Fawning refers to consistently abandoning your own needs to serve others to avoid conflict, criticism, or disapproval. Fawning is also called the “please and appease” response and is associated with people-pleasing and codependency. “Fawn types seek safety by merging with the wishes, needs, and demands of others.
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.
Understanding the Fawn Response
The fawn response involves trying to appease or please a person who is both a care provider and a source of threat. 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.”
Fawning often first develops in early childhood when a traumatic event has been perpetrated by a parent or primary caregiver, explains Walker. A child who has been abused may learn to fawn to avoid any further abuse, such as physical violence, sexual abuse, or verbal abuse.
In a nutshell, “fawning” is the use of people-pleasing to diffuse conflict, feel more secure in relationships, and earn the approval of others. It's a maladaptive way of creating safety in our connections with others by essentially mirroring the imagined expectations and desires of other people.
The fawn response
In childhood, this might involve: ignoring your own needs to take care of a parent. making yourself as useful and helpful as possible. neglecting or failing to develop your own self-identity.
Smiling when discussing trauma is a way to minimize the traumatic experience. It communicates the notion that what happened “wasn't so bad.” This is a common strategy that trauma survivors use in an attempt to maintain a connection to caretakers who were their perpetrators.
fawn·ing ˈfȯ-niŋ ˈfä- : seeking or used to seek approval or favor by means of flattery.
A fourth, less discussed, response to trauma is called fawning, or people-pleasing. The fawn response is a coping mechanism in which individuals develop people-pleasing behaviors to avoid conflict, pacify their abusers, and create a sense of safety.
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.
It is often seen in people who endure narcissistic abuse. Fawning is also sometimes associated with codependency. Both are emotional responses that are triggered by complex PTSD. In both fawning and codependency, your brain thinks you will be left alone and helpless.
Hyper independence is a trauma response, often stemming from childhood trauma. When children are young, they rely on their caregivers for social and emotional learning to help them soothe their negative feelings through emotional regulation and teaching them how to use healthy coping mechanisms.
Childhood trauma also results in feeling disconnected, and being unable to relate to others. Studies have shown that adults that experience childhood trauma were more likely to struggle controlling emotions, and had heightened anxiety, depression, and anger.
Fawn is your body's stress response to try to please someone to avoid conflict. The goal of the fight, flight, freeze, and fawn response is to decrease, end, or evade danger and return to a calm, relaxed state.
All kinds of trauma create stress reactions. People often say that their first feeling is relief to be alive after a traumatic event. This may be followed by stress, fear and anger. Trauma may also lead people to find they are unable to stop thinking about what happened.
They feel that no one really wants to hear how terrible something was for them, whether it is being sexually assaulted, the suicide of a relative, or combat. People who have experienced any of these examples might feel that no one can understand the experience.
The symptoms of unresolved trauma may include, among many others, addictive behaviors, an inability to deal with conflict, anxiety, confusion, depression or an innate belief that we have no value.
The fawn is well camouflaged and has very little odor, which helps it hide from predators. Fawns instinctively lie motionless when approached by a potential predator. This seemingly helpless state is a behavioral adaptation that has helped white-tailed deer survive for ages.
We've all heard of the fight, flight, or freeze response in the face of trauma, but did you know that being a people pleaser can also be a trauma response? Fawning happens when an individual goes out of their way to make others feel comfortable at the expense of their own needs, in hopes of avoiding conflict.
Complex trauma describes both children's exposure to multiple traumatic events—often of an invasive, interpersonal nature—and the wide-ranging, long-term effects of this exposure. These events are severe and pervasive, such as abuse or profound neglect.