What is the Fawn Response? People-Pleasing as a Trauma Response
Do you find yourself giving more to others than you get back, avoiding confrontation at all costs, or changing your personality to fit in? If so, you might be engaging in the fawn response.
Understanding the Fawn Response
Recognising and understanding the fawn response can help you address the root cause of your people-pleasing tendencies. This awareness can enable you to break free from the associated anxiety and low self-esteem, and embrace your authentic self.
So, What Exactly is the Fawn Response?
You’ve probably heard of the fight, flight, and even freeze responses. But there’s another, lesser-known response to feeling threatened or unsafe: the fawn response. While fight, flight, and freeze are about protection through confrontation, escape, or playing dead, the fawn response seeks safety through appeasement when confronted with ‘danger’.
What is 'Danger'?
'Danger' doesn’t just refer to physical threats. Our brain perceives anything potentially threatening to our survival as dangerous. This could be conflict with someone you know logically wouldn’t physically harm you, or something as innocuous as not being accepted by a group. From an evolutionary perspective, being part of a group increases our chances of survival. Therefore, it’s important for us to feel like we fit in because there’s ‘safety in numbers’.
When You Fawn
When you fawn, the aim is to avoid conflict, prevent harm, and secure acceptance by excessively meeting others' needs and desires, often at the expense of your own. The idea is that if you meet their needs, you reduce the risk of them rejecting you or hurting you (physically or emotionally). Therefore, you feel less threatened.
Origins of the Fawn Response
The fawn response often develops when your needs in childhood haven’t been adequately met by those raising you. If you grew up in an environment where expressing yourself was frowned upon or met with criticism, rejection, or punishment, you likely learned to suppress yourself to appease caregivers or authority figures. Or perhaps you were bullied in school or experienced rejection or shame within your peer group. In these situations, appeasing caregivers, authority figures, or your peers became a survival strategy. Over time, this behaviour can become deeply ingrained.
Breaking Free
Understanding the fawn response and exploring how you were brought up can help you to start identifying the root cause of your difficulties. Even if you look back at childhood and think, ‘my childhood was fine’ or ‘it wasn’t a bad childhood,’ remember that the fawn response doesn’t only occur in the presence of physical danger. It can also develop where there is an absence of something critical to your emotional well-being. This absence can be perceived as threatening to your sense of safety and security, much like physical threats are.
The Fawn Response and Childhood Needs
For instance, as a child you need more than physical safety and sustenance. You also need emotional nurturance, validation, and a sense of belonging. If these needs are not met, you might perceive this lack as a threat to your well-being. In response, you may develop the fawn response, attempting to gain approval and affection by pleasing those around you. This behaviour, deeply rooted in the need for emotional survival, can carry into adulthood, manifesting as people-pleasing.
Identifying and Addressing the Root Cause of People-pleasing
One of the first steps to stopping people-pleasing is increasing your awareness of why you people-please and addressing the root cause. By understanding where these behaviours originate, you can begin to challenge and change them. If you want to get started click here for a FREE call with me and we can have a chat about how I can help you.
My approach uses evidence-based therapy techniques to help your brain process past experiences (even if you don’t consciously remember much from childhood). This allows your brain to better recognise and differentiate actual threats from perceived threats, and understand when the fawn response isn’t necessary. You can then relearn that it’s okay not to be preoccupied with what others think and feel, that you don’t need to seek approval from others, and that it’s okay to have your own needs and boundaries.
When you start addressing these root causes, you will feel much more able to practice setting healthy boundaries, say ‘no’ without anxiety and guilt, express yourself, and ask for what you want and need without fearing confrontation. Ultimately, this leads to embracing your authentic self.
Therapy for People-pleasing
If you relate to any of this, seeking support from a trauma-informed therapist can be a completely transformative. My trauma-informed approach can uncover the origins of your fawn response and guide you through the process of developing healthier, more balanced ways of relating to others (without feeling sick with anxiety and guilty when you put yourself first).
