The Politics of Fawning: The Instinct that Devours Integrity

The Body Learns to Survive

Your boss snaps. You shrink. You apologize for things you didn’t do and agree to things you don’t believe. Instinctively, the voice softens, the tone steadies—thousands of small unconscious calibrations to keep the peace. The body moves before thought, a reflex learned over years of managing threat. This is fawning: the body’s ancient choreography for survival, trading the self for security, authenticity for permission to exist.

In trauma theory, we often talk about the fight, flight, and freeze responses—three ways the body protects itself. There is a fourth, less recognized strategy: fawning. Where fight meets threat with aggression and flight seeks escape, fawning seeks protection through subjugation. It’s the nervous system’s way of saying, If I can serve you, maybe I’ll be safe.

It begins as an act of survival, often in childhood, when attunement to another’s moods is the only way to avoid harm. A child can’t fight or flee, so the body learns to stay safe by soothing others, learning that subjugation ensures preservation. Over time, it becomes a pattern: the body learning to stay small, agreeable, invisible. As a therapist, I see this reflex in my clients, the body tightening to keep the peace, the words turning careful to calm another’s nervous system, the self contracting to preserve attachment. It is a protective adaptation that can feel like safety, but over time it calcifies, numbing connection to self until self-abandonment becomes its own captivity.

When Survival Becomes System

It isn’t just individuals; the pattern echoes upward. The same logic that keeps a child compliant can shape entire systems of power. What begins in one body can spread across a nation—especially under narcissistic, authoritarian-leaning governments.

Narcissistic power feeds on attention. It cannot live without an audience—adoring, enraged, or afraid. Its survival depends on others bending themselves out of shape to reflect its image. Within that field, fawning becomes the currency of survival.

At the personal level, fawning begins as an act of preservation—a way the body learns to stay safe when power feels absolute. But when that same reflex becomes strategy—scaled into politics or institutions—it shifts allegiance from survival to power itself. What once protected life begins to defend privilege. The difference is not in the physiology—the same nervous system logic drives both—but in accountability. Fear may explain behavior, but it cannot absolve harm. Compassion helps us understand why someone folds; responsibility asks what they do once they know they are bending.

The narcissist demands affirmation not as connection but as control; flattery turns to tribute, silence to consent. The aim is not persuasion but absorption—the slow erasure of boundaries until distinction itself feels dangerous.

Once unleashed, that kind of power floods every available space, a relentless stream of certainty that leaves no room for doubt or exchange. Such power moves like a current, flattening nuance, demanding agreement, turning hesitation into betrayal. The effect is totalizing: it declares, I will not tolerate your inner world. In that atmosphere, self-censorship becomes instinct.

For institutions, this often masquerades as pragmatism. Financial institutions, law firms, universities—those closest to power—don’t bend the knee out of confusion but calculation. They safeguard access, markets, margins—and in doing so mistake short-term security for survival and proximity to power for protection from it.

Integrity in Collapse

Appeasement begins as a choice—a calculated effort to contain threat or preserve stability. But repeated often enough, that choice stops being strategy and becomes reflex. What begins as calculation dissolves into fawning: the body politic moving before thought.

When self-preservation becomes the organizing principle of power, it hollows the very systems it was meant to serve. The nervous system’s logic—stay safe at all costs—turns into policy; soon enough, appeasement hardens into habit, and habit into subjugation.

The result is a nation ruled by fear—the quiet rehearsal of power’s demands until no protest feels possible. History shows where that path leads: when fear is rationalized as pragmatism, one by one, the guardrails of integrity fall, and the architecture of democracy rots from within.

Eventually, the nervous system of a nation mirrors its institutions: braced, compliant, numb. Under such conditions, democracy loses tone—stiffening into control or collapsing into chaos. This is the long tail of fawning: the erosion of boundaries that once anchored moral life.

Remembering What Integrity Feels Like

Healing begins in the body—the breath held between fear and speech. To remember integrity is to feel the body unclench, to stand where you once folded. Wholeness is not the absence of fear, but the choice to stay within it. Freedom begins when the body remembers its rhythm—when movement returns, where defense once held shrinking.

Regulation is not calmness but coherence—the capacity to hold tension without collapsing into servitude or retreat. A living nervous system learns to sort activation from danger. That discernment—not endless subservience—is the ground of ethical courage. It asks us to notice reflex: the instinct to appease, the impulse to soften what must be said plainly; to feel the tremor beneath the smile, to trace where fear still shapes tone.

The same is true at scale. Coherence in a democracy looks like courage made operational: financial institutions refusing to fund authoritarian drift, universities protecting free speech even when it offends donors, media holding integrity steady even when it endangers access. These are not gestures of virtue but acts of regulation at the institutional level—proof that collective safety depends on collective courage. Without them, institutions stop being stabilizers and become accelerants of decay.

Yet too many of its vital organs— those entrusted with public trust—have mistaken complicity for caution. They call it risk management, fiduciary duty, strategic neutrality. It is none of those things. It is moral anesthesia.

Every calculation to protect access or profit erodes the very conditions that make them possible. What looks like prudence in the short term is devastation in the long one. You cannot hedge against the collapse of a democracy you helped hollow out.

Accountability is where safety and integrity meet—but it must be the right kind. Even tyrants demand it, only in reverse: obedience, not responsibility. True accountability flows downward and outward, not only upward. It protects the vulnerable, not only the powerful. When accountability becomes the architecture of belonging, integrity becomes the measure of strength.

And maybe that’s where healing begins: in the single breath that breaks the reflex to please, in the trembling voice that speaks before it feels ready, in the body that, after years of bracing, remembers how to stand upright in its own truth.

The body remembers first. The rest—our systems, our politics—follows its lead.

NOTE ON INFLUENCES

As I’ve been learning more about fawning, I’ve begun to notice its patterns in my own story—the small, early adjustments that once ensured protection and later shaped how I moved through adulthood. These reflections have deepened through conversations with friends and colleagues who are also exploring how the body carries history and learns new possibilities for safety and wholeness.

My deepest gratitude to Dr. Shideh Lennon, with whom I’ve been training in Somatic Experiencing, and who first introduced me to the concept of fawning. Her presence and teaching have deeply shaped how I understand the body’s wisdom in seeking safety.

I’m also influenced by the work of Pete Walker, who first named and described the “fawn response” within trauma theory, and Dr. Ingrid Clayton, whose recent book Fawning: Why the Need to Please Makes Us Lose Ourselves—and How to Find Our Way Back illuminates this survival response with clarity, compassion, and courage.

Finally, my clinical work continues to be a living classroom for this understanding, witnessing with humility and care how people’s bodies navigate safety and integrity in real time. That work keeps this inquiry grounded, human, and alive.