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”.
