When you can't say no
What the heck is Fawning you may ask?
Fawning is one of 4 ways our autonomic nervous system responds to trauma: Fight, Flight, Freeze and Fawn - the 4 F’s.
Young people use fawning as a survival strategy with caregivers they depend on but don’t necessarily feel safe with.
They learn how to please and appease as a way to keep the caregivers love and care in an environment where love is conditional.
Remember, at a young age we need that love and care for our survival.
Many of us had no choice but to engage in fawning early on.
These strategies became so effective in keeping us safe that we took them with us into adulthood and are using them in our current relationships..
Examples of fawning behaviors:
Difficulty saying no
Not saying what your really feel/think
Disregarding your needs
Desperately seeking to be liked
People pleasing
Compulsive caretaking
Walking on eggshells
We need to feel connected. We need relationships.
It’s in our nature to engage in tending and befriending others but if you find that some of these behaviors are your default, remember there’s nothing wrong with you.
On the contrary, your nervous system has found a brilliant way to keep you safe.
Coming from this compassionate perspective, you can gently start inviting yourself to look into creating some space around any fawning behavior so you can have more choice.
You want to do that because at a certain point fawning can come at a great cost to your well-being.
It can move you so far away from your authentic self, that your basic needs are left unfulfilled.
One way to detangle the knot of fawning, is to literally create more space around it.
You do that by noticing what happens in your body when you feel like you must fawn as a reaction to a certain situation and bringing some resource to this place of activation so it can open up and expand. Just that simple step can stop fawning in its tracks.
This is one of the things we can do in Somatic therapy which is all about bringing breath to whatever feels rigid and tight.