Fawning is a trauma response that uses people-pleasing behavior to appease or supplicate an aggressor, avoid conflict, and ensure safety. This trauma response is exceedingly common, especially in complex trauma survivors, and often gets overlooked.
Sometimes, trauma and abuse survivors will fawn in response to their abuse in an effort to keep the abuser happy. While abuse is never the victim's fault, victims may feel responsible for their abuser's behavior and fawn in an attempt to prevent abusive behavior. Fawning can also appear as compliance to prevent harm.
What types of trauma cause the fawn response? The fawn response is most commonly associated with childhood trauma and complex trauma — types of trauma that arise from repeat events, such as abuse or childhood neglect — rather than single-event trauma, such as an accident.
Some key signs of the fawning trauma response include: You look to others to see how you feel in a relationship or situation. You have trouble identifying your feelings, even if you're alone. You feel like you have no identity or authentic self.
The fawn trauma response of the “pleasing” response is very present in narcissistic relationships and it is when we talk about trauma bonding or Stockholm syndrome. We become addicted to feeling the way we do and pleasing our abuser to stay safe.
There are actually 5 of these common responses, including 'freeze', 'flop' and 'friend', as well as 'fight' or 'flight'. The freeze, flop, friend, fight or flight reactions are immediate, automatic and instinctive responses to fear. Understanding them a little might help you make sense of your experiences and feelings.
People-pleasing is sometimes referred to as the “fawning” trauma response because it's so closely associated with overly-appeasing behaviors and cycles of codependency.
Examples of fawning include: “I hoped that by caring for them they might care for me.” “I never showed my true feelings for fear of retaliation.” “I was always walking on eggshells; I never knew when they would explode”
In the most extreme situations, you might have lapses of memory or “lost time.” Schauer & Elbert (2010) refer to the stages of trauma responses as the 6 “F”s: Freeze, Flight, Fight, Fright, Flag, and Faint.
Signs of Fawning
A person responding by fawning will be heavily focused on others in an attempt to pacify, please, and cater to the needs of others, rather than their own. Someone might declare themselves as non-confrontational, when really they're fawning. It's a learned habit from traumatic experiences.
Fight, flight, freeze, and fawn are a broader collection of natural bodily reactions to stressful, frightening, or dangerous events. This sympathetic nervous system response dates back to our ancestors coming face-to-face with dangerous animals.
Masking is a form of “social camouflage” where a person adapts their behaviour in order to be accepted in an environment. Fawning is an attempt to avoid conflict by appeasing people.
Fight: facing any perceived threat aggressively. Flight: running away from danger. Freeze: unable to move or act against a threat. Fawn: immediately acting to try to please to avoid any conflict.
The 4 Trauma Responses: Fight, Flight, Freeze, Fawn: Examining The Four Trauma Reactions. According to a research on the neurobiological consequences of psychological trauma, our bodies are designed to respond to perceived threats with a set of near-instantaneous, reflexive survival behaviors.
But repetitive, nearly constant apologies for every little thing—or, what Psychologist Paige Carambio, PsyD calls, “apologizing for existing”—can actually be an after-effect of trauma, a self-preservation technique survivors may think they still need to utilize in order to protect themselves.
Fawn. A fawn response, also called submit, is common among codependents and typical in trauma-bonded relationships with narcissists and abusers. When fawning, we seek to please and appease someone to avoid conflict. Internally, we're unable to regulate our emotions. We frantically look to someone else to normalize them ...
Intrusive memories
Recurrent, unwanted distressing memories of the traumatic event. Reliving the traumatic event as if it were happening again (flashbacks) Upsetting dreams or nightmares about the traumatic event. Severe emotional distress or physical reactions to something that reminds you of the traumatic event.
This might be a trauma response. If you find yourself refusing help — even when receiving help would make things much simpler for you — you could be operating from a place of trauma through a response known as hyper-independence.
Fawning is when people work to please those more powerful in the belief that if someone likes you then they will be nice to you. For some this might even look like flirting.
The three R's – Reaching the traumatised brain. Dr Bruce Perry a pioneering neuroscientist in the field of trauma has shown us to help a vulnerable child to learn, think and reflect, we need to intervene in a simple sequence.
If you live with complex trauma or post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), trauma dumping or oversharing could be a natural trauma response and coping mechanism.
Fawn & the Polyvagal framework
In terms of polyvagal theory, when we neurocept (subconsciously perceive) a certain level of danger, the fawn response is one of the possible trauma responses that our body uses for survival purposes. The fawn response involves both Fight/Flight and Freeze activation at the same time.