The (Significant) Downside of Fawning

WITH LOVE, DANIELLE

Danielle LaPorte

Self-improvement, Education

4.9 • 697 Ratings

🗓️ 11 April 2025

⏱️ 24 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Fawning is a trauma response. And it’s one we don’t talk about enough.

In this episode, Danielle is digging into fawning as a default stress response. Most people misunderstand it. Fawning isn’t just being nice or deferential—it’s a survival mechanism that many of us picked up in childhood, and now it’s messing with our relationships, our confidence, and even our nervous system.

She unpacks how fawning isn’t as physiological as fight, flight, or freeze—it’s more of a personality gimmick. We think it’s safer to please other people than to be our authentic selves. And that… erodes trust in every direction.

In this episode:

The difference between fawning and other stress responses
How childhood (and chronic stress) trains us to fawn
A real story of working with someone who fawned—and how it impacted trust
The connection between fawning and chronic pain or illness
Why spiritual practice is the antidote
Healing practices to transmute the fawn response with love

MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE:

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Transcript

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0:00.0	My loves, I want to talk about fawning and specifically the significant downside of that stress
0:10.5	response.
0:12.0	This is partly inspired by a recent sacred post and podcast episode that I called AI is not your best life coach. That was issue 42 of
0:24.6	the sacred. It turned out to be one of the most shared and saved and commented on posts that I've
0:31.3	ever written on all of my platforms. I'm on substack now, by the way, you can find me there.
0:39.6	I'm the Danielle Lapack now, by the way, you can find me there. I'm the Danielle Leport,
0:49.1	whatever the substack URL is. I don't know. I'm new over there. My focus with the conversation with AI was on the emotional manipulation that can come from artificial intelligence,
0:56.1	that essentially the algorithm is being trained by our behavior and inputs to kiss ass.
1:03.8	It's called fawning.
1:05.6	Is it happening across the board?
1:07.3	No, not all of the time.
1:08.4	You can actually train your chat GPT to be more cynical,
1:12.8	to give you resistance, to challenge your intellectual thinking and all of that. The point there
1:18.9	was about the downside of the programmability and various forms of AI telling us what we want to hear. And that is a dangerous
1:30.5	place to be in. And to rely on AI as our spiritual director, there's all sorts of unhealthy
1:39.9	implications in that. What I want to talk about today is fawning and how that works in humans.
1:48.7	I'm more interested in how it works in humanity. So fight, flight, freeze, fawn. These are all now
1:56.2	very well-known behaviors of a dysregulated nervous system. I prefer the term imbalanced or balanced
2:02.9	nervous system. It feels less clinical and more human. And I think that fawning as a stress response
2:11.6	gets a little bit misunderstood. I think it's gotten lumped into fight, flight, and freeze.
2:19.0	And I think the implications of fawning are actually a bit understated.
2:25.4	I really, I really want to understand this.
	...

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