If you laugh at unfunny jokes, raise your hand too quickly, or can’t decide on your favorite color, you may be exhibiting a fawn response.

By Katy Waldman
January 12, 2026

Illustration by Cristina Daura at the link.
According to the psychotherapist Meg Josephson, fawning is alternately a path to self-annihilation and a “subtle superpower” of heightened perception and sensitivity.


It is the afternoon of the fawn. Everywhere you turn, in workplaces and households alike, yearlings with saucer eyes, brown felt noses, and stilt-like legs are wondering if you’re mad at them. The fawn response, as it’s known in some precincts of social media, bundles various forms of ingratiating, people-pleasing behavior. It can manifest in threatening situations, where expressing authentic emotion could elicit a powerful person’s wrath or cruelty, or it might be more banal: laughing at a vindictive supervisor’s unfunny joke, saying you love a gift when you don’t, laboring over the perfect string of whimsical emojis to append to an opinion that you’ve expressed over text. In a new book, the clinical psychologist Ingrid Clayton recalls hearing about the concept and feeling that she’d found a skeleton key for understanding both her patients’ lives and her own. “It was like I saw fawning everywhere,” she writes. “We were having a collective awakening.”

Clayton is the author of one of two recent books that try to release fawners from their plight. Her contribution, the rhapsodic and quirky “Fawning: Why the Need to Please Makes Us Lose Ourselves—and How to Find Our Way Back” (Putnam), joins the chatty and pragmatic “Are You Mad at Me? How to Stop Focusing on What Others Think and Start Living for You” (Gallery), by the psychotherapist Meg Josephson. Both authors are white women who live in California; both have large followings on Instagram. Josephson’s book originated with a viral video in which she summoned for her audience the reassurances that her younger self would have most liked to hear. “They aren’t secretly mad at you,” she promised. “Your mind is lying to you because it’s scared. I know you may have this fear that you’re secretly a bad person and it’s just a matter of time before everyone finds out, but you’re actually safe.” Within hours, Josephson recounts, the post had blown up across social-media platforms, with hundreds of commenters expressing recognition and relief. “Why am I crying?” one user wrote.

Both authors write as recovering fawners, weaving their own stories through case studies and explication of therapeutic motifs. (They explain that they prefer the term “fawning” to “people-pleasing” or “codependency” because it sounds less judgmental, and because, in their formulation, it addresses the wellspring of the tendency: childhood wounds.) Each one grew up in a home that required her to curry favor with volatile and inconstant parents—a menacing father figure, a recessive and enabling mother—and each found a fragile safety in her caretakers’ occasional good will. The authors were diligent students, high achievers. When they left home, they engaged in self-destructive patterns: Josephson developed a drinking problem; Clayton dated terrible men. “Well into my thirties,” the latter writes, “I joked that I must be wearing a sandwich board that read: users and abusers, please apply here.” As Josephson tells it, fawning is alternately a path to self-annihilation—a “belief that we need to neglect ourselves for the comfort of other people”—and a “subtle superpower” of heightened perception and sensitivity.

The books draw on the work of the psychotherapist Pete Walker, who, in his book “Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving,” from 2013, defined fawning as a trauma response, analogous to fighting, fleeing, or freezing—a way that victims seek safety “by merging with the wishes, needs and demands of others.” The idea reverberates in recent efforts within domestic-violence advocacy to reframe victims’ solicitousness as a survival mechanism. In a 2023 paper co-written with Jaycee Dugard, who was kidnapped as an eleven-year-old and held hostage for nearly two decades, the psychologist Rebecca Bailey argued that a victim’s bond with her captor might be better understood as a “powerful instinctual strategy to survive and thrive.” By some interpretations, the fawner resembles Scheherazade, forestalling death through creative feats that appease the men around her.

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https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2026/01/19/fawning-ingrid-clayton-book-review-are-you-mad-at-me-meg-josephson