Fawning: The Trauma Response We Don’t Always Talk About
There’s more than fight, flight and freeze.
When we talk about trauma, we often mention the fight-flight-freeze response. We know it’s our body’s natural reaction to perceived threats, which allows us to act quickly so that we can protect ourselves.
However, there’s a fourth type of response: fawn. People who fawn use people-pleasing behavior to feel secure in their relationships and deescalate potential problems, trying to blend in at all costs.
The term was first used by Pete Walker, a psychotherapist and trauma expert who describes fawning as “seeking safety through appeasing the needs and wishes of others”. This form of coping stems from a lack of emotional nurturing in childhood, creating an extreme self-sacrificing personality.
Personally, discovering this new perspective on trauma has changed my life in many ways, as it allowed me to recognize my own childhood wounds.
I have indeed spent most of my life fawning, and I believe there are many others like me out there. This article is for you.
Are You A Fawner?
It can be very difficult to recognize our own unconscious emotional patterns. The first time I realized my people-pleasing personality was not healthy was when I was stuck in cycles of chasing emotionally unavailable people.
Most of my friendships and relationships came down to this: I avoided those who’d readily show me love and affection, and I’d pursue those who were inconsistent, unreliable and inaccessible.
Ironically, I had a tendency to attract the inconsistent types — and I would always end up feeling either drained, angry or disrespected. But I’d stay silent, and the cycle would begin once again. And again. And again.
This is what fawning feels like: you deny your truth to make others feel comfortable. You repress your feelings, thoughts and needs. You don’t know how to say no to people. You seek as much external validation as you can because you don’t feel worthy of being liked and loved.
Essentially, you spend your life trying to keep the peace, even if it means abandoning yourself.
“Given that those who suffer from the fawn response are more frequently in a threat induced mindset, they will be less able to perform and execute healthy social behaviors and will even have a more difficult time expressing their emotions. This can potentially create a vicious cycle of poor relationships that exaggerate the unhealthy attachment styles leading to more unhealthy behaviors and consequently unhealthy relationships.”
My problem was simple: I didn’t believe relationships were supposed to be easy and consistent. I didn’t believe friendships were supposed to make me feel supported. I didn’t believe that it was actually possible for me to feel safe and secure — I ‘d never felt that way before.
How could I expect something I’d never had in my life before?
If you’re anything like me, you’ve probably normalized your behavior. You think it’s normal and this is just how you are. However, the more you learn about the roots of your fawning response, the more you realize how it actually makes sense.
As Dr. Porges says, this coping mechanism stems from attachment wounds and, if left untreated, will eventually lead to more transgenerational trauma.
Why Do We Fawn?
Fawners have the tendency to be submissive in order to avoid conflict, resulting in the repression of the fight response. This means that instead of externalizing what they’re really feeling, they keep everything inside.
The reason why fawners don’t fight is simple: they were taught that voicing their thoughts was not acceptable and expressing their emotions would only cause more conflict. They were taught that they were not worthy of standing up for themselves.
In my case, my people-pleasing behavior was my attempt to establish an emotional connection with a self-involved father who was unable to love me unconditionally or to be emotionally present.
He would always find a way to blame me, criticize me or diminish my accomplishments. Every time I stood up for myself, I’d be silenced immediately. So, how could I believe I deserved to express myself if my own father would never allow it?
As children, if we don’t receive the love we crave, we do whatever it takes to get it — even it it means betraying ourselves. We forget our needs, we ignore our feelings, we give up expressing ourselves. All we want is to be loved and accepted by our caretakers.
Fawning is a maladaptive survival response developed as a means of coping with a non-nurturing or abusive parent:
“Walker asserts that trauma-based codependency is learned very early in life when a child gives up protesting abuse to avoid parental retaliation, thereby relinquishing the ability to say “no” and behave assertively.”
Rebecca Mandeville, in The Trauma Response of Fawning
As we can see, the fawning response can be just as damaging, which means that it should be taken just as seriously. I wonder how many adults carry this coping mechanism throughout life, completely oblivious to their own trauma.
I spent years trying to make sense of my own dysfunctional patterns, not being able to understand why I operated the way I operated. Now that I do understand, I’m still working through it.
Trauma is complex and should be treated as such. More importantly, trauma is not what happens to a person, but what happens within them.
Different people respond differently, and fawning is just another response that’s based on our relationship with our environment. We all develop our own coping mechanisms and, for some people, their instinctive response is to suppress their individuality in order to feel safe.
If, as children, we learned that our true feelings were a threat to others, or that our loved ones couldn’t deal with our self-expression, that’s what we do. We adapt to survive (emotionally).
One thing I know for sure: if we limit our perspective on what is traumatizing and what isn’t, what we’re really doing is restricting our awareness and sabotaging our own healing.
