Meg Josephson grew up as a people-pleaser.
Raised in a home she describes as volatile, she remembers monitoring her father’s reactions, desperately trying to smooth tensions over.
“Being a perfectionist and being kind of always on was very protective for me,” Josephson told Business Insider. “It was the one thing in my control to kind of keep my dad’s moods at bay.”
Once she left home, however, she realized that people-pleasing was her default response, even when no one was actually mad at her.
It was when she started going to therapy herself that she learned how much she relied on the fawn response to fear — placating instead of entering fight, flight, or freeze.
Healing from her fawning inspired her to become a therapist. Now, she said, many of her Gen Z clients and social media followers seem to especially struggle with people-pleasing.
“Social media and digital communication have played a huge, huge, huge role in the Gen Z fawn response,” Josephson said.
Online life magnifies rejection and makes it so much easier to seek validation, meaning Gen Zers with people-pleasing tendencies can get stuck in a never-ending, approval-hunting loop, she said. Josephson titled her upcoming book “Are You Mad at Me?“, out August 5, because she hears it so often in everyday conversations.
Luckily, being a people-pleaser isn’t a fixed trait, she said. Even Gen Zers can shed that identity — if they’re willing to let it go.
Warpspeed rejection
The classic precursor for people-pleasing is if you were raised in a dysfunctional environment or by emotionally immature parents. That wouldn’t make Gen Zers a unique generation. Reactive or abusive parents have existed forever.
Still, it’s the online world Gen Zers grew up in that primes them to feel abandoned more often, triggering a need for reassurance that their relationships are stable.
“There are so many ways to connect now, and because of that, there are so many ways to feel forgotten,” Josephson said.
While past generations were limited to in-person interactions, letters, or phone calls, Gen Zers can feel validated — or rejected by — so much more. Their best friend not “liking” their Instagram photo. A crush leaving their DM on read. A group of their friends posting a Snapchat without them.
This can lead them to fawning, which Josephson considers “almost a more modernized threat response” compared to fight or flight.
An unanswered text may not be frightening enough to trigger physically running away, but it can pressure someone to send more clarifying texts in the frantic hope that their friend isn’t upset with them. The fawn response, at its core, is “I need this external validation to know that I’m safe,” she said.
To complicate matters even more, online life is both rife with posts about how people should behave and opportunities to be misunderstood.
“We don’t hold a lot of room for nuance because we want digestible, short, snappy information,” Josephson said.
She said one of the first steps to healing is realizing that we’re all inundated with high expectations, heightening “this ridiculous standard that we hold ourselves to internally.”
An endless supply of reassurance
Perpetual people-pleasers might fall into a common trap: rampant reassurance-seeking. It can look like texting “Are you mad at me?” to a friend or asking your partner if they’re still into the relationship.
Validation-seeking can become a cycle because “we’re getting this relief for a split second,” Josephson said. But done in excess, it can strain relationships, she said.
Disorders like relationship OCD, for example, can manifest as constantly needing positive feedback from a romantic partner — an ultimately unsustainable dynamic.
Some people ask the group chats to weigh in on their Hinge date, post about their friends in anonymous forums, or even consult ChatGPT. Still, Josephson said that too much outsourcing is a bad idea. AI, in particular, is a dangerous crutch.
ChatGPT “does have the intelligence to validate, but because it’s not a real relationship with a real person, there’s a limitation,” Josephson said. The chatbot may empathetically respond with all the reasons your friend probably isn’t mad at you, but probably won’t tell you that you’re asking that question way too often.
How to ditch the people-pleaser label
There are over 140 million TikTok posts about being a people-pleaser. While social media posts can help identify and relate to a problem, they can also nudge people into viewing their people-pleasing as a permanent personality trait.
Josephson said that she works with clients to move away from labels that can keep them stuck. “It’s not an identity, but rather it’s a self-protective pattern,” she said. “It’s this younger part of you that has learned to be on high alert to manage people’s moods as a way to protect you, but that doesn’t mean you always need protecting now.”
One of the best starting points is pausing — putting the phone down or taking a beat in the middle of a heated conversation. A moment of mindfulness, “even if it’s just for 10 seconds,” can help you acknowledge the fear without immediately reacting to it, Josephson said.
“If you’re oversharing because you want to feel understood, pause. What do you actually want to say, versus what’s coming from a place of fawning?”
Done consistently, this practice becomes the stepping stone for other habits, like tolerating discomfort in a conflict or setting boundaries.
You might still end that pause in the same place — worrying that you’ve unknowingly angered someone. The difference is in what you’ll do next.
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