The Fawn Response

[Certain Hope]

Psychotherapist Pete Walker. M.A.,  writes:

In my work with victims of childhood trauma (I include here those who on a regular basis were verbally and emotionally abused at the dinner table), I use psychoeducation to help them understand the ramifications of their childhood-derived Complex PTSD (see Judith Herman’s enlightening Trauma and Recovery).

That line I put in bold is what made me want to read the rest. What went on around our dinner table has always felt traumatic, but I never said that aloud, because I felt silly for making much ado about nothing. In fact, I was ready to chalk it all up to being an "HSP"... until I continued reading this article and discovered that what I'd attributed to being HSP may actually have been at least partially created, learned, and not inborn... and that a better name for it may be "post-traumatic-stress".  What's in a name? Well, in this case, a better understanding of who I have been and what I can do to mend the effects of being a child of my parents.
Others here may recognize themselves in this picture, as well. I'll just post some excerpts...

Sometimes a current event can have only the vaguest resemblance to a past traumatic situation and this can be enough to trigger the psyche’s hard-wiring for a fight, flight, or freeze response.  (This is followed in the article by some examples, and then...)

Many trauma victims over time develop an ability to use varying combinations of these responses depending on the nature of the triggering circumstances.

A fourth type of triggered response can be seen in many codependents.(Codependency is defined here as the inability to express rights, needs and boundaries in relationship; it is a disorder of assertiveness that causes the individual to attract and accept exploitation, abuse and/or neglect.) I have named it the fawn response...the fourth ‘f’ in the fight/flight/ freeze/fawn repertoire of instinctive responses to trauma. Fawn, according to Webster’s, means: “to act servilely; cringe and flatter”, and I believe it is this response that is at the core of many codependents’ behavior. The trauma-based codependent learns to fawn very early in life in a process that might look something like this:
as a toddler, she learns quickly that protesting abuse leads to even more frightening parental retaliation, and so she relinquishes the fight response, deleting “no” from her vocabulary and never developing the language skills of healthy assertiveness.

At this point, there are some examples of the flight and freeze scenarios, followed by:

A final scenario describes the incipient codependent toddler who largely bypasses the fight, flight and freeze responses and instead learns to fawn her way into the relative safety of becoming helpful. She may be one of the gifted children of Alice Miller’s Drama Of The Gifted Child, who discovers that a modicum of safety (safety the ultimate aim of all four of the 4F responses) can be purchased by becoming useful to the parent. Servitude, ingratiation, and forfeiture of any needs that might inconvenience and ire the parent become the most important survival strategies available. Boundaries of every kind are surrendered to mollify the parent, as the parent repudiates the Winnecottian duty of being of use to the child; the child is parentified and instead becomes as multidimensionally useful to the parent as she can: housekeeper, confidante, lover, sounding board, surrogate parent of other siblings, etc. I wonder how many of us therapists were prepared for our careers in this way.

All this loss of self begins before the child has many words, and certainly no insight. For the nascent codependent, all hints of danger soon immediately trigger servile behaviors and abdication of rights and needs. These response patterns are so deeply set in the psyche, that as adults, many codependents automatically and symbolically respond to threat like dogs, rolling over on their backs, wagging their tails, hoping for a little mercy and an occasional scrap; (Webster’s second entry for fawn: “(esp. of a dog) to behave affectionately.”) I find it particularly disturbing the way some codependents can be as unceasingly loyal as a dog to even the worst “master”.


I have had considerable success using psychoeducation about this type of cerebral “wiring” with clients of mine whose codependency began as a childhood response to parents who continuously attacked and shamed any self-interested expression on their part. I work with such clients to help them understand how their habits of automatically forfeiting boundaries, limits, rights and needs were and are triggered by a fear of being attacked for lapses in ingratiation.

Elucidation of this dynamic to clients is a necessary but not sufficient step in recovery. There are many codependents who understand their penchant for forfeiting themselves, but who seem to precipitously forget everything they know when differentiation is appropriate in their relationships. To break free of their subservience, they must turn their cognitive insights into a willingness to stay present to the fear that triggers the self-abdication of the fawn response, and in the face of that fear try on and practice an expanding repertoire of more functional responses to fear.

Real motivation for surmounting this challenge usually comes from the psychodynamic work of uncovering and recreating a detailed picture of the trauma that first frightened the client out of his instincts of self-protection and healthy self-interest. When the client remembers and feels how overpowered he was as a child, he can begin to realize that although he was truly too small and powerless to assert himself in the past, he is now in a much different, more potentially powerful situation. And while he might still momentarily feel small and helpless when he is in a flashback, he can learn to remind himself that he is in an adult body and that he now has an adult status that offers him many more resources to champion himself and to effectively protest unfair and exploitative behavior.

I usually find that this work involves a considerable amount of grieving. Typically this entails many tears about the loss and pain of being so long without healthy self-interest and self-protective skills. Grieving also tends to unlock healthy anger about a life lived with such a diminished sense of self. This anger can then be worked into recovering a healthy fight-response that is the basis of the instinct of self-protection, of balanced assertiveness, and of the courage that will be needed in the journey of creating relationships based on equality and fairness.

....   extreme emotional abandonment also can create this kind of codependency. I believe that the continuously neglected toddler experiences extreme lack of connection as traumatic, and sometimes responds to this fearful condition by overdeveloping the fawn response.

That's it for now.

On edit:  I forgot to include the link:  http://www.pete-walker.com/codependencyFawnResponse.htm

[dandylife]

Hope,
Yes, yes, yes!

I see myself in this - up until my "awakening" of a realization that something like this was taking place.

"Giving over our power"

"Learned Helplessness"

"Subjugation"

"FEAR"

"Non assertiveness"

Whatever you want to call it -your post describes it perfectly.

Thank you!

Much insight there.

Dandylife

[Certain Hope]

((((((((Dandylife))))))))

Here's some more of the story from a later article by the same psychotherapist. (Sheesh, I am so far behind in recognizing my own needs that it's just now occuring to me... it is exactly this sort of cognitive approach which suits my own learning style and registers in such a way as to make a real difference! Copying this entire article here, in case it disappears from the link... don't want to lose it.)

A significant percentage of adults who suffered ongoing abuse or neglect in childhood suffer from Complex Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. One of the most difficult features of this type of PTSD is extreme susceptibility to painful emotional flashbacks. Emotional flashbacks are sudden and often prolonged regressions ('amygdala hijackings') to the frightening circumstances of childhood. They are typically experienced as intense and confusing episodes of fear and/or despair - or as sorrowful and/or enraged reactions to this fear and despair. Emotional flashbacks are especially painful because the inner critic typically overlays them with toxic shame, inhibiting the individual from seeking comfort and support, isolating him in an overwhelming and humiliating sense of defectiveness.  

Because most emotional flashbacks do not have a visual or memory component to them, the triggered individual rarely realizes that she is re-experiencing a traumatic time from childhood. Psychoeducation is therefore a fundamental first step in the process of helping clients understand and manage their flashbacks. Most of my clients experience noticeable relief when I explain PTSD to them. The diagnosis seems to reverberate deeply with their intuitive understanding of their suffering. When they understand that their sense of overwhelm initially arose as an instinctual response to truly traumatic circumstances, they begin to shed the awful belief that they are crazy, hopelessly oversensitive, and/or incurably defective.

Flashbacks strand clients in the feelings of danger, helplessness and hopelessness of their original abandonment, when there was no safe parental figure to go to for comfort and support. Hence, Complex PTSD is now accurately being identified by many as an attachment disorder. Flashback management therefore needs to be taught in the context of a safe relationship. Clients need to feel safe enough with the therapist to describe their humiliating experiences of a flashback, so that the therapist can help them respond more constructively to their overwhelm in the moment.

Without help in the moment, the client typically remains lost in the flashback and has no recourse but to once again fruitlessly reenact his own particular array of primitive, self-injuring defenses to what feel like unmanageable feelings. I find that most clients can be guided to see the harmfulness of these previously necessary, but now outmoded, defenses as misfirings of their fight, flight, freeze, or fawn responses. These misfirings then, cause dysfunctional warding off of feelings in four different ways:

fighting or over-asserting one's self with others in narcissistic and entitled ways such as misusing power or promoting excessive self-interest;
fleeing obsessive-compulsively into activities such as workaholism, sex and love addiction, or substance abuse (uppers');
freezing in numbing, dissociative ways such as sleeping excessively, over-fantasizing, or tuning out with TV or medications ('downers');
fawning in self-abandoning and obsequious codependent relating. (The fawn response to trauma is delineated in my earlier article on "Codependency and Trauma" in The East Bay Therapist, Jan/Feb 03).
As clients learn that their originally helpful defenses now needlessly hinder them, they can begin to replace them with the anxiolytic and therapeutic responses to flashbacks that are outlined and listed at the end of this article. I introduce this phase of the work by giving the client a copy of this list of cognitive, affective, somatic and behavioral techniques to use as a toolbox outside of the session. These tools are also elaborated ongoingly in our sessions. I continually notice that the clients who acquire the most recovery are those who carry the list with them or post it up conspicuously at home until they are thoroughly conversant with it.

As clients begin to derive benefit from responding more functionally to being triggered, there are more opportunities to work with their active flashbacks in session. In fact, it often seems that their unconscious desire for mastery 'schedules' their flashbacks to occur just prior to or during sessions. In helping them to achieve some mastery, my most ubiquitous intervention is helping them to deconstruct the outmoded alarmist tendencies of the inner critic. This is essential, as Donald Kalshed explicates throughout The Inner World of Trauma, because the inner critic grows rampantly in traumatized children and because the inner critic is the primary initiator of most flashbacks. The psychodynamics of this is that continuous abuse and neglect force the child's inner critic [superego] to overdevelop hypervigilance and perfectionism - hypervigilance to recognize and defend against danger, and perfectionism to try to win approval and safe attachment. Unfortunately, safety and attachment are rarely or never experienced. Hypervigilance progressively devolves into intense performance anxiety and perfectionism festers into a virulent inner voice that increasingly manifests self-hate, self-disgust and self-abandonment at every imperfection. Eventually the child grows up, but she is so dominated by feelings of danger, shame and abandonment, that she is unaware that adulthood now offers many new resources for achieving internal and external safety. She is stuck seeing the present as rife with danger as the past.

I sometimes think of this phase of the work as rescuing the client from the hegemony of the critic. Despite the negative connotation rescuing has in many circles, I believe there is an unmet childhood need for rescue that I help meet when I 'save' my client from the critic. like mom didn't save her from abusive dad, or like the neighborhood didn't rescue her from her alcoholic family. This rescue process then, is a gradual emancipation from self-alienation, and a gradual deliverance from the internalized parents who trigger the client with flashback-inducing catastrophizations and perfectionistic invectives. If no one shows the trauma-locked individual that extrication from the self-torturing processes of the critic is possible, he rarely learns to rescue himself. He may live forever without discovering that he now has a variety of helpful responses [detailed in the list below] available to him to resist the triggering and exacerbating dynamics of the critic.

Over the course of therapy, I often reframe flashbacks as messages from the wounded inner child about the denied or minimized traumas of childhood. In this vein I paint flashbacks as the inner child righteously clamoring for validation of past parental abuse and neglect. Flashbacks are the child pleading for unmet developmental needs to be met, none more important than the gradual awakening of a healthy sense of self-compassion and self-protection. This is fundamental to recovery because without self-compassion, clients rarely evolve any substantive self-care habits. Similarly, without reconnecting to the instinct of self-protection, clients rarely develop effective resistance to either internal or external abuse.

When clients get that their emotional storms are messages from an inner child who is still pining for a healthy inner attachment figure, they gradually become more self-accepting and less ashamed of their flashbacks, their imperfections and their overall affective experience. They understand that the lion's share of the energy of their intense emotional reactions in the present are actually appropriate but delayed reactions to various themes of their childhood abuse and neglect. As they learn to effectively assign this emotional energy to those events and perpetrators, they metabolize and work through these feelings in a trauma-resolving way. This in turn leads to a reduction of the emotional energy that fuels their flashbacks, and flashbacks in turn, become less frequent, less intense and less enduring. Eventually flashbacks can even begin to automatically invoke a sense of self-protection as soon as the individual realizes she is triggered. Eventually this can even happen at the moment of triggering, as well as just before encountering known triggers.

Some final words. I have seen so many of my clients respond well to this model, even those who 'only' suffered neglect, I have come to conceptualize Complex PTSD as being on a continuum of severity. In this vein, it seems that with enough neglect, certain children automatically over-identify with the superego and adopt an intense form of perfectionism that, via the critic's "not good enough, not pretty enough, not smart enough, not helpful enough, etc.," triggers them over and over into painful abandonment flashbacks every time they are remotely less than perfect or perfectly pleasing.

MANAGING FLASHBACKS
Say to yourself: "I am having a flashback". Flashbacks take us into a timeless part of the psyche that feels as helpless, hopeless and surrounded by danger as we were in childhood. The feelings and sensations you are experiencing are past memories that cannot hurt you now.
Remind yourself: "I feel afraid but I am not in danger! I am safe now, here in the present." Remember you are now in the safety of the present, far from the danger of the past.
Own your right/need to have boundaries. Remind yourself that you do not have to allow anyone to mistreat you; you are free to leave dangerous situations and protest unfair behavior.
Speak reassuringly to the Inner Child. The child needs to know that you love her unconditionally- that she can come to you for comfort and protection when she feels lost and scared.
Deconstruct eternity thinking: in childhood, fear and abandonment felt endless - a safer future was unimaginable. Remember the flashback will pass as it has many times before.
Remind yourself that you are in an adult body with allies, skills and resources to protect you that you never had as a child. (Feeling small and little is a sure sign of a flashback)
Ease back into your body. Fear launches us into 'heady' worrying, or numbing and spacing out.
  [a] Gently ask your body to Relax: feel each of your major muscle groups and softly encourage them to relax. (Tightened musculature sends unnecessary danger signals to the brain)
  Breathe deeply and slowly. (Holding the breath also signals danger).
  [c] Slow down: rushing presses the psyche's panic button.
  [d] Find a safe place to unwind and soothe yourself: wrap yourself in a blanket, hold a stuffed animal, lie down in a closet or a bath, take a nap.
  [e] Feel the fear in your body without reacting to it. Fear is just an energy in your body that cannot hurt you if you do not run from it or react self-destructively to it.
Resist the Inner Critic's Drasticizing and Catastrophizing:
  [a] Use thought-stopping to halt its endless exaggeration of danger and constant planning to control the uncontrollable. Refuse to shame, hate or abandon yourself. Channel the anger of self-attack into saying NO to unfair self-criticism.
  Use thought-substitution to replace negative thinking with a memorized list of your qualities and accomplishments
Allow yourself to grieve. Flashbacks are opportunities to release old, unexpressed feelings of fear, hurt, and abandonment, and to validate - and then soothe - the child's past experience of helplessness and hopelessness. Healthy grieving can turn our tears into self-compassion and our anger into self-protection.
Cultivate safe relationships and seek support. Take time alone when you need it, but don't let shame isolate you. Feeling shame doesn't mean you are shameful. Educate your intimates about flashbacks and ask them to help you talk and feel your way through them.
Learn to identify the types of triggers that lead to flashbacks. Avoid unsafe people, places, activities and triggering mental processes. Practice preventive maintenance with these steps when triggering situations are unavoidable.
Figure out what you are flashing back to. Flashbacks are opportunities to discover, validate and heal our wounds from past abuse and abandonment. They also point to our still unmet developmental needs and can provide motivation to get them met.
Be patient with a slow recovery process: it takes time in the present to become un-adrenalized, and considerable time in the future to gradually decrease the intensity, duration and frequency of flashbacks. Real recovery is a gradually progressive process (often two steps forward, one step back), not an attained salvation fantasy. Don't beat yourself up for having a flashback.

http://www.pete-walker.com/flashbackManagement.htm

[dandylife]

Thanks so much Hope.

This is fascinating and illuminating. I'm saving it for reference!

Dandylife

PS I'm going to check out that website, too.

[lighter]

ACK!

For one brief moment, reading that made me want to throw up.

Or maybe it was the belly full of raw cookied dough I just ate

Either way..... that information was an eye opener, Hope.

Thanks for sharing: )

[sally]

Dear Hope,

I don't mean to fawn, but....... THANK YOU, THANK YOU, THANK YOU, THANK YOU, THANK YOU, THANK YOU, THANK YOU, THANK YOU, THANK YOU, THANK YOU, THANK YOU!!!!

I think you have found a missing link for me and I have been looking for this link for a long, long time.

Reading the first few paragraphs also made me want to throw up, but, wow! this is ME!!!!!: ever "helpful" and "self forfeiting".

Sometimes, I walk around calling myself a fool, idiot, shmuck:  how could I let my NPs  dictate my life???????  Why did I let them do that??????  This article gives me the answer.  I'm bambi (a cartoon character, not a real person WHO HAS NEEDS OF HER OWN AND A LIFE OF HER OWN) with low self esteem.

Wow, it's hard to express an emotional break thru in cyberspace.

And, what I find so VALUABLE about this article is that the fawn response started WHEN I WAS A TODDLER & I HAVE NO MEMORIES OF THAT TIME, so that's why this article is a Rosetta Stone for me.

Sorry for my theatrics & meltdown.  I've got to study this article.

Thank you, again, Hope and God bless you.

Love,
Bambi (sally)

[Hannah]

  PTSD. Dinner table. The whole thing. For years I couldn't sit at a round dinner table because the memories were so disturbing. I have read Judith Herman's book (a long time ago) but need the information anew.

Thank you, Hope. Whew. Much to think about.

Hannah

[Iphi]

These two articles hit me like lightning, especially the second one.  I did not realize that I had PTSD until reading it, because I have never understood the incidents that are the flashbacks.  Like sally wrote, this also finally gives me the key - a key I have been looking for over many years.  I can't believe it.  It's shocking.

I've been so afraid of having the things that happened to me in the past - performance anxiety so intense that I cannot function at all - happen to me in the future that I have avoided so many challenges - because I didn't understand what was happening.  I thought I just couldn't compete, you know?  This really takes the onus off and gives such a sense of incredible relief.  Knowing it is PTSD, soon I will know what to do about it and how to care for myself when I experience it.

This changes everything.

It also brings home how bad it all was back then.  I'm sooooo sick of my family's denial and the way they have always mocked me for struggling.  They are damned liars.

[sally]

Hi Iphi,

 thought I just couldn't compete, you know?  This really takes the onus off and gives such a sense of incredible relief.  Knowing it is PTSD, soon I will know what to do about it and how to care for myself when I experience it.

This changes everything.

Glad to hear this was a break thru for you too.

I'm sooooo sick of my family's denial and the way they have always mocked me for struggling.  They are damned liars.

Exactly.

Love,
sally

[Iphi]

Well it has been 12 hours or so and my mind is still blown.

I can't believe it.  I have PTSD.  Oh my god!  That is what it is and has been all these years! 

Also, I absolutely do have the fawn response too.  It explains some of my past 'friends' and a couple of people I dated.  Sheesh.  It's so disturbing to really see the mechanics and dynamics of my self-forfeiting behavior and how consistent it is across all kinds of situations.

What is disturbing me the most is this.  The storyline in my FOO is that everything is good and there is no problem.  That I was suffering, traumatized, struggling sometimes, trying to address issues head-on - - all of this meant that there is something wrong with me that is out of nowhere.  That's just crazy.  That's hysterical, emotional, histrionic, dramatic and etcetera.  This has been so powerful against my efforts, because my mom is schizophrenic.  So if you want to shut me up  - just tell me I'm crazy.  Push that FEAR button.  When my mom went crazy she let my dad down - she was supposed to serve and nurture him - she was supposed to be a wife and a mother - and mother him - but he would be in power and control her.  She was very compliant and docile with him - but of course that docility can be a passive symptom of schizophrenia - so his interminable need for control carried the seeds of destruction of his dream marital situation within it.  And when she broke, he threw her away - because she became a burden and imposition upon him.

If there was real love between them - well - if they were 2 completely different, better people than what they are - I can imagine so many things they each might have done to try to get through such a calamity as major mental illness.  I'm not saying my mom is a saint, because in fact they are two different peas who belong in the same pod.  It was all about what a bad thing happened to my dad. No one else.  Not her, since it was all her fault.  And not us, since we were burdens once our mother malfunctioned.  We had to justify our usefulness didn't we? 

Well, here I am ruminating.  This is all to say that for all these years it has been a matter of survival to act tough and well and unaffected.  I couldn't say my needs, couldn't say my wounds, couldn't acknowledge them, could not show them.  If I acted out from them - I would be condemned - it would be evidence of my craziness.

It really sucks.  I thought I could find some compromise, some low level of interaction with my family, but once again I have been trying to stop seeing.  It is what I've been trying to do all these years - put the brakes on and say 'oh we don't have to go all the way and see it all, do we?' 

In my head I can absolutely hear the critical voices of my FOO saying again and again all the offloading, critical YOU YOU YOU condemnatory judgmental stuff they have always said over the years.

I'm done!  There is no reason to mock and derogate me!  There seems to be now way to stop the madness, but only to just cut myself off from them.

[Poppyseed]

Well, here I am ruminating.  This is all to say that for all these years it has been a matter of survival to act tough and well and unaffected.  I couldn't say my needs, couldn't say my wounds, couldn't acknowledge them, could not show them.  If I acted out from them - I would be condemned - it would be evidence of my craziness.



I've been so afraid of having the things that happened to me in the past - performance anxiety so intense that I cannot function at all - happen to me in the future that I have avoided so many challenges - because I didn't understand what was happening.  I thought I just couldn't compete, you know?  This really takes the onus off and gives such a sense of incredible relief.  Knowing it is PTSD, soon I will know what to do about it and how to care for myself when I experience it.


Iph,

Just wanted to say that I feel so much the same way.

Poppy

[Poppyseed]

Hope,

I just read through this thread.  It is the BEST description of my codep stuff.  It feels like I have tried so many times to explain what your article stated.  Thanks. I have much to work on in the rewiring process. But thank you.  Wish I could express more of my feelings but I just can't for some reason.  I feel like the words just won't come.

Pops

[Ami]

Dear Iphi and Sally.
  I am so happy that you  made such  HUGE breakthroughs.It is a shock-- isn't it. I will have to carefully read all the articles. I just read one, I think.
  I had ANOTHER shock last night .I will wrote it on my "Shocked "thread.
  Maybe we all need "shocked threads--lol?                                  Love and a BIG Hug  Ami

[dandylife]

Iphi,
It sounds like there was never time or effort made for you to ever be HEARD. A huge loss for you to never have had validation, understanding.

I hear you now.


(((((IPHI))))))

Love,
Dandylife

[Iphi]

Every time I spoke up or even looked the wrong way or displayed the wrong thing - the animals attacked.  Even being in the wrong situation (such as being depressed, or a weak college application due to being depressed) - the animals attacked.  The hilarious thing about it is the whole mythos of the family is what an awesome great incredible dad my dad is.  And every time he attacks me and badmouths me he directly shows what a liar he is. 

Last year my sister was visiting and we were at a bookstore and she saw the title of a book in my hand and rolled her eyes and said 'whatever floats your boat.'  I mean - what the hell is that?  It's just more of the same.  It isn't that such a specific thing would give me PTSD, but it just shows how it is never safe around them and it never will be safe - never safe to be heard or overheard, never safe to be seen, never safe to show yourself, never safe to be vulnerable, candid or honest.  That's what I mean by if you are even seen with the wrong thing in your hand - bam - time to remind Iphi how she is unacceptable and has cooties.  My sister is a trained monkey who sold her soul for the safety of the pack.  She's worse off than me.