How Fawning Makes You an Infiltration Target

The fawn response looks like loyalty and helpfulness from a 'nice' person, but it's really compulsive fear.

Photo by Vitalii Khodzinskyi on Unsplash

I recently read Cody Taymore’s piece The Fawn Response: How Your ‘Niceness’ Might Actually Be a Trauma Response (And What to Do About It) here on Substack, and it got me thinking. Trauma responses show up all the time in activism and resistance, and regular readers here are familiar with several of those responses because we’ve broken them down.

Fawning, however, deserves its own category, because it’s not as blatantly obvious in practice but has potentially even worse effects over time. Today we’ll be talking about what it looks like, and what dangers it brings to your group.

Taymore’s description of the fawning response is spot-on:

The fawning response is a trauma-driven pattern where you secure your safety by becoming indispensable to the person who threatens it. Where you preemptively meet needs before they’re expressed. Where you contort yourself into the perfect support character in other people’s stories.

It’s a solution brilliant in its simplicity: If you can’t beat them, and you can’t escape them, make yourself useful to them.

Its implications within group dynamics, especially resistance movements, activist collectives, and clandestine operations, are deeply strategic. When we ignore the presence of fawning in groups, we leave our internal ecosystem vulnerable to manipulation, sabotage, and infiltration.

To understand the dangers, we need to look beyond the psychological roots and recognize the operational risks.

What a Fawner Looks Like in a Group

A fawner is nice. They’re agreeable, they’re often high-performing and indispensable members of the group. It’s not uncommon, in fact, to very quickly wonder how you ever got along without them because they do so much that benefits the group.

• The one who takes on everything, especially the unpleasant tasks no one wants.

• The emotional sponge, absorbing tension in meetings and offering immediate conciliation to any conflict.

• The member who rarely (if ever) pushes back against leadership, even when something seems off.

• The person who diffuses tension with humor, distraction, or self-deprecation.

• The one who says yes to just about anything proposed, even before they’ve taken the time to think through the consequences or secondary effects of the action they agreed to.

To the untrained eye, they may look like a dream team member. They’re compliant, helpful, and adaptable. But beneath the surface, they are also often:

• Hypervigilant to perceived threats (especially interpersonal ones).

• Terrified of being seen as difficult or disloyal.

• Operating from fear, not conviction.

They may display signs of overcompensation: apologizing excessively, downplaying their own ideas, or mediating conflicts that don’t involve them. What makes them dangerous to the integrity of a group isn’t their intent—it’s the unconscious way their trauma wiring serves the interests of power structures, even when those structures are harmful.

Case Example 1: How Fawning Dismantled a Group from the Inside

In one group, a longtime member we’ll call Sarah had become the go-to for everything. Logistics, member check-ins, supply runs, and all the admin tasks that the men didn’t care for. She rarely expressed her own opinions, always agreed with the most dominant voices, and was often praised for being the glue that held the group together.

What wasn’t seen until it was too late:

• Sarah consistently mediated between two strong personalities, never taking a side, which delayed important decisions and created a false sense of harmony.

• Others became reluctant to bring up concerns about her mistakes or the emotional labor necessary to deal with her, because she would spiral.

• A manipulative new member exploited her fawning behavior to gain access to logistics data. When questioned, Sarah defended them to preserve her own value and image.

Eventually, the group fractured. Trust was eroded, decision-making slowed to a crawl, and half the team left—citing emotional exhaustion and confusion about priorities.

Sarah wasn’t malicious. She was trying to stay emotionally safe. But in doing so, she became a vector for dysfunction.

In case you’re already compartmentalizing this as a female problem, let me show you how this also plays out for males.

Case Example 2: A Male Fawner in Tactical Leadership

In a decentralized security-focused team, Rick was a former military member who became the informal second-in-command. Reliable, skilled, and always on call, Rick earned everyone’s trust fast. He was always the first to volunteer for activities, and was extremely helpful.

But Rick had a deeper driver: he couldn’t stand conflict.

• He avoided confrontation with the group’s dominant leader, even when unethical behavior surfaced.

• When newer members raised valid security concerns, Rick would shut it down by calling for unity, or claiming that the concerns raised were just “people starting drama.”

• He regularly took on more work than he could handle, trying to prove loyalty rather than delegate or enforce boundaries.

When the leader was later outed for working with the feds, Rick was the one who had vouched for him repeatedly.

You already know how this ends. The group fell apart, the larger network cut ties, and members were left holding the bag of negative public perception, with the overall cause credibility being harmed. Rick, unintentionally, had helped embed a toxic element—not because he was corrupt himself, but because his fear of disapproval and trauma around group conflict drove him to it.

Rick was trying to keep the peace and preserve the mechanism that made him feel safe. What he did was preserve the corruption in the group and help foster the exact culture that would later destroy it.

Oddly enough, the same factors that drove his behavior (need to feel part of a group, need to matter) were ultimately his undoing, leaving him with none of the things he had fought so hard to preserve. Another group down, another individual disillusioned and out of the cause.

Until, of course, Rick found a new group and started the process all over again.

Why Fawning Is Dangerous

• It cloaks dysfunction in helpfulness. Fawners get praised for their service while enabling dangerous patterns that no one wants to speak up about until it’s too late.

• It weakens group discernment. Constant emotional conciliation prevents necessary conflict and critical feedback.

• It opens the door to exploitation. Manipulators can easily hijack a fawner to avoid scrutiny. All they need to do is foster the fawner’s loyalty to themselves by positioning as the strongest member.

• It distorts loyalty. Fawners often side with whoever feels most emotionally intense, not with principle or mission.

Mitigation Strategies

• Define roles and responsibilities. Don’t reward invisible emotional labor. Name it, contain it, redistribute it.

• Build a culture of disagreement. Make principled pushback a requirement, not a risk.

• Check for over-functioning. If one person is doing everything, ask why. Then restructure.

• Leadership screening: Ask candidates, "How do you handle conflict? When did you last say no to someone in power?"

• Group norms training: Teach members the difference between peacemaking and appeasement.

You might be tempted to look at the fawner as the infiltrator themselves, but you’ll be incorrect. Fawning is an instinctive survival response emerging from trauma conditioning. It’s reactive, not premeditated or intentional.

Infiltrators, on the other hand, are acting according to an internal plan that has intent, clarity, and control.

As we’ve discussed before, an infiltrator isn’t always a government agent or informant. An infiltrator is anyone who is there for reasons other than the group’s stated goals. While fawners and infiltrators can often appear behaviorally similar, their drivers are completely different. The fastest way to tell the difference is this:

Fawners are emotionally overattached. Infiltrators are emotionally detached.

In short, the fawner will almost never be the infiltrator…but they will defend the infiltrator to keep the peace and stay, in their minds, emotionally safe.

The next section offers a step-by-step tool for identifying fawning behavior in your group, as well as an answer to the question “We found one…now what?”

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