed to organize the meeting around the management of their reactions. The surface grows smoother. The underlying reality starts to rot.

Convivial Systems Theory has always been interested in what happens at the seams, where humans and systems meet and useful truth gets thinned out long before formal failure arrives. A culture of fawning belongs squarely in that category. It reduces the quality of information available to the group. It delays correction. It raises the political cost of honesty. It trains capable adults to speak one language inwardly and another, buffered and safer, aloud.

A room in which nobody can name a weak idea plainly is a room that will eventually pay for weakness at a higher price.

The Dutch meeting taught me this more efficiently than any theoretical framework could have done. It gave me a working picture of adult social life with less appeasement in it. The intelligence of the room did not suffer. The opposite happened. More of it was available. More of it stayed in circulation.

Standards

Years ago, after watching Thelma & Louise, I borrowed one brutal line from the film and built a doctrine around it: you get what you settle for.

In the scene, Thelma, played by Geena Davis, is complaining about her abusive husband and expecting sympathy. Louise, played by Susan Sarandon, gives her something harder. She takes a drag of her cigarette and says, “Well, you get what you settle for.”

You get what you settle for.

The line has more range than first appears. It applies to dating, certainly. It applies just as readily to work, friendships, institutions, habits, standards. Systems drift toward the lowest level they repeatedly permit. People do too. Whatever is tolerated becomes the floor. Whatever is repeatedly accepted becomes the environment.

That is where unfawning becomes more than a matter of temperament. It becomes a standards question.

A person who keeps entering rooms where her role is to make herself smaller so others may remain comfortable is not merely enduring a condition. Over time, she helps sustain it. A team that rewards nodding, overfunctioning, diplomatic padding, and unbilled emotional labor is setting a floor. It should not be surprised when that floor becomes normal.

A manager who benefits from everyone speaking carefully around his ego may still call the culture collaborative. The name changes very little.

Once I had seen a room with far less fawning in it, many other rooms became harder to misread. I could see the hidden emotional labor more clearly. I could see how often the smoothness of a meeting depended on somebody, often lower in the hierarchy, metabolizing tension for everyone else. I could see how often “good culture” meant that the least powerful people in the room had become expert in cushioning the experience of the most politically powerful ones.

That is a costly definition of harmony.

Unfawning: A Quiet Form of Return

Unfawning rarely arrives as a cinematic act of rebellion.

More often it begins in small corrections, almost too small to notice from the outside. The nod that does not happen. The sentence spoken cleanly, without apology. The task not volunteered for. The silence allowed to stand. The role asked for directly. The extra labor declined.

These gestures can feel disproportionate when they first appear. People accustomed to self-abandonment often experience ordinary boundary-setting as guilt. They hear themselves say no and feel, briefly, as though they have violated some deeper ethic. They withdraw unpaid labor and feel selfish rather than clear.

Part of what makes the unfawning process disorienting is that it reveals the terms of earlier arrangements with brutal efficiency. Some people liked you best when you were easiest to use. Some organizations prized your steadiness because it saved them from confronting their own bad habits. Some forms of apparent harmony were being financed by your silence, your flexibility, your willingness to sand yourself down before entering the room.

Once that becomes visible, the past reorganizes itself. So does the future.

You stop cushioning every truth. The fear of sounding harsh loses some authority. Some relationships go slack. Some structures wobble immediately. Others improve at once, almost with relief. There are people who do not need you kneeling in order to meet you. There are rooms that grow stronger when more of your real mind remains present in them. There is work that becomes cleaner once it no longer passes through three layers of diplomatic softening before it can be spoken aloud.

The self returns in increments.

What Comes Back

A room full of fawning adults can look wonderfully harmonious right up until the product fails, the institution rots, the marriage curdles, the family myth collapses, or the most competent person in the room finally leaves. Then comes the usual astonishment, as though the warnings had been invisible.

Usually they were visible. They were merely expensive to name. Fawning had become the norm.

A room with less fawning may feel sharper at first. The air carries more edge. It also carries more usable truth. Bad ideas die sooner there. Reciprocity becomes easier to measure. People who require constant deference become easier to identify. The hidden tax of appeasement begins to come off the books.

Life shifts when that tax is no longer being paid.

You notice who can meet you without needing you diminished first. You notice which structures improve when you stop overfunctioning for them, and which ones sag immediately because they were resting on your silent subsidies. You notice that your work gets better when more of your actual mind is allowed to remain in it. You notice that your body, relieved of the daily requirement to betray itself in tiny increments, becomes a more trustworthy instrument again.

That is the deeper appeal of unfawning. It restores useful signal. It restores proportion. It restores standards. It returns a person to herself, and in doing so, returns something valuable to the room as well.

Where fawning begins, the self starts to recede. Where unfawning begins, it comes back into view.