Fawn implies seeking favour by servile flattery or exaggerated attention.
Merriam-Webster’s Online Dictionary
Time does not heal wounds without acknowledgement of what has happened. You need to clarify your feelings and express them in a way that defines in detail what you have lost and how much you care about what you have lost.
Peter Leech, Zeva Singer, Acknowledgment: Opening to the Grief of Unacceptable Loss
I have been down many blind alleys in my attempts to come to terms with my emotions. I’ve repressed them, swallowed them, drowned them in drink, ascended above them in clouds of hemp, starved them out, interred them with food, transcended them in meditation, outrun them, outsmarted them with rationalization, exorcised them, handed them over to higher beings, transmuted them into pretty lights, and even briefly felt them before purging them in dramatic catharses that promised to render them finally extinct.
Pete Walker, The Tao of Fully Feeling
I didn’t experience my value or worth in safe and nurturing environments, so my body learned to fawn, trying to keep other people happy or in appreciation of me, in order to prove myself worthy or valuable. I repeated this pattern to such a degree that by the time I learned about fawning, I had decades of unconscious behaviours to unpack.
Ingrid Clayton PhD, Believing Me
Up until about thirty years ago, the clinical literature on chronic stress, specifically in relation to typical reactive patterns to developmental trauma, listed three typical reflexive responses, namely fight, flight, and freeze.
By reflexive, we mean that the reaction occurs without prior engagement of the conscious part of our brain. We hear that voice, smell an aroma, recognize a familiar emotional state and, before we know it, the default reflex has already kicked in. We say or do things in situations which, in retrospect, we would prefer to have handled differently. We could refer to this as hijacking.
Developmental trauma is also now referred to as Complex PTSD, whereby I draw attention to Dr Edith Eger, an experienced psychotherapist and former Auschwitz inmate, who once quipped: `How dare they call it a disorder!´ She went on to point out that it is an adaptation, which when originally deployed, probably saved our lives. The term disorder suggests pathology, whereas here we are simply dealing with the vagaries of the human condition.
Only later in life, in an awareness born of introspection, can we ascertain if this adaptation is still of service to our healing, our further development, and growth. It may have become a disorder in the sense of it being an unconscious, ingrained maladaptation, leading us to behave in ways that run counter to our innate aspirations of safety, connection, and loving kindness.
Such responses are not a conscious choice, they are the body’s instinctual reaction to danger, fortified by repetitive deployment in the early years of childhood when alternatives were not available, and our agency was not yet developed.
Fawning is an unconscious attempt to manipulate the reaction of others to ward off danger and maintain connection in an unsafe environment or relationship. This behavioural pattern can become habituated, appearing like personality, without us ever being aware of its traumatic origins.
The term fawning was coined by Pete Walker, a psychotherapist who specializes in complex trauma (synonymous with developmental, relational or childhood trauma). Walker saw fawning as the “Fourth F” of trauma reflexes: Fight, Flight, Freeze, and Fawn. It is particularly common among people who have had, or are experiencing, long-term, developmental trauma.
Which of these four reflexes we draw upon depends on what worked best for us in childhood. Even in the same household, different siblings will develop different strategies, as many of you will recognise in your sisters and brothers. Some kids will rebel, others head straight for the hills, and yet others will withdraw as if petrified or hoping to become invisible.
Very few of us are purebreds, in this respect, so we each have a unique combination of these ingredients in our toolbox for dealing with the world, especially when we register stress. One is generally dominant, however.
Over recent years of clinical research, the fourth option has gained more and more recognition as an ingrained adaptation; fawning. It is still generally the most overlooked trauma and stress response. Paradoxically, it appears to be the one most commonly deployed.
The child inclined to the fawning response to trauma will usually be identified as the helper, the one who goes out of her way to accommodate the needs of others. The fact that this behaviour may be engaged upon at the expense of her own needs often gets unnoticed, even by the child herself. It does generally get noticed by others, however, who may encourage and exploit it in the child for their own benefit.
Fawning is when we reflexively engage in people pleasing, when we say yes while our gut says no, and we engage with people beyond what we desire, so we can spare them from being hurt or from being uncomfortable.
Perhaps the reason it remained under the radar for so long is precisely because it is such a widely displayed trauma response and, in our culture, so strongly promoted and rewarded in child rearing. Children are bribed with candy, attention, love, and money for being obedient.
Fawning is different from simply having manners. It is about learning how to override or bypass our body’s truth to fit in and not make others uncomfortable. While I am not sure if it is more common in large families, my intuition tells me, as the fifth of ten children, that it was instilled in me by my parents (both themselves from very large families) to maintain control in the face of their feeling overwhelmed by the task of parenting. Seen in this light, it could be a manifestation of intergenerational trauma.
As in the equestrian discipline of dressage, where the horse carries out precision movements in response to barely perceptible signals from its rider, the child learns to read subtle signals from the adult caregivers, while drowning out their own somatic feedback system.
We learn to overlook the knot in the stomach, the tense shoulders, the sweaty palms, the inability to sleep well, etc., attempting to silence such somatic alarm bells by trying even harder to please those on whom our welfare, sometimes even our life, depends.
Part of the package of developmental trauma is the messaging that it is the child who is the root cause of the problem. The integration of this narrative in our inner dialogue leads us to spend the rest of our lives barking up the wrong tree in search of healing and wholeness.
Being made to refuse gifts and attention of well-meaning relatives, forced to hug people you don’t want to touch or have touching you, having little or no down time or personal space in the home, and even being required to share your most personal items – all of these reinforce the fawn response.
When the expression of our own emotional truth in childhood is met with the threat of shaming and abandonment, we learn to fawn, unconsciously choosing the lesser of two evils. Later in life, we engage in fawning to bolster our standing in the peer group, to secure our job, to maintain a relationship, or even to stay alive.
Because it’s so surreptitious, we confuse this pattern with our personalities and desires. We call it being nice and we cling to that identity. Being nice is usually of benefit to those around us. However, it’s not nice – it’s a reflexive strategy to attempt to manage the temperaments and reactions of the people around us. In truth, it is an attempt to manipulate others, whereby we end up being the chief victim, due to the overriding of our true self, which is stored in each and every cell of our bodies.
Fawning bypasses the discomfort of misalignment and awkwardness within our own bodies that arises from speaking our truth. We often don’t even notice our fawning pattern until we learn how to become aware of it. This happens in therapy or any recovery modality which will initially enable us to reconnect with our bodies which we had learned to ignore all those years ago.
The shadow of fawning is resentment and a deepening of shame because fawning breaks boundaries. When I engage in fawning, I am violating my own integrity and positively reinforcing the earlier abusive behaviour perpetrated on me. A lifetime of this will create powerful rage and suffering. We go through our days with our lamp hidden under a bushel. Our sense of essence, of Divine Self, is greatly diminished.
However, we cannot forever overlook the fact that we are being untrue to ourselves. This is, paradoxically, really good news. Our drive to heal, to become whole again, is stronger than any of the survival strategies we developed in childhood.
Once, in recovery, we have reconnected with our bodies, we can begin to practice getting to know our true selves and setting healthy boundaries in our relationships and daily interactions. This is a further key component on our way towards emotional sobriety.
In the Positive Intelligence (PQ) Mental Fitness modality, for example, we learn to intercept Saboteurs such as the Judge, Pleaser, Victim, Controller, and Hyper-Rational, which may all be involved in the fawning dynamic. By means of brief body-centred exercise (so-called PQ Reps) we shift our neural activity from the left hemisphere to the right, where the Sage Powers reside.
Activating the Sage Powers of Empathy, Explore, Innovate, Navigate, and Activate, we deploy whatever combination is best suited to the given situation, developing and applying new responses to the perceived threats. The more we practice along these lines, the stronger the new neural pathways become as the old one wither in strength. We learn to engage in the conscious behaviours of loving kindness in the energy of ease and flow. The virtuous cycle of Mental Fitness has now begun.
Learning the somatic cues of fawning will help you interrupt it rather than let it hijack and trick you. As Pete Walker pointed out: `The only pain that can be avoided is the pain that comes from trying to avoid unavoidable pain´. I call that suffering, which is always the work of our fear-fuelled Saboteurs.
Remember, pain is part of the human condition, – a given, – whereas suffering is always self-induced, and therefore optional. The challenge is to recognise the roots of our own attitudes and behaviour, even in the confounding haunted house built on the foundation of developmental trauma.
