I believe in the village. I try to be one.

Here in Pasadena, I coordinate park dates, invite people over for dinner, keep the door open. I believe deeply that parenting in isolation is one of the quiet crises of our time — and I try to do something about it in the small ways available to me.

And yet.

When my son says something that lands hard the way kids do, right at the end of a long day when you have nothing left — I don’t call my best friend. I don’t text my cousin. I manage it quietly. Alone. I bring it to my therapist, and I hold the rest myself.

I know what I believe. And I still do this.

That’s fawning.

If you're reading this and thinking "this is me," you're not the only one. This is a pattern I work with often in therapy across LA, especially with moms who feel like they have to hold everything together. And over time, it can start to look a lot like strength

What Is Fawning — And Why Motherhood Makes It Worse

Fawning is a nervous system response. It’s one of the lesser-known cousins of fight, flight, and freeze. Instead of confronting or running, the nervous system learns to appease: to keep the peace, to attune carefully to everyone else's needs, and to make sure they're met, often before your own have even been considered.

For many women, this pattern started long before motherhood. It developed in environments where being agreeable, easy, and attuned felt like the safest way to stay connected.

And then you became a mother.

A mother holds her young child, seen from behind — a quiet moment of connection and the weight of care. — Photo by Bethany Beck on Unsplash

Motherhood takes everything fawning already built: the hypervigilance, the anticipating, the putting yourself last, and gives it a bigger stage. Two small people who genuinely need you. Whose distress is real. Whose nervous systems are actually co-regulating with yours.

So you don't just abandon yourself.

It feels like you have a very good reason to.

If you want to understand this pattern more deeply, you can read a complete guide to fawning and people-pleasing patterns here.

The Broken System Behind Mom Burnout

A perfectly organized playroom — the kind of image that floods social media and makes moms feel like they're falling short. — Photo by Kailun Zhang on Unsplash

Here's the part that doesn't get named enough.

We're asking mothers to do something that was never meant to be done alone.

Paid leave is limited or nonexistent, support often drops off long before recovery is complete, and childcare is both expensive and difficult to access. Family is frequently far away. Community, when it exists, has to be built from scratch.

And in the absence of real support, the message becomes: you should be able to handle this.

Social media fills in the rest. You scroll past mothers who appear to be managing the activities, the emotional presence, the clean house, and then assume the problem is your capacity.

Meanwhile, your burnout is being reinforced at every turn. Running on empty gets called devotion. Putting yourself last gets called being a good mom.

No wonder you don't recognize it as burnout.

It feels like motherhood.

Wondering if what you're experiencing is mom burnout? Read more about the signs of mom burnout here.

If you're a mom in Pasadena or across California and Nevada looking for support, you can learn more about mom burnout therapy here.

The Math That Doesn’t Work

I have two kids: five and a half and almost three.

There are moments where I can feel exactly two pairs of hands and exactly three people's needs in the room, and the math doesn't work. They both need something at the same time, and I can feel what I can't give.

I believe in autonomy and free play. I also know they need me. And sometimes those things pull in opposite directions, and I'm the only one there to navigate it.

This is what it looks like to parent inside a system that asks everything of mothers and hands them very little.

Not a personal failing.

A structural one.

Why Fawning Moms Don’t Recognize Their Own Burnout

You're often the last to recognize your burnout for a specific reason:

Your burnout doesn't look like collapse. It looks like competence.

You're still showing up, still anticipating, still managing everyone's emotional temperature, still saying yes. You’re doing grocery inventory regularly, drop off and pick ups, meals, bedtime, and play dates. From the outside, everything appears to be working.

Underneath, you might feel tired, flat, or quietly resentful. But you don't name it burnout, because burnout, in your mind, is what happens when things fall apart.

And you haven't.

This is often the point where something starts to click — not a lack of capacity, but a pattern that's been running for a long time.

Over-functioning and fawning tend to live side by side, reinforcing each other in ways that are hard to see from the inside.

So rest feels selfish. Asking for help feels loaded. Saying no feels like letting people down.

These aren't usually conscious choices. They're patterns that have been reinforced long enough to feel like truth.

I wrote more about the identity layer underneath this, and why rest rarely reaches it here.

Signs You Might Be a Fawning Mom

You might be a fawning mom if:

You feel more comfortable tending to everyone else's needs than naming your own
You say yes before you've checked in with yourself about whether you actually want to
You manage hard moments alone because asking for help feels like too much to ask
You feel guilty resting, even when you're exhausted
You're described by others as incredibly capable, while quietly feeling like you're barely holding it together
You notice resentment building but can't quite name what you're resentful about
You've started to wonder if this version of you (the one who carries everything) is just who you are now

If several of these landed, this probably didn't start with motherhood. Motherhood just gave the pattern more places to show up.

The Fawning Mom's Hidden Rule

Underneath the over-functioning, the constant yes, the managing and anticipating — there's often a belief so familiar it doesn't even feel like a belief anymore.

It feels like truth.

My needs and my children's needs cannot coexist.

Not as a conscious thought. Just as the operating system running quietly in the background.

So when you're exhausted, you keep going, because they need you. When you want to ask for help, you don't, because it feels harder than doing it yourself. When you finally get a quiet moment, you fill it, because stillness feels selfish when someone else is still struggling.

From an ACT perspective, this is what we call a fused belief. You're not choosing it. You're living inside it as though it's simply the way things are.

And the first step toward changing it is being able to see it clearly enough to ask: is this actually true? Or is this just what I learned?

What Helps a Fawning Mom Heal From Burnout

This isn't about spa days or surface-level self-care.

It's about understanding why doing less feels so hard in the first place.

Step 1: Notice the pattern without judging it

In therapy, we start here. Not trying to force the pattern to stop — just understanding it. We get curious about what the constant responsibility, the busyness, the over-attunement to everyone else is actually doing for you.

What is it protecting?

What would have to be felt if you put some of it down?

Just noticing, without the self-criticism, is where things begin to shift.

Step 2: Get curious about what the fawning is protecting

Most fawning patterns developed for very good reasons. They kept relationships intact. They reduced conflict. They earned connection in environments where connection felt conditional.

So we don't try to eliminate the pattern. We get curious about it.

What does the busyness protect you from feeling? What does saying yes keep at bay? What are you afraid might happen if you really slowed down?

These questions aren't rhetorical. In therapy, they tend to open something.

Step 3: Practice tolerating the discomfort of doing less

This is often the hardest part.

Because when you start to step back — when you don't immediately fix, smooth over, or say yes — your nervous system sounds the alarm. Something's wrong. Someone might be upset. Things might fall apart.

That discomfort is real. And it doesn't mean you're doing something wrong.

It means you're practicing something new. And your nervous system needs time to learn that discomfort and actual danger are not the same thing.

Step 4: Work at the nervous system level — not just the cognitive one

Understanding the pattern is important. But for many fawning moms, insight alone doesn't change the automatic response.

A woman stands in sunlight looking out at the ocean — a moment of stillness and quiet relief — Photo by Artem Kovalev on Unsplash

That's because fawning doesn't only live in your thoughts. It lives in your body, and in what your nervous system learned to do long before you had language for it.

This is where approaches like EMDR and the Flash Technique can reach what talk therapy sometimes can't. They work directly with what your nervous system learned, and help it update what it believes it needs to do to stay safe.

Over time, you may notice you catch the pattern earlier. You feel less pulled to automatically say yes. You have a little more space to respond instead of react.

When those patterns have deeper roots, EMDR can help reach what talk therapy sometimes can’t. You can learn more about how I use EMDR here, or explore how I work with people-pleasing and fawning here.

What Happens When the Pattern Goes Unnamed

If the fawning pattern never gets recognized, you don't suddenly fall apart.

You just get quieter. More efficient. More isolated. The resentment builds so slowly you mistake it for personality. The distance from yourself grows so gradually you forget there was ever a closer version.

You keep showing up for your kids, your partner, your friends, your community. And somewhere in the middle of all that showing up, you stop showing up for yourself. Not dramatically. Just gradually, incrementally, one small self-abandonment at a time.

And your children grow up watching you disappear into everyone else's needs — learning, without anyone saying a word, that this is what love looks like.

The pattern doesn't have to keep running.

But it rarely changes on its own.

You Don't Have to Keep Doing This Alone

If you’re noticing this pattern in yourself — the over-functioning, the constant responsibility, the exhaustion that doesn’t quite make sense — we can talk through what’s underneath it and what might actually help.

I work with women and moms in Pasadena, across the greater Los Angeles area, and virtually throughout California and Nevada.

You can schedule a free consultation here.

Why Moms Who Fawn Are the Last to Recognize Their Own Burnout