Fawning: The Pleasing and Appeasing Reaction to Trauma
Fawning is a shame reaction and the epitome of self-abandonment.
Bambi Is So Cute! What’s Wrong With Me Being Like Him?
What exactly is fawning? Fawning is a nervous system reaction to trauma that someone with Complex Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (C-PTSD) unconsciously goes into in an effort to find some safety and relief while in their traumatic or abusive situation. This is part of a denial reaction which also includes dissociating, numbing out, telling themselves, “It wasn’t SO bad” or “It didn’t really happen.” This is where drug and alcohol, food, sex, or other addictions can stem from. Having learned this as a young child, an adult will still react this way in his or her traumatic or abusive relating (in love relationships, friendships, work, or religious situations). Often, a fawning type will choose people and situations who “help” their nervous systems react in the ways they were taught to react as children in an effort to calm down and to feel safe. It is very comfortable staying with what we know, even if it is largely unhealthy for us now. And, it can be hard to know how to change this pattern in and between ourselves and others.
The fawning reaction is one where the child clings to the abusive parent, tries to please and appease them, is shut down or frozen from their true feelings of anger and resentment about how they are being treated, and opts to perform and be of service to the parent. The child wants to keep the connection with the parent no matter what. Just to name some of the ways that abuse can show up, here is a short list: being hit or pushed; being called names; being laughed at; becoming your parent’s best friend or emotional surrogate when the other parent is emotionally unavailable to them; being sexually touched or molested; being controlled by spiritual or religious clergy or those in high authority in a church; or being manipulated and controlled by someone you love. Having your boundaries crossed in these ways and in many other ways is disrespectful at the very least and can cause harm or even death depending on just how far an abuser is willing to cross those lines.
Being a fawn type is also rewarded in our society because those who are “good” girls or boys, who are of service, who always befriend and accept anyone and everyone (even if the person isn’t healthy and will hurt them), and who allow people to cross their boundaries are “easy” to like. Those who say “no” to abuse and disrespect are seen as “difficult.” Fawn types have genuine compassion for people, but because they are forced to put themselves last, their true compassion becomes unbalanced as they eventually have more compassion for their abusers than for themselves. This usually gets them into trouble in their lives. Because they are empathetic and want to help their abusers feel better so that they will stop abusing them, abuse survivors can easily become codependent with their abusers and others. This affords the fawn type the false notion that he or she has more control in their lives and over the abuser than they actually have.
As a predominantly fawn-type person myself, I have been verbally, emotionally, and physically attacked by people I genuinely loved and wanted to help. Unfortunately, when we take on someone else’s problems as our own project to fix, we might find that whatever we do to help them—to be better for them or to change and follow their needs and plans for us—is never enough for them. Because of their own abandonment and trauma wounding, they seem to be an empty well of need. This often leads them to becoming enraged at us out of their own excruciating inner pain and self-loathing. Also, even though they will not always admit to it and even though they might seem like they very much DO need us, people actually don’t want to be saved or rescued. On a deep and unconscious level, there is true resentment from a person who senses that we don’t trust them to figure it out on their own. We are all strong enough to save ourselves. We all need to ask for help from helping professionals and not rely on our family, friends, and significant others to take on our own pain or be the scapegoat for it. Luckily, through my own healing journey, I have been able to have boundaries and say no without any guilt of hurting the people who took or tried to take advantage of my kindness and generosity. Can anyone relate to having this happen to you?
Fawn types can also be known to over-explain themselves and to talk a lot. This is because they have very often been rejected, abandoned, dismissed, and invalidated about how they feel, think, or what they desire. They may have been given the silent treatment for having “big” emotions or for calling out the uncomfortable truth—the secrets, lies, addictions, and abuse of the family home. As adults, feeling the need to explain themselves is their way of trying to be understood and seen. They want to be loved, respected, and cherished. They want it to be okay that they are who they are. They want to be accepted and to belong.
As children, we needed to feel safe, loved, and like we belonged. If we didn’t get these needs met back then, guess what? We STILL need all of that, even as adults. Our wounded inner children still crave and need it. So, on an unconscious level, adults will still be looking for a Mommy or a Daddy in the form of love relationships to give them those needs that went unmet. It’s do-over time! Over-sharing about themselves also happens with fawn types because they want to be perceived as good, and because they were not seen as good in their family homes, they really, really need people to see that their intentions are good ones. However, this is a lot to put onto people and it is also a way the fawn type continues to self-abandon.
Shame is at the heart of all developmental trauma, and there are other reactions to shame as well, such as attacking self in the way of talking down to self, perfectionism, believing “I deserved it,” or “I’m bad.” Self-harm in the form of eating disorders, cutting, or suicide are also ways we can attack ourselves. Attacking others is when one becomes aggressive, feels contempt or rage, or blames or shames others. Homicide and school shootings happen when a trauma reaction focuses on attacking others. Another reaction is when a survivor withdraws and licks their wounds, pulls inward, isolates, and doesn’t trust others. The withdrawal reaction, however, can be a healing one because when we pull inward, we have the opportunity to reassess things, see the bigger picture of the abuse, trauma, and our shame responses, have some self-compassion, possibly find some humor and humility, and make other choices for our lives.
What Is Self-Abandonment?
We pretty well know what being abandoned looks and feels like. Most of us have been given the silent treatment, been ghosted or ignored out of nowhere, been neglected at times in childhood when we felt sad or hurt, or have been made to feel like we are invisible or don’t matter to certain people. Think about how you do this to yourself though. Again, as children we learned to self-reject and self-abandon in an effort to get other people (our abusive caregivers) to stop rejecting and abandoning us. And then we kept doing it because, well, it seemed like it would help us feel better to have all the external validation we could get from pleasing people and being helpful and good. Unfortunately, we come to realize eventually that this is not a good long-term solution. People are not always going to validate us and make us feel good. That is not realistic, and it is disempowering to lean on others to give to you what you can and should be giving to yourself. The reason people can reject and abandon us is simply BECAUSE we do it to ourselves first. This is how energy works. If we are not focused on ourselves, others won’t be focused on us either. But, what does this mean in real time?
This means that the rejection and abandonment you felt as a child needs to be seen, felt, validated, and sat with. It needs your attention. Just like a child needs validation and attention, so too does that little you who was abandoned by your caregivers and then by you when you opted to fawn and please your abusers instead of yourself. As an adult, you can re-parent yourself any time you want to!
It is not your fault that you abandoned yourself. Abusers required you to do this and shame and your inner critic forced you to make it a habit and then a pattern. So, you were groomed to do this since you were very little and perhaps even when you were still in the womb. This is typically generational trauma, so everyone in your ancestry was either doing the abusing or reacting to the abuse in some way and you were literally born into this energy or this environment. You were bathed in this patterning so to speak. Also, abandoning yourself actually calmed your nervous system for a little while so that you could survive until the next episode. Have you ever noticed how “calm” or “peaceful” you feel when you please someone and do it their way, even when it hurts you in the long run? Just to be clear, this is not true, long-term, or even healthy peace. But as you can probably see now as an adult, you are likely still fawning, pleasing, or performing for approval from people who may not give it to you and who really should not even have to give it to you—because YOU can learn to give it to yourself and then attract those who will SUPPORT your self-love instead of supporting your self-abandonment.
And, the even cooler news is that once you learn to stop abandoning yourself, you can be the example of how to do it (which, if you hadn’t noticed, was never taught to any of us in school) and then you can be the generational trauma ender if you so choose. This is the coolest part about trauma and abuse recovery. When you are ready, you can break the chain and set yourself free.
How Can We Change?
Logic does not win out in the effort to recover from trauma. Your brain cannot decide, based on intellectualizing, if someone is dangerous to us or not. Our logical mind will convince us that someone isn’t “so bad” and tell us we are overreacting in some way. It will tell us to “just have boundaries” and to “just stop fawning.” That seems like a logical, reasonable, and smart thing to do, right? But it’s not so easy to “just do it” because our nervous systems have been operating this way for so long and they are on autopilot. They force us to abandon ourselves in order to protect us and to keep us feeling safe and to survive. And then when we have our inner critic telling us that we are bad or unworthy if we don’t please people (shaming and self-rejection) and heaps on tons of shame and guilt (emotional reaction to the shaming and self-rejection) to ensure that we will do whatever it takes to calm the nervous system even if it hurts us long-term, well, then it’s really tricky to stop that neurochemical chain reaction. However, the good news is that, as adults, this is no longer something we need to do and, with some inner work, we can change it.
We can change this by re-wiring our brains so that our new autopilot is healthier for us. We can find out exactly how we self-reject and, ultimately, self-abandon. Through my work with you as your coach, I help you spot the ways you do this to yourself and we work on changing it. We work on getting you back into your body and grounding into it in safety. We counteract the shame spirals and limiting beliefs that keep you locked in abusive and codependent patterning—with others and, more importantly, with YOURSELF. When we can sit in our bodies again and be with the fear, sadness, anger, shame, and even the joy we were not allowed to feel as children and, as a result, probably even as adults today, we start to inhabit our bodies again. We stop the self-rejection, the self-abandonment, and the self-neglect. We start to learn how to calm our nervous systems in healthy ways. When we stop abandoning ourselves, we start to feel safe again in our bodies. We love ourselves in all of our “ugly” and “not-so-ugly” feelings. These feelings really are not ugly at all. They are WARRANTED and they are OKAY. Once we love ourselves fully and truly, no one can ever take it away again.
Making yourself a priority in your own life has far-reaching benefits. It is not selfish. It is more selfish of you to choose someone else’s agenda for you and to please them than it is to choose yourself. Why is this? This is because when you follow someone else’s plan for your life and allow them to control you, you feel anxiety and chaos in your body. This is heavy stress on your system. This stress is the cause for many chronic illnesses. This stress creates the desire to be away from your body and to numb out on substances, unhealthy food, or other forms of addiction, which also leads to health issues. It is also stressful to spread your energy out that much by giving too much time and energy doing someone else’s bidding so that they can feel good and normal. Normal means that you and I are the same and not different which is “good” to the body (in terms of calm and safety) and to the world (which, unfortunately, has a hard time with others being different). Our abusers need us to be just like them so they feel some control and safety in their nervous systems; the reality is, however, that your normal and their normal might be incompatible. This is a hard thing to realize, but it might be the truth.
This is living in disharmony, which creates havoc in your life. You can become less focused on your career and run the risk of losing your job. This also affects your financial stability, too. When this is how your life is, you don’t feel good emotionally and mentally. This affects your health on every level. When you are not healthy, you might not live as long as you want. And then the people who love you will lose you. See how selfish it is to abandon yourself?
When you stop self-abandoning and choose yourself and your true path to happiness and feeling whole, you become free. You have more time for play and fun. You celebrate yourself and laugh. You can live more spontaneously and with more ease and joy.
I am always in service to you and your highest life goals—but no longer in a fawning way!
