The Fawn Response: People Pleasing, Self-Abandonment, and Standing Up for Yourself

hello and welcome to being well I'm Forest Hansen if you're new to the show thanks for listening today and if you've listened before welcome back we've recently done a series of episodes on the stress responses including dedicated episodes on the fight flight and freeze responses and then before those episodes we did one on self-abandonment that I thought served as kind of an episode on the fwn response and we then got so many requests for a dedicated episode on the Fawn response that that's what we're going to be doing today and to help me explore that

I'm joined as usual by clinical psychologist Dr Rick Hansen so Dad how are you doing today I'm good and I love this material yeah I really loved it too um it's been incredibly helpful for me personally to explore it because I feel like I've learned a lot about all of these different responses including how they show up in my life and I think that one of the parts of it that has been particularly useful for me and I hope useful for other people as well has been understanding the stress respones as being functional in nature

I think that we can often take like a very pathologizing stance towards our uh our responses to stressful situations and by Framing them appropriately as like a way of solving the single most most important challenge that we face in life which is the challenge of survival can really help us give ourselves a little bit of extra credit around the behaviors that um that we've taken on habitually what do you think about that I think that's a great Framing and and I like this material a lot because it's rooted in attachment Theory which has at this

point getting close to a 100 Years of research background uh when you go all the way into the depths of it going all the way back to the work of Conrad lorence and you might have seen the famous photograph of him uh with young geese who had imprinted on him as their attachment figure following behind him marching along so there's a rich robust research tradition here and it's also extremely practical uh in terms of its applications for relationships today as well as healing in her wounds so it's it's great it's right at the intersection of

a lot of cool stuff awesome so most people are probably pretty familiar with the first three stress responses that we've explored in detail through this series fighting somebody else running away from them and then freezing but the fun response is a bit newer in terms of its uh incorporation into this model in a kind of formal way one of the first people who did that was actually former podcast guest Pete walker uh who came to it through his work on childhood trauma and complex PTSD so while fighting is a conflict strategy and flight and freeze

are avoidance strategies fawning is a different kind of approach it's called an appeasement strategy which is when you try to manage dangerous situations by moving into relationship with whatever the source of the threat is so we give the person what we think that they want in order to diffuse a stressful or a potentially dangerous situation so Dad I would love it if you kind of took a moment here to make this clear for people by giving some examples of what the fond response looks like in practice or um maybe even draw on your experience here

working with people in clinical practice describing different patterns of behavior that might come up sure I think of it in very fundamental ways is imagine a a young child on a playground with a bully and the child has different options the child can fight the bully who is bigger stronger and has maybe buddies who are helping or the child can can flee maybe the child can just freeze and get really quiet and even space out and almost dissociate or the child can in effect plead with the bully please don't hurt me go submissive uh and

plate the bully and even make some kind of an offering like you're so strong you're so big I know you can hurt me uh you're so smart those are familiar territory another example that Rings really true to me is grounded in our primate history and these are images of monkeys who are deferring and I'm going to do a physical gesture here they they defer to the alpha and in that deferral that submission that helps them get out of the conflict they are moving into gestures of embodied shame so shame and fawning are very close together

anthropologically and even other mammal species uh that we've diverged from further back in the tree of evolution like dogs they will roll over and show their bellies they will submit and in that subm Mission uh they end the conflict and they accept their standing in the social ladder these are very Primal aspects here there's a lot of biology in the mix in our own psychology so for those who were listening and might not have actually seen what you did there you kind of curled yourself up you brought your head down almost a kind of uh

Bowing in the direction of the person that you're doing that fwn response towards and I think it can kind of be helpful to look at some of the behaviors maybe for people that could be associated with this so what are we talking about here we're talking about being excessively compliant and accommodating to avoid conflict or harm typically by diffusing different kinds of stressful situations so here are a few common examples of that first people pleasing and self-abandonment we talked about that uh in detail during the episode on self-abandonment but if you didn't listen or watch

that one and this is just an excessive need to please other people often at the expense of your own needs so you're putting other people's needs chronic ially above your own this could look like having a hard time saying no to other people it could look like chronic self sacrifice uh some people even do this by what I'll call borrowing trouble this tendency of getting involved in other people's issues or problems in an attempt to diffuse or deescalate them because there's this feeling that as long as they're okay I'm okay and that's kind of the

basis of the fond response if we just keep swimming if we just keep keep it all cool inside of the collective then I can manage the threats because most of the real threats in our lives these days are social they're other people and certainly historically when we're evolving in these very small very tight net hunter gatherer bands the uh the greatest threat to your survival was almost always another human so and then tied to that that feeling of looking out for um threats or trouble in the outside world there's this kind of hyper awareness this

could be a hien sensitivity to others emotions or needs and this can lead to a kind of anticipatory compliance for people getting along with somebody else before they've even really asked you to get along with them you're anticipating a need and you're trying to meet it before it even shows up alongside that is hypervigilance this is the habit of constantly scanning for different kinds of threats and if you are a faer there might be a bit of a tendency to see threats even when the threats are pretty mild or maybe aren't AR even there at

all and then finally there's this fear of conflict I think that lies underneath everything else if you're more of a fighter generally you don't fear conflict as much because there's this sense of yourself as being able to succeed when combat or I'm let say that again because there's a sense of the self as being able to succeed when conflict does show up like you can overcome it through a sense of your own like bigness and strongness same in some ways with fleeing like you know that you can get away with it freezing is a little

bit more complicated and we talked about it during that episode but I think that faers really dislike conflict uh during one of the early episodes I described myself as being a bit more of a faer as a personality structure and I definitely don't like conflict as you know Dad like I try to avoid it uh under almost all circumstances we talked about that a little bit during the fight response episode as well and then a complicated symptom for many faers and we're going to talk about this at more length later is a lack of self-identity

and this is an overr on other people for comfort for validation and underneath it all for a sense of selfworth and I think that that's a piece of it that I really wanted to focus on here today dad so I'm wondering what do you think about that beautiful list and I hope that people can listen to that list and I'll just do a quick review of the headlines people pleasing difficulty saying no chronic self-sacrifice uh borrowing trouble hyper awareness and hyperv vigilance and an avoidance of conflict and Underneath It All issues with self-identity so as

people listen to that they can maybe locate themselves or locate others or not um what stands out for me in all that are two things first the power structure inherent in fawning or appeasing is an object relations of other and self as a kind of a relationship Paradigm in which the other is more powerful than oneself fawning is a form of submission Behavior to a powerful other and what can happen with time is a reinforcing of the notion of their power in my weakness and in that can come a kind of development of Shame inadequacy

related to all that submission Behavior turbocharged even by our own biology shame and deference uh even a shameful collapse is actually a survival strategy because it gets you off the battle field with the alphas inside your band or even between bands but that's obviously not good for someone over the long long the shadow though that I've seen that's really interesting of that development of Shame is that also the development of contempt for the ones we are appeasing the ones we are fawning over because overtly we have to act like we think they're wonderful or they're

they're bigger and more powerful than we are but the shadow of that often gets developed to kind of contempt toward them uh with an understanding that deep down inside we're tricking them to make them think that we're submitting but actually we're uh playing a game we're putting on a false self that they're somehow believing it's a weird combination isn't it the development of both a kind of growing sense of Shame inside and contempt uh for those that you are appeasing that really speaks to me dad about the roots of this behavior and that's something that

I really wanted to ask you about here because I know that it's it's um it's something that you have a lot of affinity for and we have access all of us to all of these stress responses all the time everyone can be a fighter a faer a flyer a Runway a freezer we all have all of these but they also have behaviors associated with them and for everybody we fall into habits of behavior we fall into habits of Behavior Uh in our romantic lives and we fall into habits of behavior and how we respond to

stress so T most of the time people will gravitate toward one of these different ways of responding to stress and often these patterns start to emerge and can even become pretty fixed in us pretty early on in life and I'm really curious Dad how you think about this like could you describe the um the kinds of environments or the kinds of experiences a person might have that might lead them to develop more of a um a fun response to stress as a as a habit of being I'm thinking here both about a child's relationship to

caregivers parents and also the child's relationship to peers and that contempt shame Dynamic that you were talking about really I think is like core to this particularly in terms of the caregiver relationship oh very interesting yeah so uh to some extent uh if a parent is erratic and volatile uh then a child is going to be more likely to freeze um in the face of the parent but also try to prevent problems and a form of appeasing in a sense is that child who becomes in a healthy sense over the life of a child who

then becomes an adult um along the way early on in healthy ways parents perform self functions they become selfobjects for the very young emerging self of the child and then in healthy ways the parents gradually with withdraw doing that for the child and more and more the child could do it for themselves U on the other hand if you're a child and you've got a parent who did not have healthy development psychologically themselves the child then can become a kind of module that the narcissistic or borderline parent needs to plug in to their self structure

to feel stable and coherent uh as a as a self and not fragmented and vulnerable to catastrophic falling apart so then the child has the experience of not being regarded as a thou as a being in their own ride but as a means to the end of the parents who gets plugged in to calm or soothe plate uh to keep the parent happy basically so that's that's one pathway that I think people many people can relate to the other is one in which socially uh humans are pack animals and there you are in the playground

and maybe you're young for your grade or maybe you look a little different uh you wear glasses or you don't have a typical I don't know body type for whatever reason throw in racism and other things uh you know you just feel like you have to appease you have to appease the power structure you have to get off their radar you have to give them what they need you have to lead with a demonstration of subordination you know so they won't attack you you have to keep signaling your difference and you know that can get

internalized as a way of being alongside a lot of unexpressed anger that's another question for people in the Fawn style you know fawning or appeasing uh where's the anger where did it go and how can you help you know in useful ways process it these days for the freeze response and the appeasement response I think that repression is a huge piece of the puzzle pretty much everyone has access to pretty much every emotion that's that's the way it is so if you're not feeling something all of the time I don't want to be excessively psychoanalytic

here but by and large those feelings are going somewhere yeah so the question is like where are they going and how can we um Express them out in healthy ways as we age to really boil this down to really oversimplify a little bit here fawning is a great way for a wise and intelligent child to manage difficult emotionally unreliable or unpredictable caregivers it's just a great way to do it and a lot of that uh that concept for me when I first bumped into it came from drama of the gifted child which is by Alice

Miller the first chapter of it is I think the single best chapter I've ever read in a book about psychology um would strongly recommend it to just about everybody and this is one of the reasons that the Fawn response is commonly associated with PTSD and particularly complex PTSD which also often comes from situations where you had unstable or unreliable caregivers growing up and if we go back up to that list of behaviors that I had right people pleasing uh difficulty saying no chronic self-sacrifice borrowing trouble hyper awareness hyper vigilance what are situations where those are

like helpful behaviors oh it's you're a 9-year-old kid needing to constantly um manage and evaluate the emotional bandwidth of your parent at any given time because you don't know whether or not this is going to be a day where they're incredibly kind to you or day where they just randomly blow up for no particular reason and so I think that that is a huge part of this pattern for people it's not the only reason that the fond response can come along and I'm sure that there are people listening who are like that wasn't my situation

and I'm a total flaer there's a lot of different ways into this for people but I would imagine 60 70% of the time that's a big piece of the puzzle for people I think that's huge um thinking about other factors I've been really struck by temperament and in the history of psychology uh there's this almost tension between nature and nurture and and then you have people who are strong Advocates sort of emphasizing the nurture aspect of it here kind SW back the nature aspect people who uh really emphasize temperament and then there's research that shows

that a lot of the variation in attachment Styles is highly affected by variation in temperament not just the ways the parents are acting you know it's a big picture and one of the things that I've seen is that some children are much more socially attuned than others and they're much more sensitive to what's happening in the interpersonal field they're highly empathic uh they're very connected so they're going to be reading their parents more and also the more powerful kids in school more and are going to be tending to you know appease them then you have

other people sometimes who are very affected by any kind of an emotionally negative environment so they tend to be conflict adverse like oh they they get very uncomfortable when other people are uncomfortable so they want to enter into those situations as a kind of soothing balm to chill people out I think that's a factor um we could probably keep going with some other ones here like being invalidated a lot you know you want to you know seek approval to balance those wounds inside seek approval by being means to the end of others or you know

taking care of the needs of others by appeasing them let's say um if you've been criticized a lot or maybe it's your cultural role that you're supposed to take care of the needs of others um that's important too I'm I've been very struck by situations in which routinely you know the culture cultural norms are that girls or women are responsible for meeting the relationship needs of others they're they're the ones who are supposed to you know manage the the emotional climate in the home so that if there's a problem in the home uh it's their

fault I've just seen that in go divorce situations it's not fair but frankly very often kids in a heterosexual environment let's say kids will blame their mother for a divorce young kids especially even if the dad frankly has been a real jerk so I want to go back dad as a bit of a transition from uh context to solutions to what you were saying a little bit ago about the the small self and the big scary other yeah and this I think gets to the roots of the behavior of people pleasing and uh people pleasing

is a big term online these days in social media people use it a lot and it's really interesting that when people talk about people pleasing they often talk about it as an isolated Behavior as opposed to talking about it as a uh as a contextual attempt to solve a problem so what's the problem that people pleasing is trying to solve well exactly what you said right big other small self so it's based on essentially a fear of Abandonment a fear of rejection a fear of what will happen if you are left alone and other people

don't like you like why do you need to please the other it's because just being by yourself isn't enough and this is very understandable we're big pack animals we are not built to be on our on our own so wanting to to um to appease others and preserve our role in the band and all of that is completely understandable like that's not something to judge yourself for inside of having that behavior but it can be helpful to understand where it's coming from right so what's happening here is that the person who is uh doing the

pleasing Behavior has a fundamental view that safety is outside in we're safe when others are happy so this makes their happiness a critical problem for us because safety is arguably our most fundamental need and so inside of this is that inherent power Dynamic you were talking about dad our um our social belonging our comfort our safety all these very important things are inherently dependent on other people we get it from them rather than being able to Source it ourselves and hearing Life's a huge problem because we can't control other people we can't actually manage their

behavior in the way that we're trying to with the fond response they can always act in ways that we don't want them to act so we're stuck in the Eternal possibility that one day they'll just do the thing that we don't want them to do and this activates intense and chronic anxiety for people a lot of the time um because there's this underlying feeling that we don't actually have as much control as we want to have so Dad this is a big constellation of problems here uh this is a big issue that I've kind of

put before you I'm wondering how you start to work with people on this category of issues so somebody walks into the office and you identify or they say to you that this is a fundamental problem for them how do you start unpacking this with somebody else first off let me just say that your analysis is really excellent and grounded and it it rings true to the heart we can feel what you're saying so that's really really good I'm imagining the experience of someone who is pleasing others people pleasing and what strikes me about it is

that there's a sense that there's always nothing in the bank account over there that all the deposits I made yesterday in that relationship are now gone and today I have to make new deposits in the pleasing you bank account otherwise you won't be pleased with me you won't like me you won't respect me you won't see me as a being in my own R H I have to do this all over again and in people who are drawn into the Fawn response there's a kind of exhaustion it's like a quiet desperation oh my gosh I

have to make yet another offering today no matter how many offerings I made to you previously propitiating that Angry God image H they're gone there's nothing in the account anymore and I've got to do it again today and there there's no end to this so there's a almost a throw line applied here you know like a life of quiet desperation to try to always be good enough and to resell them on your worth yet again today that's that's in there often for people so what to do about it um one thing is to develop object

constancy kind of the classic psychological developmental step where you start to realize that it may be that you're with someone that you have to endlessly appease to that extent try to get out of that relationship realistically but very often these days the person who's drawn in who attachment style if you will is sort of an appeasing fawning style uh doesn't realize that they don't have to do it so much anymore so we have two parts here we have the part in which people who have a certain attachment Style look for others with whom they can

enact that attachment style so we have to first of all watch the tendency to be drawn into situations where we constantly have to prove ourselves and then help ourselves over time to exit or from those situations to the extent we can and balance them with situations where other people um are reasonable and they have reasonable expectations for you they truly see your efforts they are themselves emotionally balanced they don't need endless supplies coming from you to you know maintain their stability as a as a self uh and then in that second category you can help

yourself realize that you don't have to keep doing those old scripts the bank account is actually already reasonably full and you don't have to feel desperate that you need each day to make new deposits in it what I'm describing then is based on a kind of discernment so you understand things but then based on understanding them you help yourself take actions that then when they go well as they do usually you emotionally internalize uh the results of them going well so that you can help yourself shift into a different way of being so I just

want to start there those are two things right off the top that kind of have a big impact what do you think about that so far then I could offer a couple other suggestions I I think they're right on and I also am wondering about the behavior chain of fawning which is a very forced question to ask right kind of a little CBT is sort of approach here right there's the perception that something has gone wrong inside of somebody else's life inside of the social structure around them maybe there's there's somebody who's even quite close

to them who's upset about something there's an anxiety that comes in about that being the case there's there's you know a fear response to call it what it is there's that underlying sense of ungrounded things are changing maybe this will impact me even if it doesn't impact me I'm a very empathic person so it's kind of empathic empathically impacting me already cuz I don't want them to feel bad there's all of that that's coming and then the behavior activates so the behavior might be uh trying to sooth them might be going out of your way

to U make that person feel better all of these different behaviors that deployed in the right way are wonderful behaviors like I I would I would love to be surrounded by fod response people as opposed to fight response people or or whatever else right like that that sounds like a good time for me um but it has to be appropri 90 days or 90 minutes exactly and then it probably starts to drive you crazy yeah absolutely that's right but like C yeah yeah but it comes it comes from a good place is the point that

I'm trying to make here yeah so that behavior activates here we are we're in that moment okay if you were working with that person where in that chain would you look to try to intervene oh if I follow you right in your behavior chain you're starting with appraisal okay and then there is some kind of unpleasant emotion a negative emotion arises that then is managed by the fawning Behavior yeah that's where you're getting at right okay so yeah I think on the appraisal side um it can really help people to realize that uh some of

their appraisals that somehow they are the solution they have to be the solution to other people's problems it's just not true and I want to highlight if I could here a sense of demand so in the fond frame there's a sense of demand oh your need is my problem I have to solve your problem I have to and one of the first things a person can help thems do is to slow it down and to create more of a SP face more of a buffer in which a question can arise huh do I really have

to solve their problem just because they're upset does that mean it's my fault just because they're upset is it my responsibility to help them feel better really and to give yourself some space so you can really explore that for yourself that's very helpful and underneath these more cognitive appraisals is a fundamental worldview that's very experiential worldview almost sounds abstract it's a sense of are you whole and complete and differentiated and independent as you are or are you do you need are you and do you need to be a kind of extension of other people almost

as if if their back itches you know their own hand moves to scratch it but somehow it's your role to scratch their back if it itches you're an extension of them other distinct from feeling differentiated and feeling fundamentally independent of other people and the more that emotionally a person can establish a healthy sense which you've alluded to already that they are the solution they are the primary source of their safety um you meet your most fundamental needs by addressing them yourself rather than somehow meeting the needs of others who will then ously scratch your back

somehow reciprocally right um your selfworth is based on who you are much more than what you do the more that you can grow into that way of being then when you feel it more and more viscerally you see other people as having needs you're not cold or indifferent you could still be compassionate you you can take care of their needs one of the chapters in my book making great relationships is give them what they want you know there's a place for giving other people what they want and not being stingy about it but that's really

different from the compulsion the demand aspect that is is baked into the Fawn response yeah it's it's about being at Choice here yeah that's I think what I was kind of getting to when saying there are aspects about these behaviors that going to be super positive if you're in a situation at work where you don't really have a lot of options manager shouting at you you're there in the line of fire volitionally kicking on a little fond response to get them off your back is not the worst Choice a person can make like you do

not always have to stand strong in your convictions and life like we're all we're all just trying to live here we're all trying to solve real problems get through the day um make our lives as good as they can possibly be understanding the real constraints that we have and and sometimes I think this thing can can happen in the discourse around mental health and personal growth particularly you know on on Tik Tok or Instagram social media platform of your choice where it becomes all about you know I stood in my truth that day and and

that was that was what was really important to me but like standing in my truth in that way really caused actually a lot of problems in my life I'm like I don't know man maybe it's okay to not stand in your Truth for a second just to make your life way easier that day and to be volitional about that choice so yeah sometimes you can kick on some of these behaviors in a useful way but it's all about the agency aspect of it like are you deliberately choosing to do that or are you doing it

because you are activating the routine that's been programmed into you by painful experiences I think in particular because there's shame uh often woven into the fawning response for the reasons that we described it's really important as we talk about it and for people in general to understand it that when you're outnumbered or when you're just dealing with structural headwinds when you're the only woman on the board or person of color let's say or young person on the board or on the committee uh in the office on the retreat it's just harder to speak up to

disagree to chart your own course and it's important for people to not judge themselves too harshly about how hard it can be to um walk to the beat of A Different Drummer you know to quote theow again that's important right the other thing I wanted to say about um Breaking Free of this approach altogether uh it's helpful sometimes to ask yourself what would somebody else do who doesn't so automatically knuckle under and signal submission models are really helpful having like a model of somebody else out there that you can think about can be super useful

for people yeah and I think about people who are not aggressive jergs and who maintain a stability of dignity and self-respect and individuation they are their own person while also being really connected being warm being kind being socially appropriate so you can think about who are those people in different settings and how might how might they act uh and then imagine yourself acting in that way and if it would be okay for them to act in a particular ways well maybe it's worth trying on that way of acting yourself that's the other thing to talk

about here which is testing other people what happens when you break out of your familiar scripts if you've had a familiar script of being differential and subordinate and you're the friend who's mainly the giver and they're mainly the taker that's a kind of appeasing fawning structure what happens when you start taking more for yourself and you start nudging them to be more giving not just taking you might even name things and maybe after they go but then can you settle into a new equilibrium or on the other hand are they just locked in to writing

you into a certain role to shoving you into that you know round hole even though you're a square peg and that's a lesson right there when you run those kind of tests about who other people are and who they're prepared for you to be I want to ask you a little bit more dad about um the shame aspect of it which you've brought up a couple of times here and I wonder about the the shame self-acceptance uh Continuum here if we think about them as opposite ends of a pull because inside of the fwn response

is this feeling that we are dependent again we keep on coming back to that we're dependent on the approval on the Love on the relationship of other people in order to keep us safe and if we're dependent on other people's approval and we have a concern about our own interior in some way and that's the basis of Shame we're constantly worried that if other people find out who we actually are we will lose their love and therefore we need to constantly prove ourselves like you were talking about dad with that bank account every single day

day after day after day so they don't actually find out how fill in the blank we are inside our problematic nature our deep um our deep fear or deep shame whatever it is and I wonder about self-acceptance as a lot of ways an antidote to that being able to embrace who you are accepting your your strengths and your shortcomings and letting that kind of free you from that whole process because you already know what the truth is you're not worried about being called out because you've looked inside you see it in there and you're and

you're able to to have a a truth inside of yourself about the whole thing that frees you from being so afraid and for starters I'm wondering what you think about that and then I'm wondering if you've seen people go through that process even worked with them around it and maybe what was that process like if you don't mind sharing it a little bit one way I hear what you're saying for us um is about being more and more authentic yeah absolutely and more and more comfortable being who you are one powerful way I learned about

that was from a a mentor of mine Carla Clark Dr Carla Clark she pointed out that one of the primary Pathways for people to move out of different kinds of character structure that they're trapped in or attachment Styles they're trapped in or ways of being If people could see me right now I'm kind of contorting myself at like somewh really bound up one of the absolute best ways is gradually expanding the field of authentic self-expression sharing in particular the readout directly of your own experience in the moment and if you can even go further feeling

it while you're saying it being in touch with the experiencing as you are communicating it in part to discover your own truth to discover the truth of your own experience so so simply pushing the boundaries of expressing yourself can really develop more of a sense of self-integration and self-acceptance and uh being your own authentic person out loud in appropriate ways so that's very much the path and you can see that path through the therapeutic process you can see it in life in general in which we encourage people uh to heal in part by getting in

touch with what they really feel and communicating it open authentic communication is really beautiful delivering undelivered Communications to the other that you've been appeasing a parent figure who is an authority figure maybe a friend who's kind of bossy and a taker not a giver particularly you know where you actually say things to them that that are real that's that's a pathway here and then another pathway related to all that has to do with the fact that the shadow of Shame is rage rage and often bottled up in the person who has the Fawn response is

a kind of Rage reaction and because there's a lot of bottled up anger often not always but often a lot of bottled up anger the person's afraid that if they even take the lid off 1 mimer all this nuclear waste will start pouring out and um so there because there's the rage inside that actually traps them further in their repetitive mechanical kind of scripts of appeasing other people so finding ways to release that anger in dosed ways you know titrated ways Peter LaVine would talk about pendula where you pendulum into it and then you pendulum

out of it um that's an important aspect as well to find your own authenticity I'm wondering about doing that inside of a relationship tricky because it's a major place where issues with the fond response come up for people um I'm using the word relationship here pretty broadly a parent child relationship a friend relationship a romantic relationship probably maybe not so much a work relationship that's kind of a different Arena um but using that term pretty pretty broadly because issues with boundaries fears of conflict uh constantly overextending yourself on behalf of other people those really come

up in relationship a lot they're also tricky places to work with people because often when we get into a relationship with somebody else we expect a kind of constanty from them that isn't isn't actually a realistic expectation because people are changing all the time we're in a relationship with a process more than we are with a single individual we should expect people to change but relationships have a lot of inertia they have these very strong patterns that kind of keep us in a mode of relating so to use a kind of example here Dad to

give you something to that you can sink your teeth into as opposed to all relationships forever let's imagine a kind of romantic relationship where both of the partners are well-meaning this is not a abusive relationship um or one where there's a lot of really inappropriate behavior going on and one of the members of the partnership has more of this Fawn response structure inside of their behavior they've identified this or maybe their other partner has mentioned it to them whatever it might be and they want to work on it they don't want to be in that

habit so much you've mentioned a couple of things already that might be helpful for them but I'm wondering in terms of uh that specific model of romantic relationships if you have any ideas here that could be helpful for people let's say you're the person who is the faer doing some intern looking about how that feels to you and what seems actually fair and bringing into mind other people who are models for you who are like you and and in similar situations but they don't let themselves be taken advantage of even unwittingly by others you know

if on the other hand if you're the receiver as you said yourself if you're eating those cupcakes all day long and they seem to want to give you the cupcakes well you know why not eat the cupcakes and it becomes kind of The New Normal and people adapt to it so it's not necessarily that the other person is just sort of evil but they just sort of fell into something and okay but it's not fair it's not right so it helps yourself to recognize what's out of line about your situation and and and how you

would like to see it differently and why then you talk about it if you can and you see what happens it can help to talk about it uh in a not blaming way and not starting with the ways in which the other person has been ripping you off all these years uh that's pretty heavy uh and you know ascribing intent to the other person like they've been designing this or they've been you know making this happen uh take responsibility for the fact that you've been doing this yourself and now you want to do something different

and then see what they do in my personal experience many many relationships if the person who's been more one down the subordinate person actually starts to talk about it in a straight forward way very often there is indeed a resetting in the relationship in ways that are often good for the other person too because to be the person who's been one down and um overworked exploited in some ways who's gradually feeling increasingly fed up you know mile form of quote unquote rage uh they're just fed up though well that's going to redound against that's going

to affect the other person in the relationship so it can be good for both people for there to be a resetting on the other hand and this also goes to social structures think about people in classic patriarchal countries or structures if you're in those kind of environments it can be really hard to get your partner to reset with you and then you have to decide what you plan on doing and also take into account the risks of trying to speak up which is really important to take into account um and it's not just in seemingly

um classically patriarchal or you know a symmetry of power type situations uh there are situations I've been very aware of where uh you know a seemingly nice and easygoing partner who would seem in favor of equal power equal workload equal rights equal room to breathe when they're pushed on and pushed out of for them traditional often gender based roles they don't like it at all and they fight back sometimes in pretty ugly ways so it you know it can go badly um and then you have to decide you know what the RIS are of it

going badly and and also what you'll do if it does so I think a huge part of this as you point pointed out here Dad is if you are the person with that that fawning construct inside of yourself um is actually expressing this yeah actually expressing this as something that you don't want to do as much actually standing up for yourself in order to be the person who doesn't fall into that pattern and behavior we've talked a lot during this series about this idea of increasingly becoming the person that is your own source of safety

yeah so you don't have to Fawn as much because you've worked on that object relations Paradigm where the self is not so small and the other is not so big and spooky uh for those who maybe haven't listen to other episodes of this series I would love it if you could do a quick primer on some of the things a person could do to increase that sense of themselves as being a source of safety in their lives big and strong uh more worthy and therefore uh not as needing to prove themselves over and over again

pick your pick your language of choice here yeah thank you um I like to start with undeniable Primal simple mainly sensory uh building blocks yeah for example uh recognizing that that you are breathing now there is breathing ongoing uh usually in the present you're basically all right right now and really helping yourself to experience exp erience that increasingly viscerally so you feel it you know it and you gradually help yourself feel it so that in the present uh I am here I'm basically all right right now that's really useful another is to draw on the

way the sense of self is continually sort of woven by the enchanted Loom as sharington put it of the brain uh that has a lot to do in the front end of it with the sense Place locating right you are over there you the one I am appeasing you are over there oh okay I get you're saying here yeah yeah there's a heess in my beingness and both of these are under our noses continually I'm talking about tapping into what's already there as a fantastic resource for feeling like your own person ongoing being on ongoing

living the heart is beating still here awareness is still occurring mind still functioning and established in this place myself distinct from your ongoingness over there and your you know being over there distinct from here right there two great third this has been incredibly important to me as a scrawny dorky kid who felt really inadequate at a almost physical level is to find ways to tap into a fundamental sense of strength it could be a sense of basic Vitality in your body like the feeling it is to hold that yoga pose for an extra breath or

to lift that weight or to move across the land on a trail in Wilderness or cross country in Wilderness you know doing something athletic uh I just talked to someone recently about mountain bike and being on the edge of chaos and but that's where the fun was uh I reminded him to be safe but anyway uh so tap into your sense of strength and also sense of strength having to do with um will a determination uh even determination on behalf of others what's that feel like what is your face like when you're determined those three

right off the top you know tracking uh the all rightness in the present so you don't have to unnecessarily anxious locating yourself in a place and um tuning into a kind of a primal visceral I use the word feral sometimes sense of personal strength those are three that are really foundational so I I will often start with that um beyond that going back on something Virginia saer a great family therapist legendary creative family therapist back in the day talked about it's recognizing and accepting differences because if you think of it in the appease response we

are fusing with in a way in at the extreme really pathologically we are becoming a kind of module inside their overall self system just to maintain their equilibrium so it can be very threatening to recognize difference maybe initially you have to do it entirely inside your own mind before wo talking about it but over time you can help yourself realize oh your thoughts are not my own I see it differently from you actually we disagree about certain things and that's okay we're not going to agree about everything or even really accessibly don't know claiming the

right to be different to accept difference to recognize difference that recognition can be actually really quite scary because differences maybe were punished in your childhood if you tend toward this appeasing fawning style what do you think so far I think that's great and inside that which I really love both that sense of separation and sense of distance I think a form of enmeshment that can happen for people is what I'll call values based amesh or uh emotional meshmen could maybe be another way to think about it where you start to take on the values and

views of other people because you need to be incredibly sensitive to them in order to appease them so there's this process that we can go through where we start to Center our own values views beliefs about the world ways of seeing things that are indeed fundamentally different from from the ways that the people around us see those same things and claiming that as as a truth that the truth is that it's different and that difference is okay is I think a very very powerful thing for many many people particularly for people who are in those

more one down positions that you've mentioned throughout the episode or people who have this habitual pattern of behavior around faing I think that's very wise for us and you know kind of as we finish up here I'm I'm thinking about two additional things that could be really helpful to someone great so in relationships that whether they're super extreme in the power differential and I'm holding on my hands you know like a piece of wood or paper that's really tilted against the person who's won down if there's a really extreme difference but even if there's sort

of a mild difference okay um one thing that's quite helpful is to just sort of talk about a new deal in effect a new recalibration like for example hey you know I love listening to you you have such interesting things to say and going forward when you my friend and I you know we have our monthly lunch um I would like to pay attention to each of us having roughly equal time to talk would that be okay with you like very often the other person will not even have realized that there was this two to1

difference in words per lunch but they go oh there might be a little sugar like but if you say it okay so you make a different kind of arrangement or maybe around the household you could say well it just seems to me fair that you know we're each busy we're raising children together but when we're both at home um we should be both kind of on task roughly about the same amount of time what you're doing what I'm doing might people a little different one of us does the dishes the other one gives the kids

a bath you but it's roughly equal and I I think we should have that going forward what do you think about that or you know we're both busy we both work full-time we both come home I'm making all the dinners and I just think maybe we could sort of agree that um you know I'll make dinners uh you know I'll do Monday Wednesday Friday you'll do Tuesday Thursday and then we'll have takeout or go out on the weekend I'm even been willing to do one extra dinner a week what do you think about that you

know so you make an arrangement that's quite useful to do actually puts it into concrete terms um sometimes with aging parents that you have a relationship with in which sort of somehow it's your job to manage their emotional state you could start introducing if only by practice maybe not even saying you're doing it uh bounding the time of the phone call and letting them know that you just need to get off the call routinely or you got about 20 minutes for the conversation uh or uh even just sort of dropping in statements like wow Mom

I'm really sorry you're upset about that uh and uh let me tell you how the kids are doing like that okay second key point it's a broad one but it's really important it's to establish in your own mind your own code for being a good enough human what's your codee that as long as you meet your own code this goes back to so much of what you've said so far about deciding for yourself yeah I love that s good enough yeah in a heartfelt Soulful sometimes for people religious way fine establish your own code for

being a good enough person and I'll just share with you uh something that really landed for me quite deeply recently as I've been doing a lot of reflecting in the last couple years about mistakes I've made and uh regrets and remorse and managing that and trying to come to a healthy place about it and not being over the toop but on the other hand being open and cleare eyed about mistakes I indeed have made um coming up through that has been the question of well what is good enough in this life what's a reasonable good

enough standard and what came to me from my heart and and it's how I want to be is did I bring my heart to it did I try hard and did I learn along the way and that for me is kind of at the heart uh of what it is to be a good enough person in this life you know people might add other things or edit some of what I've said but just right there you know bringing your heart to it had a good heart a warm heart you yes some courage you brought your

heart to it you were engaged emotionally second you tried you didn't just give up you kept going you made efforts you persevered it wasn't perfect you needed to take some breaks sometimes but you hung in there you know and you can have credit for that not all your efforts succeeded but you tried good for you respect and third was there a learning curve was there an openness to correction to learning were you interested in becoming more skillful over time um have you had some interest in personal healing and growing even the upper reaches of human

potential perhaps uh yeah and uh then going forward of course you know can you take a look at your day and say to yourself you know I came into it with a good heart in good faith I brought my heart to it I was open to other people I was basically benevolent and benign I wasn't there to destroy others and I did try I put in a good day's work in some reasonable frame and um you know I learned some things I I grew a little uh today yeah well great then you can go to

bed even if you have not plated or appeased or fawned on other people you can know unilaterally uh your own worth whatever they think of you I think that's a great Point here Dad and also is a fantastic place to end this episode this is one of those where I think that if you start unpacking the fwn response really if you unpack any of the stress responses you just find a rabbit hole and it's a rabbit hole that leads into most of the major ideas of psychology because so much of it is just about like

what happens to us when we're under pressure and everyone can get along in life when everything is going well and there are really no real problems and we're all getting along with each other but what happens when situations aren't so simple or they aren't so easy and that's the stress response right there um so I think this has been just a really great series I'm so happy that we did it we kind of stumbled into it uh and then it became something that I was really really pleased with I hope that people have gotten a

lot of value out of it I learned I myself have just learned a ton from doing the prep for these episodes and I appreciate you uh coming along on this journey with me here Dad and uh all of the insights that you've offered learned a lot too and I even find myself thinking about what is it like when your friend or a new romantic partner is themselves kind of stuck in the attachment style of fawning or appeasing yeah and how can you help them realize that no they they've really done enough they've made deposits in

the bank account that are real and you're actually more comfortable in a power relationship with them that's more or less as equals and that is something to offer to other people I think is just great great point here to to leave people with at the end and uh maybe we'll do or I'm sure we'll do another episode on relationships at some point in the near future where we'll talk about some of these ideas as well yeah kind of like you you don't need to keep pleasing me you already have I am already pleased yeah don't

need to keep agreeing with me I'm actually really interested in our differences because that's often what's most interesting uh I I want you to be your own person because if you're not your own person that event eventually will be a difficulty in this relationship things like that so just to toss that in at the end I had a great time today talking with Rick about the fwn response to stress finally completing our series of episodes on the various stress responses and one of the big lessons for me going through all of these episodes is the

Adaptive nature of the stress response these are all different ways that we can go about solving the problem of survival when under threat and most people familiar with fight and flight and even freeze but the Fawn response is a little bit newer in terms of its incorporation into this model and it's an appeasement strategy it's when we try to Plate somebody else in order to drop off of their radar as a threat in order to get them to stop hurting us or just in general to bond with their team which we perceive as being big

and strong and we perceive ourselves as being small and weak so we need something to attached to throughout this series one of the questions that we've asked ourselves over and over again is what's the function of this response what is what are we trying to accomplish by doing it and there are three big goals that we have with the fond response first we try to keep ourselves safe then the second Big Goal is we're trying to maintain the stability of the group uh dad freaks out mom has a breakdown you're a 9-year-old kid how do

we get back to okay and then finally we're trying to get other people to like us because when they like us we Preserve ve our spot in the band and social belonging had maybe the single biggest impact on our survival in Hunter gather bands while we were evolving this creates a framework of if they're okay I'm okay and that's the root of the fwn response if we keep it cool with other people then we will keep ourselves safe and you can look at some core behaviors that flow from this pretty naturally behaviors like people pleasing

and self-abandonment difficulties with saying no chronic self-sacrifice maybe borrowing trouble uh constantly scanning the world in this hyper aware or hyper Vigilant way looking for things to be worried about and then attached to that maybe a fear of conflict uh you're going to Great Lengths to avoid confrontation or disagreement even when it means compromising your personal values or beliefs because again if you're actually in direct conflict with somebody else there's that model of the self as being relatively weak we all have access to all of these stress resp responses we can all fight and run

away and freeze in response to stress and we can all Fawn in response to stress but all of the stress responses are also patterns of behavior they're almost kind of like personality types in a way and it's really easy for people to fall into a particular pattern of behavior and these patterns often get fixed for us pretty early on in life and so we can look at those early circumstances and uh maybe also look at our own nature alongside it as Rick really emphasized and ask ourself huh you know what might lead needs somebody to

become more of a faer by nature and this gets to something that we talk about all the time on the podcast which is our early relationship with our caregivers and our early relationship with other kids I had a pretty secure relationship with my parents my relationship with kids at school not so much and so that's where my fawning Tendencies come from but fawning is a great way for a wise and thoughtful child to manage unpredictable or unstable caregivers and that's why you see a really close connection between the fond response and complex PTSD they both

arise in similar kinds of situations Rick then talked for a little while here about object relations and the ways in which parents can sometimes view children as means to ends now by and large people do not do this uh deliberately they do it subconsciously they do it as part of a very complex process inside of their own psychology but we've all known a person who had a kid because they thought that it would give them a sense of meaning and purpose or because they had other psychological needs that they were trying to fulfill separate from

uh bringing a being into the world and giving it a really phenomenal life and if you were a kid who grew up inside uh those environments or with one of those parents there's a pretty good chance that you were praised regularly not for what you were but for what you could do and particularly what you could do for other people and this can lead to a relatively unstable sense of self there's a very strong sense of what other people want and what other people need but maybe not so strong a sense of what you want

and what you need and there's the nature side of it maybe you're just by Nature a person who is very sensitive and empathic you really care about how other people feel and you want them to feel better wow that's really really wonderful you might have a more conflict averse personality just by nature or maybe there were other nurture factors uh in the spectrum that didn't have to do with your relationship with your parents maybe you received a lot of invalidations um or rejections from other kids uh you weren't you were picked last for softball that's

kind of my personal story that kind of thing or maybe you were just placed into a uh cultural position or there was a role expectation attached to uh maybe your ethnic background or your gender socialization or whatever else was in the mix for you growing up and around here was where we made a transition in the episode to giving some context on the fond response to really talking about what we can do about it in some detail and a major feature of the fwn response is people pleasing so we talked a bit about uh this

tendency which is driven by a view of the world as one where if other people are not happy with me then I will not be able to protect myself and so I asked Rick about like what you can do around that behavioral tendency and what you can do to develop a stronger sense of self throughout the episode he gave a lot of advice here I really liked how one of the things that he started with was developing a stronger sense somatically of your interior of your own Vitality um yourself as a physical animal living in

the world with other physical animals and there can be something about that for people particularly for people who haven't really had a lot of that uh felt sense of strength in their life that can be a really helpful starting point a really useful resource to begin with to kind of prime the pump for everything else Rick also talked about what I'll call establishing optimal distance this is where you get a little bit of sense of Separation in between self and other because remember with the fwn response the whole model of it is if you're okay

I'm okay now the problem with that is that we can't control whether or not other people are okay you can be the best partner the best kid the kindest person in the world and you cannot control whether or not other people are okay so if your okayness is dependent on other people you are constantly going to be anxious you are constantly going to be concerned there is no end to that so what we need to do is create more separation we need to develop a deeper sense of our eles as over here and others as

over there and when we can build up that separation over time it allows us to start turning inward a little bit more and asking ourselves okay what's in there what do I really care about what's important to me what are my values have I really done enough and this can then lead over time to a greater sense of self-acceptance which is a natural antidote to the shame that often accompanies the fwn response we're not so dependent on the approval of of others because we have looked inside and we have seen who we are mors and

all good the bad whatever else we think about ourselves right and that frees us from being so worried that other people will see it too we've seen it we've accepted it we've processed it we've get that we are not perfect people and yet nonetheless we are doing our best in the world and when you really believe that you are doing your best in the world that is such a freeing place to be and this can give us over time to uh quote the book title the enourage to be disliked which allows us to hold our

own values and our own beliefs as equivalent to those of other people not more important not less important but just as important I hope you enjoyed this episode and enjoyed the uh series on the stress responses as a whole like I said at the end of it I learned an enormous amount doing this uh it was so cool to dig into it really gave me an appreciation for the connection between biology and psychology because so much of this is just wired into our nature as animals and one of the things I think is really interesting

about the whole thing is that we can often recognize these behaviors a lot better when we see them for example in domesticated animals like dogs interacting with each other we can see a a dog engaging in the fond response a little bit with another dog that's just been kind of mean to it but when we see humans engaging in these behaviors it can be a little bit more challenging to pick it apart and that was a a piece of the puzzle here that I just found so interesting so so if you like this episode I'd

really appreciate it if you would uh hit the like button if you're watching on YouTube if you would leave maybe a nice comment if you're listening to the podcast on your podcast platform of choice Spotify Apple wherever you are right now uh we'd really appreciate that if you'd like to support us in other ways you can find us on patreon it's patreon.com bewell podcast and for just a couple of dollars a month you can support the show and receive a bunch of bonuses in return until next time thanks for listening and I'll talk to you

soon [Music]