If anyone ever told you you’re a people pleaser or codependent — a therapist, a friend, or a Cosmo article with a ten-question checklist — that’s the “diagnosis.” It tells you what you do, not why you do it. And that missing “why” is the whole story. You don’t wake up one day and decide, Hey, I’ll erase myself and become addicted to approval, that sounds fun. Fuck, no. Something inside you made that decision long before you were old enough to call it survival.  

“Codependent.” “People pleaser.” These labels are like neon signs pointing at your behaviour. You over-give. You over-apologize. You can’t stand conflict. You say yes when your entire chest is screaming no. But here’s the part no one bothers to tell you: you didn’t learn this in adulthood. You didn’t pick it up from Instagram self-help reels. You learned it as a survival reflex. It was etched into your nervous system back when your safety, love, and belonging were on the line. The behaviour is the smoke. The fire is underneath.

Big T Trauma vs. little t trauma:

When I say, “I have childhood trauma,” people hear the word trauma and picture horror scenes. War. Rape. Assault. Car crashes. Fires. Netflix documentaries.  They think trauma means one catastrophic event — something undeniable, visible, headline-worthy. That’s what psychologists call Big T Trauma. And yes, that exists. One blow can shatter your sense of safety forever. 

But here’s the one no one talks about enough: little t trauma. The subtle kind. The daily kind. The death-by-a-thousand-cuts kind.

The parent who said they loved you,but rolled their eyes when you cried or told you “they will give you something to cry about” thats the emotional dismissal.

The teacher who laughed at you in front of the class when you were too curious or too loud.

The friend who ghosted you in silence and never explained why.

The sibling rivalry no one ever mediated, leaving you convinced you were unworthy.

The mother who fed you and clothed you but dismissed your feelings with, “You’re too sensitive.”

The father who provided but was never really present.

The boy who expresses his feeling and is told he is a “pussy” or “walk it off” or “suck it up”.

Each cut looks small on its own. But stack them? They rewire your nervous system. They whisper the same message over and over until you believe it with your whole body:  The world is not safe for me. My needs are too much. My feelings are wrong. Love is conditional. That’s what little t trauma does. It’s not the explosion. It’s the slow leak of gas you can’t smell until you’re choking on it. It’s the death of your inner child by a thousand cuts — cuts that didn’t just wound you, but taught you that being fully yourself was dangerous.

I’ll give my own example. When my sister, at 54, shared with our mother she was in therapy working through childhood issues, our mother’s response was: “Well, it’s not like I burnt you children with cigarettes.” That’s exactly the point. That comment is the trauma. Not because it was the worst thing imaginable, but because it minimized and dismissed her pain. That’s why we need to define our own experiences — not for others, not against someone else’s scale of suffering, but for ourselves.

Most people know about PTSD. That’s the aftermath of a single traumatic event. Flashbacks. Nightmares. Hypervigilance. The body stays stuck in fight-or-flight, replaying the catastrophe.  But CPTSD — Complex Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder — is a different beast. It doesn’t come from one headline moment. It comes from a climate. A whole childhood environment. A slow-drip exposure to instability, neglect, invalidation, abuse, or conditional love. Not one scream, but a home where every silence was a loaded gun.  Not one shove, but a lifetime of being told, “You’re imagining things.” Not one abandonment, but years of being invisible in your own family.

And here’s the insult on top of injury: CPTSD isn’t even recognized in the DSM-5 (the diagnosis Bible). You’re more likely to be told you’re anxious, depressed, maybe “borderline,” maybe “codependent.” All technically true, but none of them get to the marrow.  Because the marrow is this: your entire nervous system was shaped in an unsafe environment.

This is the part that changes everything: trauma isn’t the thing that happened. Trauma is what happened inside you because of it.  Two kids can live through the same event. One walks away. The other walks away fractured. The difference isn’t the event itself — it’s the nervous system’s response. Trauma is the scar tissue your body grows around a wound it never got to heal. 

And here’s the kicker: not all nervous systems respond with fight, flight, or freeze. Some of us responded with fawn. Fight, Flight, Freeze … and Fawn You already know the first three survival responses.

Fight: Attack the threat.

Flight: Escape the threat.

Freeze: Go still, play dead, wait it out.

But there’s a fourth: Fawn.

Fawning, coined by Pete Wlaker, is survival by self-abandonment. It says: “If I erase myself, if I make myself small – I won’t be an inconvenience, if I keep you happy, if I make myself indispensable to you — maybe you won’t hurt me. Maybe you’ll keep me. Maybe I’ll be safe.” So you smile when you want to scream. You say yes when every cell of your body is screaming no. You predict moods like a fucking talented psychic and bend yourself into a compliant pretzel to prevent conflict before it even arrives.

And over time, you forget where the performance ends and you begin. If you’re wondering whether this is you, don’t look for flashbacks of war. Look for these quieter symptoms:

Chronic people-pleasing. You agree to things before you even feel your own wants.

Shame loops. You wake up already apologizing for existing.

Hyper-attunement. You can read every shift in tone and body language, but you couldn’t name your own emotions if asked.

Identity amnesia. Ask you what you like, what you want, what you dream of — and you freeze. You’ve outsourced yourself.

Attachment chaos. You either cling too hard or shut down completely.

Self-erasure. You’re an expert at disappearing in plain sight. Making yourself small.

Sound familiar? That’s not weakness. That’s the nervous system you built in a childhood where you learned: I survive by becoming what others need me to be. So when someone calls you “codependent” or “a people pleaser,” don’t stop at the dressed up diagnosis. Those words describe the surface. They don’t tell you why the hell you ended up that way.

Because the why is this: Your system decided early on, Erasing myself is safer than being myself. That’s not a flaw. That’s strategy. A strategy that worked. A strategy that kept you alive. A strategy that, over time, became your personality. Healing doesn’t start when you “just stop people pleasing.” Healing starts when you understand that people pleasing was your survival.

When you stop shaming yourself for what you had to do. It’s not about eradicating the fawn. It’s about retraining the body. Teaching your nervous system something it didn’t know back then: You are safe now. You can say no. You can exist. You don’t have to vanish to be loved. The wounds of childhood showed you a world where being yourself was dangerous. Where love was conditional. Where safety meant disappearing.

But here’s the truth your body is still learning: survival is not the same as living.  You don’t heal by killing the part of you that wants connection, kindness, intimacy. You heal by reclaiming it. By making it yours again. By separating authentic care from compulsive fawning. 

Because the truth is: you were never broken. You were adaptive. The chameleon in chaos – Brilliantly, exhaustingly adaptive. And now it’s time for something beyond adaptation. And survival did its job. Now it’s your turn to do yours. To teach your body that safety doesn’t require self-erasure. To teach your nervous system that love doesn’t mean abandonment. To teach your inner child that the world can hold them, not cut them. Because you are allowed to exist. Fully. Loudly. Messily. You don’t have to disappear to be loved.

To quasi-quote the immortal words of Eminiem – “Would the real YOU, please stand up”