Not a Burden, Just Unmet
The Clinical Cost of Shrinking
By the time you learn to shrink, the damage has already happened.
Not always in one loud moment. Sometimes, it’s a slow accumulation. The sigh when you speak too long. The glance at the clock when you start to cry. The way people respond to your feelings like a spill to be cleaned up. One micro-moment at a time, the message settles in:
I take up too much space.
And so you begin to disappear—just enough to make others comfortable. You turn the volume down on your joy, your needs, your grief. You learn to be digestible. And eventually, being digestible feels like being safe.
The Fawn Response: Appeasement as Survival
Many people know the fight, flight, or freeze responses. Fewer know the fourth: fawn, the survival response rooted in appeasement.
Fawning develops when direct protest isn't safe. When you can't fight back and fleeing won't work, you learn to anticipate what others want and become it. You soften your edges. You offer care instead of asking for it. You manage other people’s moods so they don’t become dangerous.
This is especially common in relational trauma and attachment wounding. If proximity to a caregiver or partner depends on performance—on being easy, grateful, or low-maintenance—your nervous system will adapt. It will trade authenticity for access.
You stay small not because you want to, but because connection has conditions.
And your body remembers the cost of being too visible.
What Shrinking Costs Us
The nervous system may choose fawning for good reason. But over time, this survival strategy starts to unravel things:
You become disconnected from your preferences, because you’re too focused on what others need.
You say “yes” when you mean “no,” and feel a strange guilt for having boundaries at all.
You struggle to believe that anyone could love the full version of you—especially the messy, reactive, emotional one.
You over-function. You caretake. You apologize too much.
And still, you’re afraid it won’t be enough.
Fawning is often praised by others: You’re so selfless. So easy to be around. So nice.
But inside, it doesn’t feel like goodness.
It feels like being gone.
What Healing Actually Looks Like
Healing from this doesn’t mean you stop caring about others. It means you include yourself in that care.
And it rarely starts with bold declarations. It starts with very quiet moments, small interruptions in the old pattern:
Noticing when you start to shrink in a conversation and choosing to stay with yourself, even if your words falter.
Catching the guilt that flares when you say “no,” and breathing through it instead of backtracking.
Working with the part of you that believes you need to earn your place by being easy, helpful, or good.
Practicing boundaries—not as a wall, but as a form of relational honesty.
It’s not about becoming big.
It’s about no longer abandoning yourself to be allowed in the room.
You were never too much.
You were just often alone with too many feelings
and no one to help you hold them.
That isn’t your fault. And it never was.
Let this be the beginning of something different.