The Fawn Response & People Pleasing: The Codependent Heart

Traumatic events impact us in many ways. The effects can be obvious or subtle, often both. Most importantly, the trauma is that they change our relationship with our Self & the world. Substance use, for example, is often a coping mechanism, for our inability to deal with stuck/denied emotions from our past, that we experience as a tsunami in the present. 

“Fawn types seek safety by merging with the wishes, needs, and demands of others. They act as if they unconsciously believe that the price of admission to any relationship is the forfeiture of all their needs, rights, preferences, and boundaries.” Peter Walker, Complex PTSD from Surviving to Thriving,2013

Walker coined the term ‘fawning’ to describe what he observed to be a fourth type of response to threat, along with fight, flight, and freeze.
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Fawning involves changing our behaviour or holding back on our opinions and desires to please another person, and to avoid any conflict. It often develops in early childhood when a traumatic event has been perpetrated by a parent or primary caregiver (Walker). To survive the child may neglect/dismiss/deny their own feelings, opinions, wants, and needs.  So, the important thing to note here is due to its early development, it will likely be unconscious to us.

It significantly distorts our world perception and creates a pattern of learned behaviour carried into later life. One that may often seem okay, because you can continue to have a successful external life – get married, have a successful career, etc., while having a high tolerance to your own internal distress or discomfort. In fact, often your people pleasing behaviour may be appreciated & rewarded by others.

There are some common signs that a person tends towards a fawn, or people-pleasing, response, such as:

• Seeking the thoughts, opinions, and feelings of others to determine one’s own thoughts, opinions, and feelings
• Difficulty identifying one’s feelings
• A perceived lack of personal identity
• Constantly dismissing one's internal experience
• Instinctively appeasing the other person at the first sign of conflict
• Neglecting one’s own values and beliefs and yielding to those of others

Common challenges and emotions faced by those who exhibit this trauma response include:

• Deep feelings of anger and guilt toward oneself
• Difficulty saying ‘no’ to others
• Taking on more responsibility, even when already feeling overwhelmed
• Difficulty setting & maintaining clear personal boundaries
• Often may find yourself feeling resentful
• Feelings of stress or discomfort when called upon for an opinion

According to Walker, ‘it is this [fawning] response that is at the centre of the codependents’ behaviour’. For example, a young child may quickly learn that to protest or ‘talk-back’ to a parent leads to an even more frightening situation.  You may have grown up in a family or culture where anger wasn’t okay, or challenging authority and the truth was denied, and secrets were kept. If you are denied the opportunity to speak for yourself, then you will learn to stay quiet. Therefore, never developing the healthy communication skills needed to navigate life, and ask for what you want appropriately.  

Though the fawn response is initially an attempt at survival, it is maladaptive to a healthy and balanced life, as is any habitual response. To abandon oneself to appease others and prevent conflict, is to lose any sense of true agency, in addition to preventing any experience of true intimacy. Something that can be particularly challenging if you have grown up in a family or culture where the needs of the individual are deemed less important than those of the collective. 

In therapy, you can learn about your specific trauma response and how it is used as a means of coping with triggers and stress. In place of maladaptive coping behaviours, you will discover healthier ways of dealing with & processing thoughts, feeling, and memories and ultimately learn how to be in a healthier relationship with yourself, and consequently others within and outside of your own culture.

This is one of the benefits of the co-dependency group I run. (see my Services tab for details)
Thank you to Khiron Clinics for their contribution to this blog. .