Trauma and Fawning
Trauma and fawning – what is the fawn response?
In the simplest of terms, the fawn response is our tendency to people-please – put the needs of others before our own. When doing so, there is a certain level of self-abandonment that occurs.
Trauma is not black and white, it has a certain spectrum. Each individual victim of trauma has their own degree to which they choose to please others and ignore their own desires and feelings.
Like with anything else related to mental health, we want to answer the questions of „why am I like this“ or „why is this happening to me“ in order to identify your own patterns and heal from them.
Why does the fawn response exist?
There are many different speculations to reasons as to why the fawn response exists. In this article, we're going to cover the three most common ones: childhood abuse, unwell caregiver, and surrounding influence.
1.) Childhood abuse
When one experiences abuse at a very young age, they don't have the power or confidence to speak about their own needs and say that that's not where they want to be. Instead, we put our own needs aside and try and please our abuse to minimise the level of harm. When reaching adult life, childhood abuse victims tend to continue pleasing others before pleasing themselves with the sole motivation of not getting harmed. This organising principle is very subconscious and makes the process of setting boundaries much harder.
2.) Unwell caregiver
If our primary childhood caregiver is physically or mentally unwell, we as children feel the urge to help them. This is because we also feel like we need them. Children are very codependent and their caregiver serves as a symbol of their whole existence.
Children wish to see their caregiver alive and well in order to feel alive and well themselves. In our adult life, we then tend to ignore our own personal instincts and focus on what other people need through the very pure desire of just making sure everyone else is okay, giving us a sense that we will, in turn, be okay, as well.
3.) Surrounding Influence
This type of fawn response needn’t necessarily have anything to do with trauma. It can be in regards to the culture, the religion, or any other means of surrounding influence with a moral norm of prioritising other people over yourself.
It really comes down to taking the given values – and going overboard with them. When the act of giving is seen nobler than the act of caring for yourself, sometimes people translate that into being maximally giving, taking away too much from themselves in the process.
This fawn response isn’t derived from a traumatic experience but from the founding principle of wanting to be a good person.
How to approach fawn response?
It’s really hard to recognise the fawn response as something needing to be addressed and/or changed as we’re used to people liking us for being so giving and lacking selfishness.
Trying to stop a fawn response can be quite an intimidating experience. It’s not so much about that we won’t please the other person, but the embedded feeling that we ourselves will be harmed in the process. Challenging these principles can evoke an often irrational sense of terror.
What you need to do is to gather the courage to sit through the fear when recognising your fawn response and familiarise yourself with these scary unknown feelings in order to make them domestic.
In conclusion
The fawn response often occurs as a means of evading harm being inflicted onto yourself because of the dynamic of your relationship with your caretaker or founding moral principles you learned to obey. In order to set boundaries and keep your mental health at bay, you need to learn to love giving to yourself as much as you love pleasing others and identify the irrationality of fears that are preventing you from doing so in the first place.