Stop Calling It Brown-Nosing: What Fawning, Fighting, Freezing, and Fleeing Are Really Trying to Protect You From
by Jessica Anne Pressler LCSW
We love to name the people who bother us. The brown-noser. The suck-up. The teacher's pet. The one at work who agrees with the boss a little too fast. We roll our eyes at them, or worse, we quietly write them off as weak, fake, or manipulative.
But what if that person isn't fake at all? What if they're doing the most honest thing they know how to do — the thing that once kept them safe?
This is the heart of what I call the Traitor Within: a part of us formed in childhood, built entirely out of good intentions, whose only job was to keep us safe, loved, and un-abandoned. It learned its strategy early, and it never stopped running that strategy, long after the danger that created it was gone. It shows up in adulthood as self-abandonment — the quiet, repeated act of leaving ourselves to keep someone else close.
Psychology has a name for these strategies: fawn, fight, flight, and freeze. Most of us only know the last three. But all four are survival responses, wired in before we had words for what was happening to us. And all four look very different from the outside than they feel on the inside.
So today, let's reframe. Not to excuse harmful behavior — hurting someone else is never made okay by its origin story — but to replace judgment with understanding, wherever we can. Because the question is rarely "why is this person acting this way?" It's "what did this person learn to do, a long time ago, to survive?"
Fawn: The "Brown-Noser," the "Suck-Up," the People-Pleaser
This is the one we're hardest on. We call it kissing up, apple-polishing, sucking up to the boss. We assume the person wants something — a promotion, an advantage, an unfair edge.
Sometimes they do. But often, what looks like ambition is actually an old, well-worn groove: I am only safe if I make myself indispensable to the person with power over me.
A child who grew up with an unpredictable, critical, or emotionally absent parent often learns this early. Love and safety weren't guaranteed — they had to be earned, moment to moment, through vigilance and appeasement. Notice the mood in the room before anyone speaks. Agree first. Compliment first. Never be the one who causes friction, because friction was once dangerous.
What it looks like in adult life:
● The coworker who agrees with every idea the manager has, even ones they privately disagree with
● The friend who always says "whatever you want is fine," and means it, even when it costs them something
● The employee who stays late, over-delivers, and over-apologizes, convinced that being useful is the same as being safe
● The family member who plays peacekeeper at every holiday, absorbing tension so no one else has to feel it
The reframe: this isn't a character flaw. It's a nervous system that learned, long before it could reason, that appeasement equals survival. The fawn response isn't asking, "how do I get ahead?" It's asking, "how do I make sure I'm not abandoned?" That's not manipulation. That's a wound still working.
Fight: The "Difficult" One, the Control Freak, the Person Who Argues Everything
We call this person combative, defensive, impossible to please. They correct you before you've finished your sentence. They need to win the disagreement, not just have it. They can turn a simple scheduling conflict into a battle.
Underneath, fight often comes from a childhood where vulnerability was unsafe, but control wasn't. If you couldn't stop bad things from happening, at least you could stop being caught off guard by them. Fighting — arguing, correcting, controlling the outcome — became a way of never again feeling as powerless as that child once felt.
What it looks like in adult life:
● The partner who needs to have the last word in every disagreement, even a small one
● The boss who micromanages every detail because delegating feels like losing control
● The friend who turns feedback into a debate they have to win
● The person who gets defensive at the mildest suggestion, as if it were an attack
The reframe: this isn't about being right. It's about never again being small and unable to protect yourself. Fight is armor built by someone who once had none.
Flight: The Overachiever, the Ghost, the One Who's Always Busy
This one is sneaky because our culture rewards it. We call this person driven. Productive. A go-getter. What we don't see is that busyness can be a beautifully disguised escape hatch.
A child who learned that stillness meant danger — that sitting with a feeling, a fight in the next room, or an unpredictable parent was unbearable — often becomes an adult who cannot sit still with discomfort of any kind. Motion becomes the medicine. If I keep moving, keep achieving, keep leaving before things get hard, I never have to feel the thing underneath.
What it looks like in adult life:
● The person who leaves relationships the moment real intimacy or conflict shows up
● The colleague who takes on every project so they're never alone with quiet, unstructured time
● The friend who goes quiet and disappears the second a conversation gets emotionally honest
● The person whose calendar is always full, as if an empty hour were a threat
The reframe: this isn't flakiness or ambition for its own sake. It's a body that learned staying still, or staying present, once meant staying in danger.
Freeze: The One Who Goes Blank, Numb, or "Fine"
Freeze is the quietest of the four, and often the most misunderstood. We call this person checked out, unbothered, cold. We wonder why they don't seem to feel anything.
Freeze usually develops when neither fighting nor fleeing was possible — when a child was too small, too outnumbered, or too dependent to do anything but disappear inside themselves. Going numb, going blank, saying "I'm fine" through gritted teeth — these were once the only available exits from an unbearable moment. The body couldn't leave the room, so the mind learned to leave instead.
What it looks like in adult life:
● The person who goes silent mid-argument, not out of stubbornness but because they've genuinely gone somewhere else
● The one who says "I'm fine" flatly, even when they clearly aren't, because naming the feeling once made things worse
● The chronic procrastinator, whose paralysis isn't laziness but a system that shuts down under pressure
● The friend who seems unreachable in a crisis, when really, they've gone into shutdown to survive it
The reframe: this isn't indifference. It's a nervous system doing the only thing it once knew how to do when there was truly nowhere to run.
The Common Thread
Fawn, fight, flight, and freeze all started as intelligent solutions to real problems. A child doesn't choose these strategies consciously — they build them out of a necessity. This is where the real reframe lives: from why does this person act like this, to what did this person once need to survive?
Compassion Is Not the Same as Excusing
I want to be very clear about something, because this is the part people sometimes get wrong: understanding where a behavior comes from is not the same as excusing harm. If someone's fight response becomes cruelty, if someone's fawn response enables abuse, if someone's freeze leaves a child unprotected — the impact still matters, and it still has to be addressed, named, and in many cases, changed.
Compassion means we can hold two things at once. We can understand that the brown-noser is a scared kid still trying not to be abandoned, and we can still ask them to grow past it. We can understand that the controlling partner learned control as protection, and we can still require them to stop wielding it as a weapon. Understanding the root doesn't obligate us to tolerate the fruit.
But when we lead with compassion instead of contempt — for others, and for ourselves — something shifts. The coworker who annoys you becomes a little easier to have patience with. The part of you that over-explains, over-agrees, or shuts down in conflict becomes a little easier to forgive. And the work of healing — recognizing the Traitor Within, understanding what it was trying to do, and gently teaching it that it's safe to stop — becomes possible.
That's the whole point. Not to stay stuck in old survival strategies, and not to judge ourselves or anyone else for having built them in the first place. To see clearly, feel compassion, and then choose something new.
About the Author
Jessica Anne Pressler, LCSW is a licensed clinical social worker who has been a psychotherapist for nearly 40 years. She developed the Traitor Within framework to help people name and understand the repetitive self-sabotage that shows up in their adult lives. She is the host of the podcast Your Traitor Within, author of Your Traitor Within: A Year of Journaling Prompts for Healing and Empowerment, and author of her debut novel, Traitor Within — How Her Fear of Abandonment Led Her to Abandon Herself.
DISCLAIMER: The contents of this website; blog, video, articles, media, social media, book, and references, are ONLY for informational and entertainment purposes. It is NOT intended as a psychological service, diagnostic tool, medical treatment, personal advice, counseling, or determination of risk and should not be used as a substitute for treatment by psychological or medical services. Please seek consultation by an appropriate healthcare provider. Call 911 if there is an emergency. Call or text 988, which is the National Suicide and Crisis Lifeline. Call National Domestic Violence Hotline at 1-800-799-7233 to talk to someone 24/7 if needed.
Looking at, reading, listening to any information on my website, social media, YouTube, or book, and communicating with me by email or any other communication with me, you acknowledge and agree that we do not have a professional/client relationship. Use of this site and information associated with this site is solely at the visitor's own risk.
