Neha Pathak, MD, FACP, DipABLM: Welcome to the WebMD Health Discovered Podcast. I'm Dr Neha Pathak, WebMD’s chief physician editor for Health and Lifestyle Medicine. If you've ever found yourself in a situation where you feel pressure to keep the peace and end up saying yes, when a big part of you really wants to say no, you're going to want to listen to today's episode.

Today, we'll take a step-by-step approach to people pleasing and, at its extreme, a behavior called fawning—an often misunderstood coping mechanism. We'll also explore the concept of boundaries and emotional health.

We'll unpack what people pleasing is, what fawning means, how they show up in our bodies as a survival response, and how they differ from compromise or healthy generosity. And because context matters, we'll look at how lived experience can shape when keeping the peace feels necessary for survival, and how to spot the physical cues—like a tightness in your chest, your stomach in knots, and a shaky voice—that can let you know that you are abandoning yourself.

Our expert guest is here to offer practical ways to shift from automatically saying yes to leaning toward respectful, values-aligned boundaries. We'll share useful scripts to help you navigate challenging moments, questions to bring to therapy for further work, and strategies for parents raising kids who default to people pleasing in moments of crisis. This conversation is a gentle reset with actionable tools to move from resentment to clarity, from self-abandonment to self-respect, and from performative niceness to real connection.

First, let me introduce my guest, Lia Love Avellino. Lia Avellino is a licensed clinical social worker, modern love therapist, writer, commentator, and community organizer. Lia is the director of Head and Heart at The Well, a global ecosystem for wellness. She's also the host of the Unprocessed podcast. Welcome to the WebMD Health Discovered Podcast, Lia.

Lia Love Avellino, LCSW: I always love being back with you, Dr Pathak.

Pathak: Well, we are so, so, so thankful to have you again. Before we jump into our conversation about our topic for today, I'd love to ask about your own health discovery. So today we're going to be talking about extremes of people pleasing. What is something you've noticed about yourself, or potentially when you're speaking with your clients, around people pleasing and the need to set up some form of boundary?

Avellino: That's a great question. This is something that comes up a lot for people, and historically for myself. So when I am in pleasing mode, I'm often leaving myself for a reason. And that reason might be historical; it may be out of habit, because when I didn't feel safe or accepted, that was a strategy I used in order to soothe myself.

Or it might be because there's something scary about this other person to me, and I feel like I'll be safer if I join with them rather than if I stay in myself and potentially oppose them. That might make them angry, might make them reactive. And so one thing that we try to do in therapy is bring conscious awareness to what's happening for you as the person who's going into pleasing mode.

Because when we're pleasing, we're very focused on noticing the other, and we actually lose touch with ourselves.

Pathak: So let's start with some definitions. So we're talking about the term people pleaser. I think many of us have heard of the term that kind of comes when you're at the extreme of that, which is the term fawning. So I'd love if you could start by defining those two terms.

And then we'll come back to defining pieces of that, which is kindness and niceness. I think that often gets kind of confused with the behavior of being a people pleaser.

Avellino: Yes. So the first thing I want to say is that I really want to set the intention not to pathologize any of this behavior, because if we're doing it, it's because it has served, or continues to serve, a positive intention. And it can be helpful to differentiate at the get-go that sometimes when we're in pleasing mode, it's because it's an automatic response, like I mentioned, and it's not necessarily serving us, but potentially just protecting us from our own discomfort or being disliked by another.

But sometimes it's essential—especially if we have social identities in spaces where we don't feel welcome or at home in ourselves. We might need to join with our oppressor in order to remain safe. So that's just a helpful framework, because I want you to know that if you're mad at yourself for pleasing, going into pleasing mode, or for fawning—which I'll define in a moment—it's because you either had to or you have to. So let's take away the shame and start to unpack what's happening and how we can be better equipped to solve the problems we're trying to solve, just not necessarily in the best way when we go into pleasing mode.

So when we are pleasing, we are leaning on niceness to remain in positive regard with another person. And part of the reason why we do this, that many people don't know, is we tell ourselves, I don't want to disappoint someone else. I don't want to be mean. I don't want to let them down. And sometimes that's true, especially in cases where we need to remain safe.

But oftentimes what's actually happening is we're trying to escape our own somatic experience—our own fear, our own shame—that comes up in our bodies when we disappoint another. So do you see that switch? We position it as they'll be mad at us, but really what we're trying to get away from is how we feel when we aren't in positive regard with someone else.

Fawning, like you said, takes that to the next level. Many people know the fight, flight, and freeze response. Fawning is another survival response, and why that's important for me to say is that it's not a choice when we're in that state. This is when we are joining with the threat by remaining likable, by remaining appealing to them. It's because we're doing it automatically—we're not choosing to. And the goal is that if the threat likes me, if the threat doesn't feel like I'm a problem, I can breathe, I can feel safe, I get to buy myself some time. So those two terms—that's sort of the general definition. How are we doing with those so far?

Pathak: Yeah, no, I think that's really helpful and gives a lot of clarity to those two terms. And then you also mentioned there's a difference between niceness and kindness, so I'd love to pull those terms into the mix as well before we kind of get into the rest of our conversation.

Avellino: Yes, and I'll connect that to the pleasing part as well. One thing that I hear from my clients all the time is they'll come in and they actually know exactly what they want to say to others. They're not unclear about how they feel or their anger. But when I give them an invitation and say, what would it be like to say that to your mom, to your colleague, they say, oh, no, no, no—like that, I could not do that. That would be mean. That's not nice, right?

And I typically hear this from women and people of historically underrepresented and marginalized identities, because oftentimes their authentic emotions and experiences have been named as unacceptable—either by an actual person or subliminal and direct messages from society and systems at large.

So when I think of niceness, I think of being agreeable. And being agreeable means we actually leave ourselves. So it's a very self-focused behavior, because we are doing it because we want to be liked, we want to feel good in those moments, and we feel like if we're pleasant, then we actually don't have to feel like we're disappointing anyone else.

Whereas kindness, which is what I try to lean into and what I try to teach my children, is an other-focused behavior because it's an act of care. But just like medicine, sometimes kindness doesn't go down super well. And Brené Brown says that clear is kind. So being as direct as we can about our own experience is the kindest thing we can do for another, because once we are clear about where we are, that frees other people up to take a position. They don't have to read us. They don't have to wonder. They know where we stand. And so that cuts out a lot of the guesswork, a lot of the misunderstanding, and a lot of the harm that comes into relationships.

So I would argue that sometimes addressing that discomfort instead of deferring it with niceness creates stronger bonds.

Pathak: This is so interesting, because I will give you a very concrete, if superficial, example of this. So a few friends started a text thread recently where one said, you know, I'd like us all to use this thread so that we can sort of hold ourselves accountable to each other and just check in regularly and make sure that some of the goals we're setting for ourselves—this could be a space where we communicate with each other.

I remember thinking internally, that sounds great, I would love to, but I'm just feeling so overwhelmed by so many other things that I sort of know that as this goes on, I'm not going to necessarily be able to participate as I would like to, and I'm going to feel guilty about it. But my response was, okay, great, great idea.

And another friend responded right away after that and was like, this is great. I'm so sorry, I just don't have the bandwidth to keep up. I am just sending you guys so much love. Enjoy this journey together. And when I can, when I have time, I'd love to participate. And she was like, I'm just going to remove myself from the chain.

And then the next thing you see, like she's removed herself from the chain, which I was just like, amazing. Amazing. And every other response after that was so grateful to her for being so clear. Everyone was like, that was great. You know, it's so hard. It is hard. We're so thankful she had that insight for herself.

Avellino: I’m so glad you shared that, ’cause that’s a perfect niceness-kindness thing for us to unpack. So first of all, I don’t judge your response. I’ve totally been there and set myself up for resentment and annoyance afterwards. But what your friend did is she may have felt some discomfort, but she addressed it right there.
And she knew that letting people know, setting the expectations, was better than saying yes, not responding, responding then being annoyed at the people, which actually might put more negative emotions into the relationship. Right? And so that’s a perfect example of sometimes when we’re trying to be nice, we’re actually setting ourselves up for more of an emotional mess, more pressure, more confusion in not only our relationship with ourselves, but the other as well.

Pathak: That’s so helpful. So I’d love to then kind of unpack why. Why might some of us fall on people pleasing as a protective strategy? Because you mentioned that there are other ways that we might respond, and that certainly there’s a piece of this where it’s sort of like, this is gonna be the best way for me to, in the short term, protect that feeling of discomfort that I might have. So why do some of us develop this? Do we know anything about why some of us develop this type of strategy?

Avellino: So we develop it for very good reasons. Any behavior that serves an emotional function will persist. So saying yes right away was something that served us. It may have gotten us acceptance, we may have gotten validated. “Wow, Lia, you are always on time. You always show up. You are a star student. I can rely on you.” To little young me, who didn’t necessarily have the strongest sense of self, my identity just wrapped itself and coiled around that validation.
And so what typically happens is we position our self-worth in how other people experience us. And if we notice we’re continually doing pleasing behaviors, we are gonna continue to do that in order to receive that validation. The second reason why we do it — and I don’t mean to sound silly — is because we just do. We’ve done it for so long that we’re not even thinking of it.
Like my yeses were like an ATM at one point. If someone asked me for something, I just gave it. It wasn’t even a thought to, “Oh, do I have the capacity? Is this something I even wanna do?” Right? And so sometimes, like I said, if we had to lean on this behavior for survival, we do it without thinking about it.
So we do it without thinking about it, and we do it because it rewards us. It gives us something. It feeds a part of ourselves that was unfit.
Yes is a much less vulnerable response, right? We don’t have to connect to either our own mess of, “Oh, can I? Can I not? Do I want to?” Right? That’s all very messy, especially if those are not questions that you’re familiar asking for yourself. And then, B, we don’t have to reveal that.
But what I do tell my clients is no is a complete sentence. Just like we don’t justify our yeses, we don’t have to justify our nos. Trust me, it triggers the “I can’t, I wish I could. My kids have a crazy week. I’m speaking on three panels,” right? Like I go into the litany of, “Let me legitimize myself so I can pad myself with comfort so I don’t disappoint you.”
But actually, I can just say, “No, I’m not available. Thank you for thinking of me.”

Pathak: So then let’s move deeper into fawning. So how does that happen? How does people pleasing go wrong to that degree?

Avellino: So it went wrong because it was the only option. And so, you know, whenever we’re doing something that doesn’t really serve us but helps protect us, it’s because that was what our brain did to stay safe. So I’ll give you an example. If there was a lot of chaos in my home, I picked out the role of being the peacemaker, the pleaser, because I knew that that was the safest place for me. That as long as the adults felt like I was helpful and kind and giving, that they were calmer, and therefore then I could be calmer.
So fawning is actually an effort to self-soothe. We just do it by soothing another person, because the belief is, if they like us, if they accept us, then I’m at peace because then they’re at peace with me. Right? And so we situate our okayness in how okay someone else is with us, and that’s really helpful, but then it starts to become problematic. Right?
I noticed in my fawning I was phony. People would say things about me like, “She’s so nice, but I don’t really know her.” Right? I was living in resentment. I was constantly feeling drained and overextended. I was annoyed that people weren’t asking me how I was doing. I was annoyed that they weren’t giving me a pass. How could they not know? I have so much on my plate.
So these are some of the tells — to use your word — when that survival strategy is actually impacting our ability now to thrive. Like it might have kept us alive, but it’s really affecting our ability to thrive.

Pathak: So can you give us some ways that we all can recognize when that niceness that we’re displaying in the world is really sort of coming from fear or obligation or something we wish we weren’t doing, but we just feel like we have to in order to be accepted?

Avellino: Yes, definitely. So what you’re making me think about is sometimes we have a belief which is, disagree means dislike. And especially when we’re younger, we don’t wanna be disliked. And so sometimes we trade our own self-respect for being liked. And so with young people, and with myself, I try to shift the goal from being liked to being respected.
Sometimes when we feel discomfort, when we feel like we’re gonna disappoint someone or they might not like us, we interpret that somatic sensation as meaning we need to step away from it, right? Do whatever you need to do to not feel that discomfort. But what I wanna say is that discomfort is a normal response to being our true selves, especially when we’re used to keeping it in.
And how we begin to shift our relationship to that discomfort — the heart palpitations, the dry mouth, the stuttering — is by practicing it more, because our nervous system rejects things until they feel less new. So as I started to be more of my authentic self and move away from people pleasing, I had all of these reactions. I stumbled. I regretted what I said.
And that’s not the sign you’re going in the wrong direction. That’s actually the sign that you’re developing a new muscle, sort of like at the gym when you go and you lift weights and suddenly your arms hurt. That’s the way that I look at it.

Pathak: So can you give us a few strategies for helping us on that path towards working out these muscles, feeling discomfort, and being comfortable with pushing past that?

Avellino: Yes, that’s a beautiful question. And one thing that I often start with myself is, is avoiding this discomfort worth the self-abandonment required? Because when we aren’t being our authentic selves, when we’re not expressing our preferences and our needs, we’re, in essence, taking ourselves out of the relationship to remain in relationship. And what type of relationship is built on us not being there?
And one question that we typically avoid when we’re asking, “Do they like me? Will their feelings be hurt?” is, “How do I feel? What do I like? What do I need?” And when we’re fawning, we really lose touch with that part of ourselves that knows exactly what’s right.
So the first thing that I wanna recommend is getting in touch with what a body-based yes feels like and what a body-based no feels like. And so we actually have to begin to read the map of our bodies — of when we are in a yes. Right? Can I actually feel sometimes my body leaping forward, or when I’m feeling excited, what does that feel like to me? “Ooh, that feels challenging. I wanna sink my teeth into that.”
So really begin to get those sensations. And then when it’s a no. Right? I know for me, I’ll never know if it’s a no unless I pause. And so it’s about creating a little space in the beginning to say, “Let me get back to you. Let me think about this,” ’cause I can’t yet say no ’cause I’m not confident enough in that sensation, and I’m a little worried about your reaction. But I can create some space for myself.
And so I know for me the no is kind of like a “uh,” or it’s a scurrying when I start to look at my calendar, like, “Oh wait, where can I squeeze this in? Oh, there’s nowhere. Uh, okay, I’ll look at this later.” Right? So sometimes the no is in the doubt itself.
And there’s this author, Greg McKeown, who wrote this book on Essentialism, and he recommends the slow yes and the quick no. And for me it used to be the quick yes and the no-nos. So really looking at that sort of automatic nature.
There’s a therapist who just wrote a really awesome book called Are You Mad at Me?, which is a question that many people who fawn and people please ask — “Ooh, when I don’t get that response, are they mad at me? Oh, they didn’t say hi in the hallway. Are they mad at me?” Right? And all of that is an indicator of a wound around being pleasing.
And what she recommends is this acronym, NICER. N is for notice — so begin to notice how you feel when you wanna go into that automatic mode. Maybe you feel scared. Maybe you feel guilt, right? The next is invite it. So instead of fighting it and trying to join with the other person, invite that emotion. How can you be with it in a more real way?
The third is see — get curious about it. So what triggered it? Is this a normal trigger for me? Is it just about this person? Is this something I feel all the time? What are the sensations of that trigger? Then embrace it. Welcome it in. “You can be here. You don’t have to hide. I wanna get to know you, even though you don’t feel good to me.”
And lastly, return to the present moment and shift gears.

Pathak: I wanna pick up on something you said earlier around how people pleasing and fawning can sometimes be a very appropriate protective strategy, particularly for people who are in a marginalized group. So we definitely wanna highlight the reality for our listeners’ experiences. So let’s talk about how identity, safety, and lived experiences — especially for people in marginalized identities — can shape some of these patterns.

Avellino: So, in addition to what I shared, we can tell a lot by how comfortable people are with saying no based on how comfortable other people have been receiving their no. And so we are not up against the same barriers. For example, if a Black colleague of mine might express her anger at work, she might have very different repercussions than I have as a white woman.

And so when I was talking about the two types of pleasing sometimes, one is avoiding internal discomfort about disappointing others, and one is about avoiding external punishment — rejection, job loss, harm to your body. That’s very, very real. And so that survival strategy wasn’t a past strategy. It is a present strategy that helps you avoid threat.

And while we’re not gonna get into how to address that from a systemic perspective today, what I will say on that is what can be equally as important is staying connected to that anger, to that sadness, to that desire to say no, and expressing that in communities where you do feel safe. Because it’s still important to stay connected to the “I,” even in a world that’s working very, very hard to disconnect you from your humanity and your truth.

And then I think also those of us who have more privileged identities — where I have had to challenge some of my pleasing behaviors by saying, “Hey, I think there’s some white supremacist policies here,” or “I think there’s some ways where we’re not creating spaces for everyone’s authentic experience” — that’s on me as someone of a more privileged identity to speak up and challenge my own people pleasing because I can risk that more safely than some of my colleagues of other identities. So I think that’s how it can also relate to privilege.

Pathak: Thank you so much for that. I’d kind of like to then move us to something we often think about as the antidote to people pleasing or potentially fawning, which is setting boundaries. We hear about that all the time in common parlance in our culture. It’s just like, we’ve gotta shift from being friendly and just always saying yes to setting boundaries.

So help us define that term, and where do you see that as a useful strategy? How can we make that a useful strategy, and where does it go too far?

Avellino: So what you’re making me think about is separateness is an important part of every connection. And those of us who go into people pleasing mode often feel like difference — compromise — is closeness. That the more same I am, the closer that I’ll be.

And so when we think about boundaries, I think about the line between you and me — where I end and where you begin. And that line can take the shape of different thicknesses at different points in our lives based on our needs, right? So sometimes that line doesn’t need to be as strong, and sometimes it really needs to be very strong.

And one misconception is that boundaries are about telling other people what to do, which they’re not. They’re telling what people we will do. And the other thing is that they harm relationships. But the way that I look at boundaries is a meeting place. Because if I am telling you about my need for space, that means I trust you. That means I’m letting you into my internal world, and that means that I can be me without being resentful and acting out or going into a mode of a role versus being a self.

And so boundaries are in service of relationships, not against them.

Pathak: So, so helpful. I mean, this has been just really such a helpful conversation. I would love to end our time together by taking this conversation that has really led us down many different pathways and would love to have you tie a bow on how we can sort of recognize these behaviors and then very concrete action steps to start really leaning into ourselves and our desires if we see or we are recognizing ourselves potentially as people pleasers or fawners.

Avellino: So the first thing, I think, is to have compassion for yourself. Because if you have a people pleasing part, if your survival strategy is fawning, it’s because it either had to or has to be to keep you safe. And so starting out with “of course I’m doing this,” “of course this was a good idea at some point in time” is the place to go, because the less judgment we feel, the more empowered we are to make change.

The second thing is to begin to look at where those behaviors are automatic, right? So there’s certain people — they’re just my freaking triggers. I just go into nice girl mode. An elder relative in my family, a boss, those sorts of things. And start to bring awareness: where are my yeses genuine, and where are they because I’m scared of being disliked?

Then the third is shifting the goal from being liked to being respected. So I’m in a place where there’s a lot of people that don’t like what I do. They also know I’m a person of integrity, and I mean what I say, and they know where I stand. And so being clear on those somatic, body-based yeses and nos, and practicing saying those out loud, has actually helped strengthen relationships with people and also normalize that.

It might mean that some people don’t think the sunshine out of your ass anymore, but again, is having everybody love and adore you worth the risks that come with self-abandonment? And so really that last step is getting back to what do you know to be true? What is real and true for you? And whether or not you act on it, give yourself permission to know it.

Pathak: And then if you could help us understand that boundary that you might have to draw to not abandon yourself. So for someone where this is relatively new for them, where they’re just sort of starting off with setting some of these boundaries, can you give us a realistic place to start?

Avellino: So any form of practice is getting yourself ready. So you might start out by just journaling around what is happening for me, what I feel, and what I need. Then you might start by saying that to a safer person — somebody that you feel like could tolerate this request. They might not like it, but they could tolerate it.

And so the more we begin to flex this muscle, the more we begin to feel the discomfort that comes up in our body, the less new and the less scary that becomes over time. So the biggest reframe here is what feels wrong, right? What feels bad is sometimes an indicator that we’re going towards a fuller version of ourself.

Pathak: Can you wrap up for our parent listeners on how to address this topic with their children, and then potentially if they are working with a partner, how they work together on this to address some of these behaviors if they’re noticing it in their children?

Avellino: So the first thing with you and your partner — I think this can be done as an exercise — is oftentimes in relationships, someone has really tight boundaries and is totally fine saying no, and someone isn’t, right? Not always, but I’m definitely like the yes woman, and my husband’s more of like, “No, I’m good.”

And so we have had to look at ourselves. A lot of the times we’re analyzing our children as a way to avoid ourselves. So they’re picking up behaviors about what it means to be a woman, what it means to be a person in the world. And so get curious about what is my own relationship with being pleasing, and how am I bringing that into my family life?

And then the second step is if you’re noticing these behaviors — either these hard nos or these really fluid yeses — ask questions about them to your kids. Oftentimes we don’t like that behavior. We don’t want them to be that way, so we try to teach a lesson. But really help them develop critical thinking. “Oh, why do you think if you tell your friend what you really believe, that they won’t like you?” “Oh, I wonder where that came from.” So really helping them get used to being in this discomfort and normalize it for them.

Pathak: I really wanna thank you so much for your time. As always, just such a critical and important conversation. So thank you so much for being with us.

Avellino: And thank you for making space for all of the nuances and for so many angles of a topic that feels really important and pertinent at this moment in time.

Pathak: As we close today’s conversation, I wanna share my three key takeaways. First, recognizing that your coping strategy is doing more harm than good is about awareness, not judgment. Once we’re aware of something, we can course correct and try something new. People pleasing and fawning aren’t character flaws — they’re actually survival strategies. If you recognize this behavior in yourself, begin by meeting that with compassion. These behaviors developed to protect us, and understanding why they show up, when they show up, is the first step towards changing them.

Second, niceness and kindness are not the same. Niceness often asks us to abandon ourselves to stay agreeable, while kindness is an act of honesty and care for others, along with care for ourselves. Building that difference into our daily interactions can strengthen our relationships rather than strain them.

And finally, boundaries are not barriers. They’re not walls. They’re meeting places. Learning to pause, check in with your body, and name what you need creates more authentic connection — not less, like we may fear.

Whether you’re navigating this for yourself, modeling it for your children, or healing from people pleasing in the context of identity and safety, small, consistent steps can shift the entire way you relate to others in the world. Thank you so much for spending this time with us.

We hope this episode helps you move toward relationships that feel grounded, respectful, and true to who you really are. To find out more information about Lia Avellino, make sure to check out our show notes.

Thank you so much for listening. Please take a moment to follow, rate, and review this podcast on your favorite listening platform. If you’d like to send me an email about topics you are interested in or questions for future guests, please send me a note at [email protected].

This is Dr Neha Pathak for the WebMD Health Discovered Podcast.