People-pleasing and the fawn trauma response
Listen: 8-min read
Summary: What is your trauma response:? Flight, fight, freeze, or fawn? In today’s musing, I focus on the fawn trauma response and how it’s related to people-pleasing.
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How would you describe your emotional landscape? Is it lush, relatively dry, barren, with seasons, or a mix?
A lush emotional landscape allows for an appropriate response to challenges: we might stand up for ourselves and protect our well-being, or we retreat in danger and give up when the situation is pointless, or we give in or compromise without feeling defeated.
You have all heard of the fight, flight, freeze, and fawn responses, which are essential to respond appropriately to dangerous situations.
However, when we experienced trauma in childhood, we often favored one of the four responses depending on the type of trauma and our personality. And this trauma response becomes habitual; we fall back into it when there are triggering situations later in life: so we keep ourselves busy, we hide away, or we respond with anger and contempt and therefore alienate others, or we bend backward to make others happy, It can also be that we have one primary response and a secondary one.
The latter ones fall into the category of people-pleasers, and Pete Walker coined them the Fawn Type.
As children, we are wired to create an emotional and psychological connection to our caregivers. This bond is less about food but about feeling nurtured, responded to, and for our needs being met. In every traumatic situation, the child has the dilemma of trying to protect itself and keep the attachment with the parent alive despite the threat and the pain.
Fawn Types develop the strategy to ignore their own needs, feelings, wants, and opinions to keep caregivers in a good mood. That way, they avoid being subject to shame, rejection, contempt, and physical or verbal abuse. They learn that standing up for themselves results in even greater punishment. Therefore it's best to stay under the radar at home, to do what they are asked to do, behave well, and not push buttons. Being a good kid/adult becomes a way of relating to the parents and other people, for example, in romantic relationships or at work.
The challenge is that while it was the only way the child could cope with the threat at home, the same response tactic is doing more harm as an adult, increasing the risk of being taken for granted, easily manipulated, and losing more and more self-worth.
Further consequences of fawning are increased stress levels to maintain the image of a kind, helpful and generous person, constant anxiety, and people disliking them, which is precisely the opposite of what they want to achieve.
And as the body communicates our inner world and needs through emotions and feelings, the fawn type has to disconnect from body sensations and instead numbs and cuts off from feelings and needs. Over time, this will lead to an even further disconnect from themselves and their environment. Checking out and dissociating is a way in social situations when pleasing doesn't work.
How to overcome pleasing people?
As it's a deeply rooted survival mechanism, it's, in most cases, an automatic response to create a safer environment.
And so, the first step is to create an awareness of when and with whom you habitually fawn:
You may tend to appease others to avoid conflict or confrontation. For example, at work, home, or with friends, you tend to say "Yes" and "No problem" when asked for another favor, even though you are already stretched thin. You tend to be overly concerned about what makes others happy and deny your own needs. You quickly blame yourself for other people's unhappiness or bad mood. You notice a constant fear and vigilance not to rock other people's boats. You tend to be overly concerned with what other people think of you and are easily influenced by different opinions.
Once you increase your awareness and mindfulness, start taking yourself seriously. This means becoming familiar with and accepting your feelings and emotions as valuable indicators of your inner world, values, and needs.
Inner Relationship Focusing is a wonderfully gentle way to establish a relationship with those places within that feel, even if they feel… numb. Of course, this will take time because you did your best not to have a connection with yourself. And yet, getting in touch with your inner landscape is essential to get comfortable with yourself, opening up to the rich interior of what makes us human, to nurture the inner child so that you can come back home to yourself.
When you have a better sense of your needs again, it's time to work on establishing better boundaries, being at ease to say No more often, learning to communicate your limits, and being assertive about what you like and don't like.
Last but not least, it will be essential to work on establishing a healthy sense of self-worth that is founded on your appreciation for yourself, not what other people think of you.
As you may have noticed, it can be very exhausting figuring out what everyone expects and likes about you, which can change from one day to the next. However, when you are clear about your values and qualities, you also get a sense of how your uniqueness enriches the lives of everyone around you. With this clarity, it is easier to have a stable center to return to again and again.
I hope you enjoyed this musing.
Until next Thursday, take good care.