What Is The Fawn Response, And How Does It Show Up At Home And In The Workplace? Meg Josephson's New Book ‘Are You Mad At Me?' Explains

Forbes

a day ago

The fawn response—which Meg Josephson writes about in her new book Are You Mad at Me?: How to Stop Focusing on What Others Think and Start Living for You—is a relatively new concept that is not yet widely understood. Josephson's book, out August 5, explains how it affects individuals at home and at work, and how 'more people struggle with it than you think.'
Are you mad at me? is not just the title of Josephson's book, but, as she tells me over Zoom, it's a 'feeling that so many of us have but maybe don't have the language for. And my hope is that this book puts language to that feeling.'
That question—Are you mad at me?—represents a feeling that Josephson says she's felt from the time she was growing up in a home that she describes as quite volatile. There was addiction, she says, and instability. This has led to, as an adult, that feeling still being there, but manifesting as worrying if her friends are mad at her or thinking, if her boss said something as innocuous as, 'Can we talk?' that she was going to get fired. Josephson, now a psychotherapist, was simultaneously working through that feeling as she was beginning her therapy career, seeing her clients resonate with that feeling as well.
'And that was actually quite surprising to me, I think, because many of us feel quite alone in this rumination and overthinking, and especially for people pleasers, we're saying, 'Yeah, no worries' with a smile. But inside, it's like, 'Am I okay?'' she says.
Josephson's book is for the people pleasers. The ruminators. The hypervigilant among us. Those who feel compelled to mask and conceal in an attempt to 'be perfect.'
'Knowing that other people think and feel this way can be surprising, because we feel so alone up here,' Josephson says. 'So just the relief of 'Oh, so many people feel this way' has really been the biggest takeaway.'
'This is such a common feeling'
It's difficult to quantify how many people lean into the fawn response—more on what that is exactly in a moment—but it's worth noting that, when Josephson and I spoke together about this, we were two for two on the call as far as the fawn response goes. 'More people struggle with it than you think,' Josephson tells me, adding that 'This is such a common feeling.' As for the impetus of writing this book, 'I needed this book for sure,' she tells me.
'This is a book I needed 10 years ago and still continue to need because this is, as I talk about, this part that people pleases and worries doesn't go away,' Josephson says. 'We're not erasing that, but we're creating a relationship to it. So a lot of the things I write about, I'm reminding myself of constantly.'
'It's still there, I just feel like I can work through it easier'
Before we go a moment further, let the expert tell you: finding peace with the inner people pleaser is possible. 'It's not about erasing these emotions, but when they arise, I feel less tension around them,' Josephson says. 'I let them be there. I feel less scared of the anxiety. I know it will pass. I know how to soothe myself through it. So I think it's freedom in that, not because it's not there, but because it's still there, I just feel like I can work through it easier.'
Josephson's book is filled with strategies to work through this: the NICER acronym, the three Ps, rupture and repair, learning that it is safe to not be liked by everyone and that conflict isn't only good, but necessary—when handled in a healthy manner. How boundaries are essential, and how on the other side of 'no' is a life that feels good. These are concepts that some have mastered since their youth, and concepts that some—without the help provided through this book—might never grasp.
'The freedom is like, 'Oh, I don't need to change myself,'' Josephson says. ''I don't need to fix anything. I just need to be with what's here and let it be okay, because it's just human and it's this part of me that's trying to protect me.' And when we can just remove the layers of shame even that 'Something's wrong with me, I need to be fixed'—so much of the tension is that. When we can remove that, then we just have the emotion and it becomes so much easier.'
Where does all of this stem from? How did those that lean into the fawn response get to be this way? 'My framework is usually 'How has this been necessary for self-protection?' whether that was in childhood, whether it's been in society to survive within the systems we have to,' Josephson says. 'It's hard to say. It's the classic nature versus nurture: Is it innate? Is it the environment that we're in? And I think, in some ways, it is a combination.'
That said, Josephson tells me that growing up in an early environment where, for whatever reason, a person had to be hyperaware of how they're being perceived—to be hyperaware of people being happy and happy with you—contributes.
'You didn't know if things were unpredictable,' Josephson explains. 'Love was conditional. All a child wants and is focused on—their whole world—is safety and love and acceptance. And so that being taken away feels like a huge deal to a child. It is a big deal. Emotional safety and emotional connection is everything to a child.' If a childhood is volatile, emotionally unpredictable, if it carried a lot of tension, if a child had a caregiver who was really critical or emotionally absent or neglectful, while Josephson says it 'can look so different for people in their environments,' she adds, 'all of those things and environments over time create this conditioning to be on high alert all the time and to learn, 'Oh, in order for me to feel safe and loved, people need to be happy with me.' And I think that's kind of the thread between all of our different backgrounds.'
This is an unconscious pattern, but 'healing starts with awareness,' Josephson says. By people pleasing or fawning, it's serving as a protective mechanism. Once we start to question, 'What is this?' or 'Why am I doing this?' a corner is turned.
'The way I see it is this is a younger part of us that is trying really hard to protect us,' Josephson says. 'And this younger part hasn't gotten the memo that we don't need this all the time. We need it sometimes, but not all the time.' Instead of saying to that younger part, 'What's wrong with you?' or 'Why can't you just be normal?' Josephson's book teaches 'how to soothe it to create a relationship to this part.'
'And as I say in the book, I still have these anxious thoughts and I just believe them less,' she adds. 'I can come back to a baseline more quickly because it's just chatter and it's not me. It doesn't feel like me as much anymore.'
'A lot of people don't know about it'
Many have heard of the stress responses of fight, flight or freeze when it comes to how humans react when confronted with perceived threats or danger. It has only been since 2013 that the fawn response has been added to that list. Characteristics of the fawn response include people pleasing and attempting to neutralize the threat by being agreeable and accommodating; this often involves prioritizing others' needs and emotions at the expense of one's own, and WebMD lists overagreement, trying to be overly helpful, having a primary concern with making someone else happy, an overdependence on the opinions of others, little to no boundaries and being easily controlled and manipulated as signs of the fawn response in one's life.
According to Psychology Today, 'the fawn response is commonly misunderstood due to its complexity.' It 'emerges when a person internalizes that safety, love or even survival depends on appeasing others, especially those who hold power over them. It is a profound psychological adaptation, often shaped in childhood, in homes where love was conditional, inconsistent or entangled with emotional or physical threat.'
'A lot of people don't know about it,' Josephson tells me of the fawn response, citing its relatively new introduction—just 12 years ago—and because not much has been written yet about it. It goes even deeper than that, she says. 'I think it's in part because it's new, but also because it's so rewarded in our society,' she says. 'We get promotions for being people pleasers. We're affirmed. We get validation for that.'
In the workplace, the fawn response creeps in 'when we have a perceived threat like our boss is being a little cold,' or, at home, 'our partner is quiet. And then we're like, 'Are you mad at me?' Or maybe we immediately compliment them, or we try to be helpful so that they're okay with us. That can also feel as threatening to the body as a real, tangible danger in front of us.' The fawn response can be very helpful in one's life and career, whereas fight, flight or freeze might not be. 'And that's why I think it's so underdetected,' Josephson continues.
Many people who resonate with the fawn response are high achievers. They're adaptable. They're charming. The fawn response can actually serve someone, until it's turned on when it doesn't need to be. Then, Josephson says, 'It's exhausting. It leads to burnout, it leads to resentment in relationships. We feel disconnected from ourselves. We feel like we're always performing.' In the book, Josephson writes that many fawners have harsh inner critics and that self-compassion is unfamiliar. At its peak, fawning is a disconnection from the self, abandoning one's needs in favor of someone else's.
'I think women especially—we're held under such a microscopic lens of, 'Am I doing things right? Am I doing enough? Am I too much? Am I not this enough?'' Josephson tells me. Men feel this, too, Josephson adds, 'but just in a different way.'
In the workplace, she explains, 'it can manifest as that fear, the overthinking, feeling like you're in trouble a lot of the time—but it can also manifest more externally as overextending yourself, not having any boundaries with time or energy, volunteering for things when no one's asking you to do it, but maybe it feels like they are.'
Ultimately, in writing Are You Mad At Me?, Josephson hopes people feel seen, become aware and give themselves the self-compassion they've deserved all along, but maybe have never shown to themselves.
'My greatest hope is that they have more understanding about why these patterns are there, but also more compassion and self-forgiveness in that they're not broken, there's not something wrong with them,' she says. 'These are self-protective patterns. So I hope, more than anything, the book can be an exhale. It can be an, 'Oh wow, thank goodness, and now I can move forward.' And I hope it's a way to come back to ourselves.'
'I hope that this can be a beginning of returning to your body, returning to who you are,' Josephson adds. 'And it's a process. It's a path. But I hope that people feel more excited and empowered to come back to themselves after a lifetime of self-abandonment. That's my hope.'