Fawning, Religious Trauma, and the Learned Habit of Staying Small
There’s a shape that shame takes in high-control faith communities: a persistent pressure to conform, subtle messaging that says your worth depends on your obedience, and a spiritual vocabulary that turns curiosity or boundary-setting into sin. For many people raised in strict or controlling faith environments, those messages are internalised so deeply they become reflexive: keep your head down, avoid rocking the boat, make yourself useful and small.
Over time that reflex can solidify into a trauma response we now name as fawning. An automatic strategy of appeasement and people-pleasing used to reduce threat by making oneself agreeable, invisible, or indispensable.
Book review recommendation - Dr. Ingrid Clayton has helped bring fawning out of the clinical shadows in her recent book Fawning, where she describes it as an often-overlooked piece of the fight-flight-freeze spectrum and offers a roadmap for regaining voice and agency.
What fawning looks like inside Religious Trauma
In high-control faith contexts, fawning often wears a mask of holiness and virtue. It shows up as over-compliance with religious rules, volunteering to help in ways that exhaust you, or absorbing blame to preserve communal peace. Fawning may look like:
Constantly saying “yes” to demands from spiritual leaders or family to avoid conflict.
Silencing doubts and questions because doubt itself was taught as disloyalty or a moral failure.
Performing devotion as proof of worth, becoming the “good church member” while the inner life erodes.
Taking responsibility for others’ feelings or spiritual states (e.g., believing someone’s grief, anger, or rejection is your fault).
Because it’s relational and survival-based, fawning can be easy to mistake for virtue: generosity, devotion, or self-sacrifice. Dr Clayton emphasises that fawning is not moral goodness, it’s a protective code written into the nervous system to keep a vulnerable person safe in an unsafe social environment.
Why shame fuels staying small
Religious shame is often communal: it’s enforced by sermons, discipline, gossip, or withdrawal of love. When shame teaches you that you are inherently flawed or dangerous, the most reliable way to stay safe is to be predictably small and pleasing. Fawning then becomes a strategy to avoid exposure. You keep your face down so you won’t be singled out, corrected, or shamed further. Over time, that strategy calcifies: nervous system patterns, relational habits, and even identity begin to orbit the goal of avoiding shame rather than pursuing truth or connection.
Fawning can masquerade as success and adaptability while eroding boundaries, autonomy, and the capacity for true intimacy. People who fawn often report exhaustion, resentment, internalised self-blame, and a persistent sense that they don’t belong to themselves.
How fawning sabotages recovery and how recovery can begin
Recovery from religious trauma is intellectual, somatic and relational. Because fawning is ultimately a neurobiological safety strategy, the work of “unfawning” involves both new nervous system experiences and new relational practices. Here are clinical and practical steps grounded in trauma-aware approaches (and themes that appear throughout Dr Clayton’s work):
Name the pattern. Simply learning the word fawning and recognizing its signs — conflict avoidance, taking blame, compulsive caretaking, code-switching to be “acceptable” can dissolve a lot of shame. Naming externalises the behaviour: it’s not a moral defect, it’s a survival response.
Track the trigger loop. Notice where your body tightens, where you rush to fix or appease. Keep a brief log for a week: situation → felt threat → automatic appeasing behaviour → outcome. This builds the data you need to intervene.
Practice small, safe boundary experiments. Start small, decline an extra task, voice a tiny preference in a trusted space, or ask for a minor adjustment and tolerate the mild discomfort. Safety learning happens in increments.
Use somatic grounding. Techniques that orient you inside your body help interrupt the reflexive appeasement. Slowing breath, gentle movement, and naming sensations (“my chest is tight; my jaw is clenching”) help create a pause between feeling threatened and automatically pleasing.
Re-author relational meaning. In religious communities, obedience and people-pleasing are often equated with holiness. Recovery invites you to revisit those spiritual meanings: can humility coexist with voice? Can service arise from choice rather than compulsion? Therapies that combine narrative work with somatic practice (and relational repair) are especially helpful.
Look for structural safety. If the religious environment is structurally coercive, personal change will be limited while those dynamics persist. Part of recovery may require safer spiritual spaces, accountability for abusive leaders, and for some, leaving a toxic community.
Special attention to marginalised experiences
Fawning is often a survival strategy used by children, women, people of colour, and other marginalised people who learn to adapt to power imbalances by smoothing and accommodating. In religious contexts, those imbalances can be amplified, spiritual authority plus cultural expectations can create environments where fawning is almost mandated. Addressing fawning therefore asks us to hold both individual healing and systemic change in view.
Unfawning is possible and worth it
Letting go of fawning does not mean becoming rude or selfish. It’s about reclaiming the right to exist as a full person, imperfect and messy, who makes requests, expresses needs, and tolerates the inevitable discomfort of not being universally loved. As Dr Clayton writes in her book, the goal is not to abandon care for others but to re-learn how to care without erasing yourself. To build an inner leadership that can both hold compassion for others and say no when necessary.
Practical next steps
If this resonates, consider these next steps: read Fawning or explore Clayton’s free resources to deepen understanding; work with a trauma-informed therapist who understands somatic and relational methods; and form a small, safety-oriented support network where you can practice boundary experiments and get honest feedback. Healing is iterative; each reclaimed boundary is a tiny liberation from shame.
Religious traditions at their best can offer nourishment and provide connection and community. But when they teach you to shrink for safety, the cost is steep. Unfawning is not a betrayal of faith; for many survivors it’s the path back to a living, accountable faith that honours both the sacred and your human dignity.