What Happens When Fawning Becomes Our Default?
If you’ve ever caught yourself trying to make everyone else comfortable (oftentimes at the expense of your own needs) Meg Josephson’s Are You Mad at Me? lands like a gentle but direct truth-telling friend. As both a therapist and a lifelong recovering people-pleaser, I found myself nodding, underlining, pausing, and taking deep breaths throughout this book.
Josephson doesn’t just name people-pleasing as a habit; she places it in the body, in trauma, and in the early relational templates many of us internalized long before we had language for it. And what struck me most was how she explores the many faces of the fawn response; not just the classic “be nice, stay quiet, keep the peace” iteration I already knew.
“Fawning isn’t just about making yourself small. Sometimes it’s about becoming everything for everyone so no one has a reason to be upset with you.”
This line in particular stayed with me. It expanded my understanding of fawning beyond compliance or passivity. Josephson describes how children in unstable homes often learn to read the emotional weather of caregivers as a survival mechanism—anticipating needs, smoothing conflict, absorbing tension, and trying to prevent abandonment by being “easy,” “helpful,” or “perfect.”
As adults, these survival skills often turn into relational patterns that feel like connection but actually erode it: over-functioning, caretaking, hyper-vigilance around tone or mood, or constantly asking, “Are you mad at me?” even when no conflict is present.
As I was reading, I felt both deeply seen and newly informed. I understood fawning before, but Josephson illuminated its nuances; it can be loud or quiet, enthusiastic or self-erasing, compliant or overly accommodating. It shows up in texting back too fast, apologizing for existing, tuning your emotions to someone else’s frequency, or monitoring another person’s comfort so intensely that your own disappears.
From a therapeutic lens, this book reminded me of how many clients sit in the tension between their authentic self and the survival strategies that once kept them safe. And it validated how important the work of reclaiming emotional autonomy truly is. Healing doesn’t mean rejecting kindness; it means understanding when kindness has replaced honesty, boundaries, or self-respect.
