There's a version of you that other people love. She's warm, she's generous, she reads the room before anyone else has taken off their coat. She makes things easier. She's the one people turn to. And it happens so naturally, so consistently, that she's stopped noticing it's a choice.
She's tired. Not just physically tired. Tired in the way you get when your nervous system has been quietly working overtime for years. Always scanning. Always adjusting. Always making sure everyone else is okay before she checks in with herself.
And somewhere in all of that, she's lost the thread of who she actually is outside of what she gives.
Most of us know about fight, flight, freeze. The ways our bodies respond when something feels threatening. But there's a fourth response that tends to fly completely under the radar, possibly because it doesn't look like fear at all. It looks like generosity. Like loyalty. Like being the person everyone can count on.
It's called the fawn response, a term developed by therapist Pete Walker in his work on complex trauma. And there's a good chance it's been running quietly in the background of your life for longer than you realise.
This isn't exclusive to people who've experienced significant trauma, or even people who would use that word about themselves at all. Most of us learned to fawn in much quieter ways. In families where keeping the peace was just how things worked. In schools where being agreeable got you further than being honest. In workplaces that rewarded it and called it professionalism. For women especially, it can run so deep and start so early that it stops feeling like a response at all. It just feels like who you are.
When you're responsible for everyone else's emotional state, when their okayness and your okayness are somehow the same thing, there's not much room left to ask what you actually need.
The hardest part of recognising fawn is that it wears your actual values as a disguise. If you care about loyalty, the not speaking up feels like commitment. If you value harmony, the constant smoothing of edges feels like just who you are. And because these things look so much like genuine kindness, from the outside and from the inside, it can take a long time to notice what's actually driving them.
It doesn't announce itself. It just runs.
Someone asks, and you say of course, automatically, genuinely, like this is simply who you are. The script runs so smoothly you don't even clock it as a script. It's only when something interrupts it, when you consider not doing it, when circumstances change and you'd need to backtrack, when you imagine saying actually, I can't, that something sharp rises up. Not just discomfort. Closer to dread. A low grade panic at the thought of disappointing someone, of being seen as unreliable, of letting someone down.
Deb Dana describes this as the nervous system acting well below conscious awareness. Not a cognitive choice, but an autonomic one. Which is why willpower alone never quite reaches it.
That feeling, that anxiety at the mere possibility of not delivering, is worth paying attention to.
Genuine generosity doesn't come with that. It comes with a kind of freedom. You can give or not give and you remain the same person either way.
Fawn doesn't feel like freedom. It feels like obligation dressed up as personality.
The capacity to make people feel safe, to read a room, to create warmth wherever you go, that's not a flaw. That's a genuine gift.
The question isn't whether you should stop being that person. It's what's fuelling it.
I know because I've asked myself the same question.
That shift didn't come easily. It took years of therapy before I had the capacity to feel into what was actually happening underneath the automatic yes. The flatness that sometimes followed it. The sense of having given something away without knowing why.
When I finally could, I started experimenting with maybe.
Not no, that felt too big. Just maybe. A small gap where the script used to run.
What surprised me was how much anxiety even that tiny pause created.
Which told me something.
What shifted things further was telling the truth. About my tendency to fix, to give, to make myself useful before anyone asked. Some people drifted. Others stayed. And something was different in how they received me, more conscious somehow, more grateful.
What I didn't expect was that giving from that place feels almost limitless. Not exhausting. Not depleting. Just easy, in a way it never was before.