Trauma Response: The Part Missing

By: Dr. Denise Renye

We’ve all heard it: When in the presence of something scary (mentally or physically), the body goes into a “fight-or-flight” response, also known as the acute stress response. That’s because our ancestors literally fought or ran away from threats such as tigers. These days, sometimes people say the “fight-flight-or-freeze” response, recognizing that in stressful situations, some people go still, they freeze like a deer hoping if they don’t move the mountain lion won’t notice them. However, the part of the response that’s less well-known is fawning.

American physiologist Walter Cannon was the first to describe the fight-or-flight response in the 1920s. He determined a chain of rapidly occurring reactions inside the body helps it mobilize against a threat. When dealing with a physical threat like a mountain lion, it makes sense that the body is ready to spring into action by fighting, fleeing, or springing into “action” by freezing, but human beings encounter other kinds of threats as well: people.

When other people feel scary, there’s another adaptive response: fawning. Fawning is a coping mechanism that uses people-pleasing to avoid conflict and establish a sense of safety. It’s saying to the threatening person, “You’re right,” even if they’re wrong or appeasing the person in some other way: flattery, affection, acquiescing to demands, etc. in order to diffuse the situation.

In the fawn response, a person ignores their own needs because expressing them is not safe. Fawning can be a coping strategy in abusive or narcissistic relationships. It’s often present in those who have a history of complex PTSD, or PTSD as a result of chronic or prolonged trauma, usually stemming from childhood. However, complex PTSD can also arise in other situations such as long-term domestic violence, being held in captivity, living in a crisis situation, and more.

When a person doesn’t have the option of fighting, fleeing, or freezing because there isn’t an escape from the threat, they develop the fawning strategy. Even away from the threatening person, the fawning coping mechanism can bleed over into other relationships. Fawning can be so engrained you don’t even realize you’re doing it.

Fawning looks like codependence. It’s putting someone else’s needs above your own. It’s struggling to say “no” and saying “yes” when you don’t want to. Your orientation is toward other people instead of yourself, “What will make them happy?” not “What will make me happy?” It’s making yourself responsible for other people’s actions and reactions: “I must have done something wrong. If only I’d done XYZ, they wouldn’t be angry/withdrawn/upset, etc.”

Anyone can learn fawning as a strategy to deal with threats but self-identified women, those who are nonbinary, or raised as girls are conditioned to fawn so it can often be overlooked as a trauma response. If you’re told over and over again to “be nice,” or “get along with others,” it can be hard to recognize when fawning is no longer useful or even damaging.

One place where fawning shows up that people may be unaware of is in the bedroom. Sexual fawning can occur in all sorts of situations, but more so in heterosexual relationships or experiences with a cis-gendered male because again, self-identified women are socialized to please others. We saw this very publicly with the Babe.net article detailing the sexual encounter between Grace (a pseudonym) and celebrity Aziz Ansari that was published in January 2018.

Grace went back to Ansari’s apartment and at one point, he instructed her to turn around. “He sat back and pointed to his penis and motioned for me to go down on him,” she told Babe. “And I did. I think I just felt really pressured. It was literally the most unexpected thing I thought would happen at that moment because I told him I was uncomfortable.” Later in the article, she said, “I believe that I was taken advantage of by Aziz. I was not listened to and ignored. It was by far the worst experience with a man I’ve ever had.”

Grace engaged in sexual fawning because alternatives didn’t feel available to her at the moment, which is a common experience. In a Vice article, Manisha Krishnan said, “While lots of women have been sexually assaulted, even more of us have been pressured into having sex when we didn’t really want to. That’s why this story struck a nerve and that’s why, despite the fact that Ansari didn’t commit a crime per se, this story is an important one to talk about.”

She also writes, “Grace’s experience is one so many women have gone through, probably many times over. It’s so common that even someone like myself read it and at first thought ‘how is this newsworthy?’ And I’m sure there are a lot of men who also don’t see what’s wrong with Ansari’s behaviour.”

We’ll discuss sexual fawning more in depth in a later post but for now, I want to acknowledge some people are incredibly disparaging of fawning. They shame people who fawn but I recognize everything we do, we do for a reason. If fawning didn’t work, people wouldn’t do it. There’s nothing to be ashamed of because it’s a survival strategy in and out of the bedroom.

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References

Krishnan, Manisha. “Aziz Ansari Didn’t Do Anything Illegal But That’s Not The Point.” January 16, 2018. https://www.vice.com/en/article/bjy394/aziz-ansari-didnt-do-anything-illegal-but-thats-not-the-point

Way, Katie. “I went on a date with Aziz Ansari. It turned into the worst night of my life.” Babe.net. January 13, 2018. https://babe.net/2018/01/13/aziz-ansari-28355