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.
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.
What is fawning? Fawning is a trauma response where a person develops people-pleasing behaviors to avoid conflict and establish a sense of safety. In other words, the fawn trauma response is a type of coping mechanism that survivors of complex trauma adapt to "appease" their abusers.
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 is a trauma response that is typical in trauma-bonded relationships and common in codependency. Fawning behavior is an attempt to appease or please our partner to avoid conflict. When fawning, we prioritize our attachment in order to feel safe.
The fawn response is when an individual tries to avoid or minimize distress or danger by pleasing and appeasing the threat. Someone responding in this way would do whatever they can to keep the threat, or abuser, happy despite their own needs and wants.
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.
Pete Walker coined the term fawn and defines it through the following: “The Fawn response is one of four defensive reactions to ongoing trauma. Those who fawn tend to put the needs and wants of others ahead of themselves at the cost of the health of their own egos, and the protection of and compassion for themselves.”
In adolescents or adults, fawning behaviors can develop in response to an abusive relationship with an intimate partner. Fawns learn to overly accommodate the scary person so that they can manage their own fears. A fawn believes "if you're ok, then I am ok."
The responses are usually referred to as the 4Fs – Fight, Flight, Freeze, and Fawn and have evolved as a survival mechanism to help us react quickly to life-threatening situations.
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.
Fawning is an attempt to avoid conflict by appeasing people. They are both extremely common in neurodiverse people as it is a way for them to hide their neurodiverse behaviours and appear what is deemed to be “normal”.
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.
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.
(fawn over/on someone) to be extremely nice to someone more important than you because you want them to like you or give you something.
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.
People Pleasing
Many who experience quiet BPD identify with people-pleasing behaviors, but what is often occurring is a fawn response. Fawning is a component of the fight-flight-freeze response that usually develops during childhood to evade abuse and mistreatment from adults.
Childhood trauma is often a root cause of codependency. They don't always result, but for many people codependent relationships are a response to unaddressed past traumas. One reason may be that childhood trauma is usually family-centered: abuse, neglect, domestic violence, or even just divorce and fighting.
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.
Over-explaining means describing something to an excessive degree, whereas oversharing is the disclosure of an inappropriate amount of information and detail about your personal life. These fall under the fawn trauma response (see podcast #302 for more information on the different trauma responses).
You may experience a range of emotions such as grief, depression, anger, and anxiety.
A great strategy for dealing with narcissistic traits in the workplace, and even sometimes in families, is what Dr. Ramani calls “narcissistic fluffing.” If you really need something from them, flatter them as much as possible. Flatter them, “fluff” their ego, and then get what you need and get out.