Photo by Mario Cikarski
Last weekend, I fawned twice in two days. Both times it was with women around my mom’s age. Both times, I felt ashamed — in the moment and especially afterward.
“The fawn response,” explains psychologist Dr. Natalie Feinblatt, “develops when your nervous system learns that safety depends on staying agreeable and avoiding conflict, even at the expense of your own needs, identity, and voice.”₁ Just like fight, flight, and freeze, fawning is an adaptive, survival-oriented automatic nervous system response to stress. They can also be trauma responses.² These aren’t behaviors we consciously choose…which is why the shame they can bring up is especially worth unpacking.
Shame is slippery and often illogical. To me, a shame reaction makes sense after I’ve done something I knew was wrong. But shame after an automatic reaction? That needs airing out. Stress and trauma responses aren’t character flaws; they’re survival responses.³ It just compresses us, keeping us bound up in false conceptions of our unworthiness.
What does fawning feel like?
My sensations when I fawn: My solar plexus becomes transparent, dropping down and backwards in space. Emotionally, I feel disempowered; grasping. The third chakra,4 located behind the navel and around the solar plexus, is the energetic and somatic seat of our personal power. So it’s no wonder that my somatic experience of fawning manifests as a feeling of weakness there.
Being overly permissive
In the first fawning conversation, the woman I was speaking with was referencing a book where the author details aspects of his traumatic childhood. Instead of letting her say, “I won’t share those details with you,” and simply continuing to listen, I urgently told the woman that it would be okay if she did. In truth, I prefer not to hear traumatic details unless I’ve grounded myself and have my space-holding hat on. I’m still not entirely sure what led me to that unsolicited reaction…clarity pending.
The urge to explain
During the second interaction, I over-explained why I don’t have time to join up with the local plein air (outdoor) painting group, citing the demands of parenting a four-year-old. I have parenting to do, yes…but mostly, I’m just not interested in painting landscapes. Maybe someday.
Feeling the need to explain ourselves is a classic fawning/people-pleasing reaction. It’s very common, and it’s nothing to be ashamed of. I write that for you, and also to remind the fawning part of me that I don’t blame her. While she developed to be adaptive, her services are no longer needed. But that doesn’t mean I need to castigate her.
Disrupting unhelpful patterns
These two fawning instances happening so close to each other was ultimately helpful; they made me aware of a pattern I’d like to disrupt. I feel awful when I fawn. Don’t you? It’s a bummer to feel pulled into over-explaining myself, or to initiate self-abandoning permissiveness with someone. Especially when, as in the case with the woman talking about the book, they’re not even asking for permission.
The core reason I don’t want to fawn anymore is because I don’t want to feel the shame that I associate with it. In place of shame, I want to feel self-aware, empowered, and intentional during conversations. I’m bringing this awareness into future interactions, reminding myself that conversations with people in certain demographics (usually people older than me) can bring up this tendency.
Supporting your nervous system
If you’re looking for direct support around fawning, feel free to reach out to me to book a 1:1 somatic session (learn more here).
Stress ←———→ Trauma. Thinking about them on a continuum can be helpful. Stress is an unavoidable part of life. Trauma is extreme stress. I like Peter Levine’s definition of trauma: “People are traumatized when our ability to respond to a threat is in someway overwhelmed.”
The third chakra is known as Manipura, translating to The City of Jewels in Sanskrit. I love connecting that imagery to the sensations of authenticity and self-assuredness.
