Fawning is a trauma response where a person develops people-pleasing behaviors to avoid conflict and to establish a sense of safety. In other words, the fawn trauma response is a type of coping mechanism that survivors of complex trauma adopt to "appease" their abusers.
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.
The fawn response, a term coined by therapist Pete Walker, describes (often unconscious) behavior that aims to please, appease, and pacify the threat in an effort to keep yourself safe from further harm.
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.”
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.
If you're a fawn type, you're likely very focused on showing up in a way that makes those around you feel comfortable, and in more toxic relationships, to avoid conflict. But the downside to this is that you're not necessarily being your most authentic self.
Freeze is your body's inability to move or act against a threat. Fawn is your body's stress response to try to please someone to avoid conflict.
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.
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.
attempting to win favor from influential people by flattery. synonyms: bootlicking, obsequious, sycophantic, toadyish insincere.
Fawning or people-pleasing can often be traced back to an event or series of events that caused a person to experience PTSD, more specifically Complex PTSD, or C-PTSD.
fawn·ing ˈfȯ-niŋ ˈfä- : seeking or used to seek approval or favor by means of flattery.
Fawning involves “consistently abandoning your own wants and needs to serve others to avoid conflict, criticism or disapproval”, McKenna says. It's also known as people-pleasing or codependence, and includes over-apologising, being hyper-aware of what others think and having an inability to set boundaries.
Middle English speakers adapted an Old English word meaning "to rejoice" to create the verb faunen, which shifted in spelling over time to become fawn.
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.
Eye contact is broken, the conversation comes to an abrupt halt, and clients can look frightened, “spacey,” or emotionally shut down. Clients often report feeling disconnected from the environment as well as their body sensations and can no longer accurately gauge the passage of time.
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.
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.
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.
The rarest personality type is the INFJ personality type, known as 'The Counselor'. INFJ is the rarest personality type across the population, occurring in just 2% of the population. It is also the rarest personality type among men. INFJ stands for Introversion, Intuition, Feeling, and Judging.
The 'fawn' response is an instinctual response associated with a need to avoid conflict and trauma via appeasing behaviors. For children, fawning behaviors can be a maladaptive survival or coping response which developed as a means of coping with a non-nurturing or abusive parent.
Simple to understand and identify fast. The four personality types are: Driver, Expressive, Amiable, and Analytical.