E017 - Fawn and the Defense Pattern of Being Extremely Nice
May 29, 2020Well hello, how are you? I’m great, thank you—really well. Everything’s great! I’m fine... Or at least I'm pretending to be fine! 😄
Welcome to this week's blog, about the trauma pattern of “fawn” and being too darned nice (or just a little bit passive aggressive). You can watch the video or read the blog below. Enjoy!
I don't know about you, but the culture I was brought up in encouraged being nice, which also encouraged having no boundaries. We like to pretend that everything is fine, and it seems important to us to consistently be as nice as possible to other human beings—even when we don't mean it!
In the work of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) specialist Pete Walker, Fawn is the fourth trauma pattern, companion to the survival patterns of Fight, Flight, and Freeze. From an evolutionary perspective, these very necessary survival patterns help us when we are attacked. Adrenalin and cortisol pour through our bodies, glucose is directed to our muscles, and we’re ready for action—to fight or to flee. When fighting or fleeing seem unlikely to save us, the best survival mechanism may be to freeze or become kind of paralyzed.
The fourth survival strategy is fawn. Classic fawn behavior is constantly being nice, or constantly apologizing—even when you’re not in the wrong. Or it’s lacking boundaries and lacking the ability to voice your need for self-protection, be it through a growl or the ability to say “back off!”, or even the all-important “NO!”
If any of these sound familiar, then fawn might be a part of your story. While these survival strategies are essential to our well-being, we humans can get stuck in the same patterns, always reacting to the world as though we are under attack, or as if our survival is being threatened. We react to the world through these stuck trauma responses—always fighting, or fleeing, or freezing, or fawning obsequiously. For me and many of my clients, reading some of the trauma literature on this topic has been a great process of self-discovery (on this subject, I highly recommend Pete Walker’s Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving).
So the four trauma typology responses to threat are fight, flight, freeze, and fawn. People who have received “good enough parenting” will have a healthy balance of these four responses (to affirm, though, there's no such thing as perfect parenting, and we’re all trying our best). But if you suffered very specific traumas in your past, they may lead you to be “stuck” in a specific survival strategy; you do this to get by and survive.
As a survival strategy you may have developed a subtle but deeply embedded pattern of fleeing relationships, or withdrawing when hurt, because that's what you needed to do when you were little at home. But a healthier upbringing allows for all four of these responses to come into play as you need them. Ideally, we have balanced access to, for example, fight, which allows us to have solid boundaries, a healthy assertiveness, and even aggressive self-protection when necessary. Fantastic. I want to be able to say NO when I need to, with vigor, kindness, and firmness!
A healthy flight response allows us to leave a dangerous situation, disengage, and retreat when necessary. This is obviously a very useful survival response in overtly dangerous situations, and even when emotionally dangerous events are taking place. Sometimes it’s best to back off and avoid fighting.
Similarly, a healthy freeze response allows us to stop struggling and become still (and sometimes even pain-free) in the moment. From this place we can assess danger from a very removed point of view, instead of being consumed by it. So a healthy freeze response can get us to recognize when fighting or fleeing are futile or might even make the situation worse.
So too can a healthy version of the fawn response. In a healthy version of the fawn response, we socially engage in conflict or danger—we listen to others, we help, and we compromise in difficult situations. Healthy characteristics can include loving service, compromise, listening, fairness, and peacemaking.
But the downsides of the fawn response include co-dependence, obsequiousness, servitude, groveling, and a loss of self. At worst, the fawn response can be a people-pleasing doormat, a slave with what’s called “social perfectionism.” One of the archetypes of the fawn is the “parentized child”—when a child is enlisted as an ally, friend, servant, or confidante to the parent and has to act like a parent with their own parent. This can lead to the fawn archetype becoming dominant in the child.
So while all four F's are necessary survival strategies, at the level of trauma they can dominate our relationships as an attachment disorder. They are also often complemented by ambivalence about relationships—wanting to be in one, but also being really terrified of being in one.
Relationships trigger the past in us, which is why they often trigger our developmental wounding and cause the four F's to express themselves in the present in our relationships. That wounding from our past will come flooding through… for example as freezing terror, or the urge to run, or a deep level of fury and fight—you’ll scream at your partner, or you’ll be filled with the need to flatter and recruit the other person. When a person is flooded with those emotions it’s called an “emotional flashback” in PTSD literature—in that moment the person is re-experiencing the same emotions they had at the time of their original trauma. Those feelings come flooding back into the body, just as if they were right back there. It’s completely beyond their control; it just takes over and happens.
So people-pleasing fawn types essentially learn to be very sensitive to and meet the needs, wishes, and agendas of others—firstly of their parents, and later in their adult relationships. In other words “For me to be safe I need to give up my needs, boundaries, and preferences,” and being helpful, available, listening, and affirming the other can make me safe and possibly loved.
Developing a fawn imbalance often involves having at least one narcissistic or borderline narcissistic parent. In other words, a parent who unconsciously wants an exclusive or close relationship with the child, or an inappropriately close relationship with a child, or that the child should in some other way meet their needs. So the child may become parentized and learn to take care of the needs of the parent in some shape or form. And the parent may actually act like a needy child and may manipulate the child; they may even throw tantrums when their needs aren't met. The child can be turned into the parent’s bestie, confidante, house servant, or even substitute partner—or in the worst cases, substitute lover. This manipulation may include being forced into parenting other children within the family too. The affected child may also develop a court jester role in the family to keep the family member or members happy. It's a way of keeping the peace.
You may well resonate with some of this but not all of it. There is a spectrum of responses, or you may have a hybrid of these responses inside you.
So how do we recover from the fawn response and being inauthentically nice? Firstly, it requires work. One of the patterns to look for is of being endlessly available to listen, but of being blocked from interjecting or speaking yourself. For this, we can learn verbal assertiveness and how to unblock our voices. I do a lot of work with my clients on unblocking their voices, learning to express boundaries, and developing powerful voices—as opposed to sitting very quietly, just absorbing, and being available to the other.
Developing real, powerful, authentic boundaries can be the work of a lifetime, but it starts today—right now. Try commenting on this blog, even if it’s just to say hi in the comments section. And of course if you don’t want to, just say NO! loudly.
For some who carry fawn-style PTSD, however, just the thought of saying NO can be incredibly frightening and can trigger an emotional flashback. Read or watch my blogs about boundaries here and here for more specific ways of developing and practicing your boundaries. At a deeper level, consistent therapeutic work is required to heal and meet trauma. For this fawn-related trauma, we need to access the hurt and the shut-it-down response of the original trauma. This is particularly applicable to people who have freeze- and fawn-related trauma, who have often shut down their rage. The anger is in there somewhere, but it cycles around below the surface without being expressed, poisoning us instead.
There may also be a huge amount of shame about carrying this rage in the body, a sense of “there’s something wrong with me.” One of the most powerful things we can do is to access that fire, that rage, and really allow it to come forward, allowing our shutdown voice the power to express itself. And this is also where powerful, authentic boundaries come from.
As I described in another episode, it can help to keep a resentment diary to track when resentment and anger are hiding in the body. Resentment is one of the great signals that: 1) we’re angry with someone; 2) we haven’t expressed it; and 3) there’s a boundary we’re not expressing.
So when I'm feeling resentful of someone, it's probably a result of something else I haven’t communicated to them, something I'm holding on to. Keeping a resentment diary really helps develop consciousness about when we're not expressing anger in the moment, and it can help us see what boundaries we really need. I cannot emphasize this enough: if resentment is circling around your body, learn to speak your boundaries. This is essential for relationship health and feeling safe in the world. I should know, because this is a huge area of learning for me and is not my strong suit!
To draw and reinforce boundaries, it’s a great idea to rehearse what you want to say by yourself. Walk around a quiet space at home and practice saying the words firmly but kindly. Practice until it becomes natural—ultimately at some point the words will just pop out, and you'll start speaking your boundaries in the moment.
There’s a lot more to be said on the subject, but I think that's enough for now. This is just an introduction—if you recognize a bit of fawn and pleasing in yourself, you might want to go deeper and work through liberating your voice.
I hope you enjoyed this. Let me know in the comments how it landed!
The videos referenced in this blog are :
The consequences of keeping your mouth shut
How to unblock your throat chakra
