Fawning and hypersocialisation, when survival becomes over accommodation

I have talked quite a lot about the fawning response before. A few years ago I was introduced to Brigit Viksnins work. In it, I was introduced to the concept of hypersocialisation, and as I thought about my own fawning response it made a lot of sense.

We often think of fawning showing up as people pleasing behaviour, which it is. But do you know it is actually more complex than that. Fawning which was coined by therapist Pete Walker, refers to the instinct to appease and accommodate others as a way to stay safe. When we fawn we use our social engagement system, which is the part of our nervous system where we usually feel safe and connected, as a survival response. Women and children are more predisposed to do this for a couple of reasons. Children because of relational power dynamics and the fact they have less physical strength, will use fawning as a response to evade danger. Women because they have estrogen and oxytocin which wires them for deep attunement and connection, will also use this strategy for the same reasons of power and strength, but also because they are biologically wired to connect. For those people with developmental trauma, fawning can become a deeply ingrained survival strategy, shaping how they relate to others and even to themselves.

Brigit Viksnins, a somatic trauma practitioner, expands on this concept with the term hypersocialisation. She describes hypersocialisation as an extreme form of fawning, where the nervous system is wired to prioritise social connection at all costs—even at the expense of one’s own needs, boundaries, and authenticity. Hypersocialisation isn’t just about being ‘nice’ or ‘people-pleasing’; it’s a profound survival adaptation rooted in early experiences where belonging and attunement to others felt like a matter of life or death.

Where I have seen this within myself and with clients is when we over function and over accommodate at the expense of our own needs. Yes, some people do develop this in their family system, and, I think the rough and tumble of the playground at school can deeply hone some nervous systems to develop this response to stay safe, as can some pretty toxic workplaces. With this, it brings some profound strengths. For me it is deep empathy, a sixth sense for what people are feeling which is of course a gift of being hypervigilant and the ability to read a room or space very quickly down to a somatic level. When we fawn like this we are putting on a mask and hiding behind it for protection. This disconnects us from our authentic self and from making deep authentic connections with others.

Understanding Hypersocialisation as a Trauma Response

Hypersocialisation emerges when a child’s primary survival strategy is to attune to others so finely that they anticipate and meet the needs of caregivers before their own needs are even acknowledged. This pattern often develops in environments where emotional safety was inconsistent or where a parent’s approval, love, or even basic presence was conditional. Rather than risk conflict, rejection, or abandonment, the child unconsciously learns that being hyper-aware of social cues and modifying their behaviour accordingly offers the best chance of maintaining attachment.

This adaptation doesn’t just disappear in adulthood. Instead, it can manifest in ways that are often mistaken for positive traits: being highly empathetic, socially skilled, and attuned to group dynamics. However, the cost of hypersocialisation is high—it often results in chronic exhaustion, resentment, and a disconnection from one’s own truth.

Signs of Hypersocialisation in Adults

• Chronic Over-Attunement: Constantly scanning for social cues, micro-expressions, or shifts in others' emotions to adjust behaviour accordingly.

• Shape-Shifting: Adapting personality, opinions, or emotional expressions based on the perceived expectations of others.

• Difficulty Setting Boundaries: Feeling guilty or anxious when asserting needs or saying no.

• Fear of Rejection or Conflict: Feeling emotionally unsafe if others are displeased, leading to habitual self-silencing.

• Emotional Exhaustion: Overextending in relationships and social interactions, leaving little energy for self-care.

Healing from Hypersocialisation

Recovering from hypersocialisation requires a gradual process of reclaiming one’s inner truth, bodily autonomy, and emotional safety. Some key elements of healing include:

1. Reconnecting with the Body: Because hypersocialisation is a nervous system response, somatic practices like breathwork, grounding, and body-based therapies (such as Somatic Experiencing) can help restore a felt sense of safety.

2. Developing Internal Awareness: Journaling, meditation, and self-inquiry can help identify the automatic patterns of fawning and where they show up in daily life.

3. Practicing Boundary-Setting: Learning to say no, even in small ways, can be a powerful act of reclaiming agency.

4. Titrating Social Exposure: If social interactions are a primary trigger for hypersocialisation, gradually practicing authenticity in low-stakes environments can help retrain the nervous system to tolerate healthy differentiation from others.

5. Building Secure Relationships: Finding relationships where authenticity is welcomed—and not contingent on over-accommodation—can be deeply reparative.

Digital art - Kellie Stirling

Beyond Fawning: Reclaiming Authentic Connection

The paradox of hypersocialisation is that, in an effort to maintain connection, it often leads to self-abandonment. True connection, however, doesn’t require over-accommodation—it flourishes when both people can show up as they truly are. Healing from hypersocialisation is about shifting from relational survival to relational agency. It’s about allowing the nervous system to trust that being real is not only safe, but also the foundation for deeper, more fulfilling relationships.

For those who recognise themselves in this pattern, healing is not about becoming less social or less empathetic—it’s about integrating those gifts with a deep and abiding connection to self. From that place, true belonging can emerge—not because we’ve molded ourselves to fit, but because we’ve learned to stand fully in who we are. Connecting with desire and understanding our boundaries, supports us to move to this place of being comfortable and safe being in our own bodies.

If you think you might be abandoning yourself through fawning and hypersocialisation, come talk to me about somatic experiencing or relationship coaching. We can work with your nervous system so you can feel comfortable to express your boundaries and feel safe to be your true self.

If you want to understand your survival responses a little better, click on this link to download a complimentary copy of my short explanation of your brilliant nervous system's survival responses.

Healing Our Trauma: Reclaiming Our Connection with Nature

For me, there is nothing better than walking barefoot in the sand on the beach, then having a dip in the sea. I love floating in sea water and the rocking that comes with floating on top of waves as they ebb and flow. It is highly restorative. It grounds me and brings me back into my body. I can feel my nervous system coming into my zone of resilience.

In the quiet of a forest, the crash of ocean waves, or the vast openness of a starlit sky, many of us feel something stir within—a longing, a recognition, a sense of home, a feeling of belonging. But for many, that connection feels distant, as if nature is something separate from us rather than a living web in which we belong.

Much of this disconnection stems not just from modern life but from unhealed trauma—both personal and collective. Our nervous systems, shaped by past wounds, can keep us in states of hypervigilance or numbness, making it difficult to truly be present with the natural world. However, as we heal, something shifts. We begin to experience nature not just as scenery but as an extension of ourselves, rich with wisdom and reciprocity.

So how does trauma disconnect us from nature?

When we experience trauma, our nervous system adapts to keep us safe. If safety was scarce, our body may have learned to stay on high alert, scanning for danger even in peaceful settings. If overwhelming experiences left us feeling powerless, we may have learned to disconnect, numbing ourselves to sensations—including the subtle, grounding presence of nature.

Maybe you are thinking but I haven’t really experienced trauma why do I feel disconnected from my body. Well, modern life is very challenging and often it is the micro-aggressions of daily life that overwhelm us and this stacks up in our nervous system. All of these moments of overwhelm sometimes hit us when we least expect it and we experience pain, illness or relational rupture.

Many of us also carry inherited trauma, passed down through generations. Our ancestors may have lived through displacement, war, colonisation, or environmental destruction, severing their relationship with the land. That rupture doesn’t just exist in history books—it lives in our bodies, shaping how we relate to the earth. The study of epigenetics has explained this to us, so we can see how this unhealed trauma is passed down through generations in both cell expression but also in the attachment system in each of us, that is formed through the maternal bond between an baby and their caregivers.

In modern life, this disconnection manifests in subtle ways as we project our internal disconnection outwards and this shapes how we relate to ourselves, others, the world and life itself. We may find it hard to slow down enough to notice the intricate beauty of a leaf, the rhythmic cycles of the seasons, or the deep nourishment that comes from being immersed in nature. We are stuck on the hamster wheel of flight and fight. Instead of feeling like we belong to the land, we often treat it as a resource to be extracted and used, a background to our human-centered world.

How does healing our trauma restore our sense of belonging within us and also to something greater than us?

The good news is that healing our trauma—whether through somatic work, deep nervous system repair, or ancestral healing—opens the door to a profound reconnection with nature. As we learn to regulate our nervous system, we develop the capacity to be present, to notice, and to receive. The very same skills that allow us to process and release trauma—slowing down, attuning to our sensations, and cultivating safety—are the ones that allow us to feel at home in the natural world.

When we heal, we begin to:

Feel the land as alive – Instead of seeing nature as an object, we start to sense its intelligence, its rhythms, and its ability to communicate. We might begin to feel the energy of trees, the presence of the wind, or the way a particular landscape holds us.

Move beyond fear and control – Trauma often teaches us to control our environment for safety. As we heal, we can interact with nature in a more reciprocal way—learning from it rather than trying to dominate it. When we feel safe in our own bodies, we can soften into a sense of safety in the world.

Trust the body’s belonging – Nature is not something we visit; it is something we are. As we learn to listen to and trust our body and appreciate its deep wisdom, we also learn to trust the wisdom of the earth. We develop a deep understanding of the rhythms of nature and the rhythms in our body. Our understanding of one pattern helps us see this replicated through our own body and other systems we interact within.

Feel the cycles of life more deeply – Instead of fearing endings and beginnings, we start to embrace the cycles of nature as part of us. We see death, decay, rebirth, and renewal not just in the world around us but in our own emotional and spiritual journeys.

Increased self-awareness and environmental awareness - When we tend to our inner landscapes, we become more attuned to the landscapes around us.

Healing give us a new way of relating to each other and a new way of orienting ourselves in the world.

As we heal, we begin to walk through the world differently. We no longer see ourselves as separate from nature but as part of an ongoing conversation with it. We listen more deeply, honour its gifts, and recognise that the earth, like us, holds both wounds and the capacity for regeneration.

Our personal healing ripples outward. When we feel connected to the land, we are more likely to protect it, not from a place of fear or guilt but from love and reverence. Our actions shift from extraction to reciprocity, from dominance to stewardship.

Healing trauma is not just personal work—it is planetary work. As we reconnect with ourselves, we reconnect with the earth. And as we learn to belong to our own bodies, we remember that we have always belonged to the web of life.

Digital Art - Kellie Stirling

What if healing is not just about feeling better, but about remembering our place in the great unfolding story of the earth?

Perhaps the most radical thing we can do is to slow down, place our hands on the earth, and listen.

Healing happens in community and when we connect with something bigger than us. There are many ways we can look at nature and draw a comparison with our body and its innate intelligence and understanding of how to heal.

Just as nature moves through seasons of growth, rest, decay, and renewal, our nervous system cycles through activation, integration, and restoration. Honouring these natural rhythms supports long-term well-being. Here are some other comparisons that might deepen you understanding of both our body and nature’s capacity to generate healing and growth through the building of virtuous cycles and coherence.

Roots & Grounding – Trees grow strong by sending their roots deep into the earth. Similarly, we cultivate resilience by grounding ourselves in connection—whether to our breath, body, relationships, or a sense of purpose.

Storms & Emotional Intensity – A thunderstorm may feel chaotic, but it brings necessary rain and clears the air. Intense emotions may feel overwhelming, but when we allow them to move through us, they can bring clarity and transformation. Emotions like natures storms pass through us when we let them be expressed. When we allow ourselves to feel emotions fully, we become more open to experiencing the depth of nature.

Ebb & Flow of the Ocean – The tides rise and fall in a constant dance with the moon, just as our emotions and energy levels naturally fluctuate. Trying to force constant calmness is like trying to stop the ocean’s waves—it’s unnatural.

Symbiosis & Co-Regulation – Ecosystems thrive through interdependence; plants, animals, fungi, and microbes all support each other. Likewise, humans regulate best in connection—our nervous systems co-regulate through relationships, just as trees share nutrients through their roots.

Fire & Transformation – I have always been fascinated by the dual nature of fire. It can be a force for regeneration and a force of destruction. Wildfires, though destructive, create space for new growth by clearing out the old. In our nervous system, moments of challenge or breakdown can lead to profound transformation when we move through them with support.

Where do we start?

Of course you can start with the simple connections you can make with nature around you. Even if it is taking a walk on the grass in your bare feet start there. Do it with a friend or your partner, take a walk together. Trauma occurs in the absence of a compassionate witness, so healing happens in the connection with one and in the presence of community. We are wired for social connection, we are not meant to do life on on our own.

The web of life, we are not just in nature, we are nature.

For centuries, humans have told themselves a story: that we stand apart from nature. We build cities, design technologies, and shape landscapes to meet our needs. We name ourselves as observers of nature, as though it is something out there—separate from us. But this illusion of separation is just that—an illusion.

The truth is, we are not just in nature. We are nature.

We have this myth of separation, a mental model that we hold that we are separate to nature. We need sunlight, water and oxygen to survive. We take all that in, plus food (from nature) and we breath out carbon dioxide which the trees take in to make oxygen. We are a system living within a system.

Somewhere along the way, many human cultures began to see nature as something to be tamed, managed, or extracted from. The industrial revolution accelerated this thinking, and modern life often reinforces it. We go from temperature-controlled homes to air-conditioned cars to office buildings, rarely touching the earth with bare feet or feeling the true rhythm of the seasons.

But no matter how much concrete we pour, how many walls we build, or how advanced our technology becomes, we are still living, breathing organisms shaped by the same forces that shape the forests, the rivers, and the wind.

Our bodies speak the language of the earth even, when we forget our connection, our bodies remember.

We have our own rhythms and cycles just liken nature, some of these are:
- The circadian rhythms that govern our sleep are tuned to the rising and setting of the sun.
- Our lungs evolved in partnership with trees, exchanging oxygen and carbon dioxide in a continuous, reciprocal dance.
- The minerals in our bones were once part of ancient mountains.
- The water that makes up most of our bodies has cycled through clouds, rivers, and oceans for billions of years.

We are the land, the sea, the sky—just temporarily arranged in the form of human beings.

Human beings are relational beings, we are wired for connection and we need other people around us to co-regulate our nervous systems - we are not wired to do life on our own. In nature, everything is relational. Forests are not just collections of trees; they are living systems where roots exchange nutrients, fungi form underground networks of communication, and birds and insects pollinate plants, sustaining the whole.

Humans, too, are part of these systems. We have always been in relationship with the land, with animals, with each other. Indigenous cultures have long recognized this interdependence, honoring the earth not as a resource to exploit, but as kin to respect.

When we embrace this view, our decisions shift. We stop seeing ourselves as rulers of nature and instead become participants—stewards in an ancient, living network.

So how do we connect back to our natural place in nature?

Remembering our place in nature is not about abandoning modern life. It’s about reweaving our awareness into the fabric of the world.

We can start small:
- Walking barefoot on the earth, this is one of my favourites and I often do laps each night in a park in my house,
- Swimming in natural bodies of water,
- Noticing the phases of the moon,
- Eating food that actually comes from the soil, not just a package,
- Listening to birdsong in the morning.

Our body actually loves being in nature and connecting with the earth helps to anchor us back down into our bodies when the daily machinations of modern life and technology lift us out of it.

These simple acts reconnect us to something ancient within ourselves. They remind us that we are not just visitors here—we belong. Whilst these are great activities we can do on our own, they are even better when we do them with friends. We build little spots of coherence in our life with these activities and coherence has the capacity to shift a system. Coherence. both within our nervous system and in ecosystems, act as small attractors and they pull the system toward greater organisation. This is because systems are often fractal, which means that small patterns reflect and influence the larger whole.

Digital Art - Kellie Stirling

So in a system that is dysregulated, a single stable rhythm, like a leader modelling nervous system regulation in a group, can influence a group to entrain to steadiness and calm.

Our nervous system is not separate from nature—it is nature. The same principles that govern ecosystems also govern our inner world:

Just as a forest needs diversity and resilience to thrive, our nervous system needs a range of experiences and emotions to stay regulated..

Just as a river adapts to the landscape it moves through, we heal by allowing our emotions and sensations to flow rather than becoming stagnant.

Just as animals shake off stress to reset their systems, we can release stored trauma through therapeutic modalities like somatic experiencing that work with the natural rhythm of the body and we can use somatic practices that restore regulation

How do we come home to ourselves?

The climate crisis, biodiversity loss, and ecological destruction we face today stem, in part, from our belief in separation. But if separation is the problem, then reconnection is the medicine.

When we stop seeing nature as something outside of us and start feeling it within us—as us—we open the door to a different way of living. A way that honours interdependence. A way that leads us back home.

Because we were never separate. We just forgot.

Now is the time to remember. Although we face many big global problems, act as that small port of coherence, start local. Start with yourself and in your systems you interact with.

Shame and our bodies

Shame has a huge influence over how we perceive and see our bodies. Many people have been strongly influenced culturally to compare our bodies to others, particularly those others we see in the media and popular culture. These are impossible standards to live up to, particularly when we know that technology allows manipulation of photographic images. What we are looking at is not reality.
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So much of what we believe about ourselves, when it comes to body image, comes from outside of ourselves. It comes from our family and larger society. From a very young age we internalise messaging about what we are supposed to eat, how we are supposed to look, who we are supposed to be, who we should love, what we should be able to do.

Our body is centred in all of this.
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Notice there are a lot of should and supposed to be there.

When you look around the world, what is considered healthy and acceptable, changes culturally. Although this has morphed and blended with social media.

Image - Mohammed Nohasi

I was a teenager in the 80s and young adult in the 90s and this was the time where diet culture was everywhere in popular media. It was aerobics everywhere, hello Jane Fonda and Richard Simmons. I was an aerobics queen, don't get me wrong it was a lot of fun and a great thing to do with friends, but the body standards were impossible and dangerous. The leotards were ace though!
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This was also the generation in modelling of the waif. Remember Kate Moss when she started out, impossibly thin. So there is a whole generation of 40 and 50 year olds out there who whose mental models of acceptable beauty are based on, excessive exercise, starving yourself and dangerously thin models.
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We are very impressionable in our early years and these impressions around body image last for years. When we don't look like what is portrayed in popular culture as normal, we feel like we aren't enough, like we don't belong. Some of us will go to extremes to fit in. This need to belong is hardwired into our DNA. In Tribal days, we relied on the tribe to be protected and fed. So it literally can feel like a life or death situation when we feel like to don't belong. It puts us into survival mode.
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So as you can see, shame has a lot to say about how we perceive our bodies. We have these internal versions of ourselves based on these external images that relate to our self-esteem. Some of us who suffer pervasive shame over our body image, have some very harsh inner critics. Some of these inner critic parts live deep in our unconscious so they are not always that easy to detect and hear. They way to diminish them is to talk about them. Shame thrives on secrecy; when we talk about our inner critic we starve them of their supply.
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There is a particular type of shame a lot of us feel as we get older. We compare how we are now to our younger selves. We remember when we were really fit and healthy and could do a lot. We remember our young faces, without wrinkles and saggy skin. We remember our hair before it was grey. Some of us go to great lengths to avoid this. There is a particular strength that can be found in accepting ourselves just as we are right now. A happiness, a contentment, a sense of joy.
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Whats the antidote to all this shame?
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Pride, curiousity and open conversations, shut shame down. Learning to love your body and all the amazing things they have done for you is the way through. It might not be easy but it is totally doable.

Need some help? Come talk to me.

How freeze physiology in our nervous system can impact our self-confidence

Freeze physiology in our nervous system can manifest in many different ways. Many of us walk around every day in a state of functional freeze. I did for a very long time. We often think of freeze as flat but that is often not the case. What we can see in freeze is a permanent state of contraction. Just like we see a snail or turtle moved into its protective shell when it feels threatened, the human body can move into a contracted posture when placed in a situation that evokes fear.

Freeze can be a stuck startle response or stuck fight and flight energy. Imagine all the times when you have been startled by something that you have seen and never got to discharge that energy. That response gets frozen in your system. It doesn't matter what the story of the situation is, it is something that overwhelmed us that was too much, too fast, too soon for our nervous system, or maybe too little for too long.

As the years go by, we absorb and adjust to this physiology so we can function well in life. However it can come at the expense of certain characteristics that we might like to develop. Like Self-Confidence. Why is this so hard? Well it has a little to do with the qualities of expansion and contraction.

Confidence is an expansive quality. It allows us to stand up for ourselves, speak more freely and take actions we might not take in other circumstances. However it is hard to expand when we have a contracted position stuck within. It needs the qualities of openness to emerge and stay available to us.

Sometimes we do a lot of mindset work to feel more confident. Sometimes a lot of exercise helps us to feel better in our body, more connected to it and more confident. However when we don't do the work on our nervous system, these benefits don't stick around. We wonder why, what is happening why is my confidence really up and down. Well it is normal to have up and down moments in life, but if we don't work on the functional freeze, the patterns of contraction in our nervous system keep pulling us back. Just like the turtle or the snail we contract back hard into our shell under a situation that stimulates the fear response. Sometimes this is why some of us cannot speak up in meetings or for something we care about when the stakes are high.

It can also impact us in our relationships, being able to speak up for what we desire most in life. In our dating life, it helps us so much to be able to ask for what we want in relationships. In our work life it helps us in so many ways move towards work that supports us and nourishes us, that allows us to feel confident to be our authentic selves.

Emotional Starvation

The midlife crisis is not really a crisis. It is a slow wake up call from your bodymind asking you for big changes. Come back to who you are, come back to the body. So much of our culture does not support people thriving and being able to be their real selves. Instead it encourages the ego, those survival strategies you built as a kid to get by, to run the show. It traumatises us time and again. So many people I have worked with push themselves outside their window of tolerance time and again, just so they can function in the workplace.

Midlife is the time when you have a chance to set yourself up to thrive in the second half of life. It asks you to take a deep inward look and really commit to sorting out what needs to be healed, whether it is physical, emotional, social or cultural. Lets undo these survival strategies you have going, that are stored in your unconscious so you can come back to the truth of who you really are.

There is nothing wrong with most of us, it is the system that is broken. The culture telling us how we should be, often this is far from our own reality and lived experience.

Your body has an innate intelligence around healing. You don’t have to tell your body to do anything when you cut your finger, it knows what to do. However our brain can override many of the actions that bring us back to homeostasis. This impacts us significantly when it comes to our emotions and the feelings associated with them. We’ve been trained to ignore the bad stuff like the feeling of anger or sadness or grief in our body, so we override it using our powerful brains and coping strategies to numb ourselves.

The common survival patterns I see that are distracting us from this are: I work too hard, I eat too much, I don’t eat enough, I exercise too much, I diet too much, I drink too much, I shop too much, I give too much. And there is a still a sense of hunger within all of us that cannot be touched because really what we want is to feel.

Emotional Starvation I call it. We starve ourselves of feeling these tough emotions so that we can feel safe, fit in and belong and receive love.

We are doing all the “too much” just to keep up in a culture that numbs us to the sensations and emotions we feel in our bodies. We ignore our own need for pleasure. We ignore the warning systems of our nervous system and over ride our own boundaries to fit in and please.

Our ability to be honest with ourselves, intimate with ourselves, comfortable in our own skin become so confined and limited. We go to all the ‘too much’ activities to avoid looking inside, to avoid noticing the basic sensations, messages our body is trying to give us. When we cannot be honest with ourselves, honour our own feelings, emotions and needs it makes intimacy with another really hard.

How can we connect with ourselves? Through connecting with our pleasure. Feeling the sensations is the important guide. We experience the world through our five senses, they are what tells us if something is pleasurable or painful. When we consciously choose pleasure, and bring attention to the sensations of that, we start to recalibrate our system.

Feeling tells us what is safe and what is not, it connects us to what we really want in our life - our desires, and it puts us in touch with our nervous system, teaching us how to listen to it. Pleasure comes from inside of us, we can create it for ourselves.

Next time you feel like doing one of the “too much activities’, see if you can stop yourself in the moment and choose something that is pleasurable to your senses. Create a sensual experience that brings pleasure to you, that allows you to focus on that feeling of it inside of you.

It’s not too hard, start small, walk in the park, consciously eating nutritious food, dance to music your love. Start small, small steps are more sustainable than grand gestures. That is how change happens.

Choose you.