I said yes to a project last Tuesday that I didn’t want to do. It wasn’t a big project. It wasn’t even a particularly important one. A colleague asked if I could review something for him over the weekend and before the question had fully left his mouth I heard myself say “yeah, of course, no problem” in that bright, accommodating tone I’ve been perfecting since I was about twelve years old.
I hung up the call and sat there for a minute feeling that familiar low hum of resentment that comes from volunteering for things you never actually volunteered for. My wife looked up from her phone and said, “you did it again.”
She was right. I did it again.
The word I couldn’t say
I’m 37 years old. I run a media company. I’ve written thousands of articles about self-awareness and emotional intelligence and mindful communication. I’ve literally published a book about living with intention. And I still cannot say no to people without feeling like I’m committing a small act of violence against the relationship.
I know this is irrational. I know that saying no to a weekend project doesn’t make me a bad person or a bad colleague or someone who will be quietly removed from the group chat. I know this in the same way I know that the spider in the bathroom isn’t going to kill me – the knowledge exists, the feeling doesn’t care.
For years I thought this was just politeness. Australian politeness, specifically – that reflexive agreeableness that gets drilled into you in a culture where “no worries” is less a phrase and more a constitutional amendment. But when I moved to Vietnam and then Singapore and the pattern followed me across three countries and two languages, I started to suspect it was something else entirely.
What psychology actually calls it
The word is fawning. And the first time I read it in a psychology context, sitting in a cafe in Saigon with my phone in one hand and a Vietnamese coffee in the other, something clicked so hard I actually put the coffee down.
Fawning is the fourth trauma response. Most people know about fight, flight, and freeze – the three ways your nervous system reacts when it perceives danger. But therapist Pete Walker identified a fourth response he called “fawn” – where instead of fighting back, running away, or shutting down, you make yourself useful. You become agreeable. You dissolve your own boundaries to keep the peace because somewhere deep in your wiring, conflict doesn’t just feel uncomfortable. It feels dangerous.
Walker describes it as learning to purchase safety through servitude. The fawn type, he writes, “seeks safety by merging with the wishes, needs, and demands of others” and “acts as if they unconsciously believe that the price of admission to any relationship is the forfeiture of all their needs, rights, preferences, and boundaries.”
Reading that felt like someone had found a diary I didn’t know I’d written.
Where it starts
I grew up in Melbourne in a working-class family. My parents were good people who loved us and did their best with what they had. But like a lot of Australian families in the nineties, emotional expression wasn’t exactly the household currency. You learned early that the smoothest path through family life was to be easy. Be helpful. Don’t make waves. Read the room and adjust accordingly.
I was the quiet brother. Justin and Brendan were louder, more direct, more willing to push back at the dinner table. I was the one who noticed when the energy shifted, who could feel tension building before anyone said a word, and who instinctively moved to defuse it. I thought this was a skill. I was proud of it, actually. I was the peacekeeper. The easy one. The one nobody had to worry about.
What I didn’t realize until much later was that I wasn’t keeping the peace. I was keeping myself safe. And the cost of that safety was a slowly disappearing sense of what I actually wanted.
How it shows up at 37
The thing about fawning is that it doesn’t look like a problem from the outside. It looks like being a great colleague, a thoughtful friend, a considerate partner. People who fawn get praised for it constantly. “You’re so easy to work with.” “You’re so accommodating.” “You never make things difficult.”
And that praise becomes its own trap because it reinforces the exact behavior that’s slowly eroding you from the inside.
Here’s how it showed up in my life before I started paying attention. I would agree to deadlines I knew were unrealistic and then work until midnight to meet them instead of pushing back. I would sit through conversations where someone said something I disagreed with and nod along because the discomfort of conflict felt worse than the discomfort of betraying my own perspective. I would anticipate what my wife needed before she asked for it – not because I was being thoughtful but because I was unconsciously trying to prevent any possibility of disappointment.
That last one is the sneakiest because it genuinely looks like love. It took my wife pointing out that she never got the chance to ask me for things because I was always already doing them for me to realize that what I thought was attentiveness was actually anxiety wearing a really convincing disguise.
The biology underneath
This isn’t just a personality quirk. There’s actual neuroscience behind why some people default to appeasement under stress while others fight or flee.
In 2000, psychologist Shelley Taylor at UCLA published a landmark paper in Psychological Review proposing that the classic fight-or-flight model was incomplete. Taylor and her colleagues argued that humans – particularly those in caregiving roles – often respond to stress not by fighting or fleeing but by “tending and befriending.” Tending involves nurturing behaviors designed to protect yourself and others. Befriending involves creating and maintaining social networks that provide safety.
The biological mechanism behind this, Taylor found, is largely driven by oxytocin – the same hormone involved in bonding and attachment. When you’re stressed, oxytocin pushes you toward connection rather than confrontation. It’s an elegant survival strategy. Instead of outrunning the threat or overpowering it, you neutralize it by making yourself indispensable to the group.
The problem is that when this response gets locked in as your default – when tending and befriending becomes your only way of managing stress – you lose access to the fight response entirely. And the fight response, in healthy doses, is what gives you the ability to say no. To set boundaries. To protect your own needs even when doing so might create temporary friction.
The moment I actually saw it
The moment it became undeniable was about two years ago during a business call with my brothers. We were discussing a decision about one of our publications and I disagreed with the direction they wanted to take. I had good reasons. I had data. I had a clear alternative.
And I said nothing. I just went along with it.
Afterward I sat at my desk in Saigon and tried to understand why. It wasn’t that I was afraid of Justin or Brendan – they’re my brothers, we argue all the time, they would have listened. It was that somewhere between having the thought “I disagree” and opening my mouth to say it, my nervous system intercepted the signal and rerouted it to something safer. Something more agreeable. Something that kept the surface smooth.
I’d been studying mindfulness for over a decade at that point. I’d spent years learning to observe my thoughts without reacting to them. But this wasn’t a thought. This was deeper than thought. This was my body making a decision before my mind even got a vote.
What actually helps
I want to be careful here because I’m not a therapist and I’m not writing a treatment plan. But I can tell you what’s helped me over the past two years of actually working on this.
The first thing was simply naming it. Once I understood that my automatic yes wasn’t generosity or politeness but a conditioned response to perceived threat, I could start catching it in real time. Not always. Not even most of the time at first. But sometimes I’d notice the moment between the request and my response – that tiny gap where the fawn impulse fires – and I’d pause long enough to ask myself a simple question. Do I actually want to do this, or am I just afraid of what happens if I don’t?
The answer was uncomfortable more often than I’d like to admit.
The second thing was practicing small nos. Not dramatic confrontations or boundary-setting speeches. Just small, ordinary nos. No, I can’t review that this weekend. No, I’d rather eat somewhere else. No, I don’t agree with that. Each one felt like defusing a tiny bomb. Each one didn’t explode.
The third thing – and this is the one that surprised me most – was letting people be temporarily disappointed in me. This is the fawner’s ultimate fear, the thing the whole elaborate system is designed to prevent. Someone being unhappy with you. Someone thinking you’re difficult or selfish or not as helpful as they thought.
I’m still working on this one. I probably will be for a long time.
What my wife taught me about boundaries
My wife is Vietnamese and if you’ve ever spent time in Vietnam you know that Vietnamese women are not generally in the business of tiptoeing around what they think. My wife will tell me directly when I’ve done something she doesn’t like. She’ll tell me when my cooking is bad. She’ll tell me when I’m being annoying. And she does it without any apparent fear that the relationship will collapse because of it.
I found this terrifying at first and then I found it incredibly liberating. Because watching someone set boundaries with zero catastrophic consequences is the most effective therapy I’ve ever experienced. She says no to things she doesn’t want to do. The world continues to turn. People continue to love her. If anything, they respect her more because they always know where they stand.
She didn’t teach me this through any kind of intentional lesson. She taught me by simply being herself and letting me watch how a person moves through the world when they aren’t constantly calibrating their behavior to manage other people’s emotions.
Why I’m writing this
I almost didn’t write this article. Which is fitting, I suppose, because not writing it would have been its own small act of fawning – staying safe, staying agreeable, not saying the thing that might make people uncomfortable.
But I think there are a lot of people, especially men in their thirties and forties who were raised to be “good” and “easy” and “no trouble,” who are walking around with this pattern and don’t have a name for it. They think they’re just nice. They think saying yes to everything is just how you get through life without making enemies.
And they’re exhausted. Not the kind of exhausted that comes from doing too much – the kind that comes from never doing what you actually want. There’s a difference, and it’s the difference between a full life and a performed one.
Psychology calls it fawning. I call it the longest con I ever ran on myself. And at 37, sitting in Saigon with a daughter who’s going to learn how to navigate the world partly by watching how I navigate it, I’ve decided it’s time to stop being so agreeable about things that actually matter.
Starting with the weekend project I said yes to last Tuesday. I called my colleague back this morning and told him I couldn’t do it after all. He said “no worries.”
He meant it. And for once, neither did I.
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