I was driving home the other day fuming over agreeing to drop the kids off at school when it was my husband’s “day”. He asked me over breakfast and I reflexively said “Sure, babe”. Why do we do this to ourselves?
Why on earth would I say yes, when I was so excited to finally have a whole day to work (it’s been a lot of ski days in our household)? When things have been brewing in my mind since Christmas & beg to be fleshed out on paper so they don’t wake me up at night? 
Why do we say yes when we mean no? Why does a knee-jerk yes override our drive to honor our boundaries? 

It is the autonomic nervous system’s relational safekeeping measure - the fawn response - our kneejerk reaction to people please, fit in, and appease. Here is what I know.

Fawning is when we reflexively appease another. (important keyword, not a thought-through deliberate appeasement).
In this series, we previously covered what is and how to interrupt a fight response and a flight response. Today we move on to fawn.

Our limbic brain perceives a relational threat and decides to stay safe by increasing amounts of niceness, appeasing or approximating the “threat”. 

Contrary to what your inner critic might tell you, fawning is not a choice. In the same way, we don’t choose our split-second reaction of fight or flight, fawn is a reflexive behavior. We may watch ourselves become polite, say yes before we can think no, or laugh to lessen the power of our bad news delivery.

How? Our nervous system works outside of our conscious awareness constantly scanning for safety or threat cues. This activity happens in a part of the brain that developed as a species - the limbic brain. It is involved with emotions and our sixth sense among other functions. It, according to signals picked up via the autonomic nervous system (ANS), drives our behavior by releasing hormones (stress hormones in threat, pleasure, play & rest hormones in safety). 

ANS, by design, when first sensing a threat, kicks into gear (sympathetic activity) to have us first FIGHT. If our limbic brain perceives that the threat is too big (like an overambitious to-do list), it shifts gears to FLIGHT mode, motivating us to get away, flee, avoid. 

If our body decides that a threat is too big to fight or flee from, the ANS responds from the parasympathetic branch. This is either by freeze, which we will cover in detail in the next article or by the fawn response. Read on to learn all about the biology of this function. 

To orient us, here is a handy recap of the functions of our ANS in safety and under threat:

What Happens When We Fawn?

I’ll use my dropping off the kids’ example to illustrate what happens. 

We are a one-car household. To make this work, my husband and I divide the week into errand days (kids, groceries, post office etc) and home office days. He then asks me to drop the kids off at school on my home office day. I reflexively agree. 

My truth is “No, I don’t wanna drop the kids off”. I am looking forward to waving bye to the brood and cocooning up in my office with a pot of tea to organize my thoughts, write, and follow up with clients. 

1. My truth “I do not want to” gets repressed and frozen somewhere in my biology.

2. Instead, I fawn and my reflexive, performative, don’t rock the boat and do what you are asked autopilot takes the driver's seat and says the opposite.

3. On my drive home - after I performed - I am bracing to hold back my initial truth and performing against my desire exhausted me. I realize this and am angry for letting myself down.

You can see now that fawn is a combination of Freeze and performative action.

It is a very different feeling in my body when I agree to take the kids from a fawning state and when I agree from a conscious, authentic, generous place. 

The essence of people pleasing is that we abandon ourselves (our beliefs, boundaries) in order to safeguard a connection. In my instance, it was the drive to not rock the boat.

So why did I feel the need to safeguard a connection? 

Truth is, Dave would have been fine taking the kids and probably just forgot that it was his day. Why did my body feel that refusing his request was a threat to our relationship? 
Answer is complicated and multilayered. The responses of our ANS carry the signature of the lifetime of our experiences, from in utero to now. 
Partly I fawned because two years ago we were on a brink of divorce (registered as unsafe, my limbic brain equals abandonment with a threat to life) and my body felt that being nice and sacrificing my needswas safer. Partly I fawned because my parents had an Italian marriage and dad was kicked out of the house twice a year so my fear of abandonment is highly triggerable. There is more, but my point is that the analysis of why I do it does not actually help me stop fawning. So what does? Glad you asked! Read on…

Chronic Fawn Response

If we perpetually live in a ‘I’m a nice person’ mode the chronic fawn response can feel like: 

+ Feel like everything is your fault or that you are bothering people
+ Take too much responsibility to fix situations
+ Apologise a lot unnecessarily
+ Avoid conflict with your loved ones by keeping them happy or distracting them rather than enforcing boundaries
+ If you have kids you might be constantly stressing about other people’s reactions to your kids’ behavior. 

It’s not all bad though. Your agreeble presence likely makes people around feel safe, and when you connect to your true caring nature, your people feel nurtured. So don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater. 

If you have a Fawn dominant stress response, confrontation likely feels overwhelming or uncomfortable.

Your body looks for ways to lessen the likelihood of confrontation, tension & arguments. You might tilt your head, smile unnecessarily, give compliments or laugh at an inappropriate observation as a way of de-escalating a potentially dicey situation at the cost of losing your authenticity. Sometimes it is wise to do so. All our ANS responses are adaptive & highly sophisticated. 

Chronic fawning is where we get in trouble.

In just a quick google on people pleasing one will find tons of research and TED talks about the pitfalls and dangers of people pleasing.

These two quotes are representative of the info out “there”:

🎤 💨 Jeez, guys, way to drop the mic! 

Ok, we get it. People pleasing hurts the pleaser. But acting like it is just a question of strong enough will and sticking with one’s morals is not doing us any favors.

Fawning is a biological function.

As a recovering fawner I can tell you that thinking my way out of chronic fawning was NOT what helped. We are all different and maybe talk therapy and psych analysis of why we do what we do might help some people but CBT did not do it for me. Here is what worked:

How To Stop Fawning

There are ways to interrupt a FIGHT or FLIGHT response because they happen on the sympathetic branch of the nervous system - the active doing part. 

With FAWN and FREEZE, the parasympathetic branch, the being part, is involved. You can’t interrupt being. The parasympathetic branch is, in safety responsible for relaxation, and under threat immobilizes us. Once in parasympathetic state - The freeze thaws slowly. Slow is the key to getting out of it. You gotta give yourself tiiiime. 
This is where doing too much too soon has the opposite effect, more freeze. 

So, we wanna stop a fawn response when we unnecessarily hide our true selves, sacrificing our authentic truth for the sake of being liked. 
When our safety is at stake we want to fawn.

Step 1 - Awareness

Often it is after we fawned when we realize, why did I say that? So we gotta develop self-knowledge of what situations will have us fawn so we can expect it. The thing is the more you “practice” fawning, the more likely it is for your body to go that route again. There is hope though! 

Sometimes we catch ourselves as the words come out of our mouth. If and when we do: Slow it down. We tend to go into automatic ANS responses when we accelerate. Name what is happening. “I might be fawning here.”

Naming what is happening brings it to consciousness which is half the battle. Then:

Step 2 - Delay response

Ask for time to respond later. 
”Let me think about it and get back to you this afternoon.”

Practice this. Ask for time to respond and give yourself a deadline to avoid kicking the can down the road. It takes courage! Then say no when appropriate and celebrate it 🕺

Step 3 - Anti Fawn Dojo Training

If you are a chronic people-pleaser you need to expand your window of tolerance for confrontation, being seen and speaking up, and get in touch with your anger. Awareness and analysis is half the battle. This is what made the difference for me:

1. I slowly trained myself to become more comfortable with discomfort:
   + Started with taking 20-second cold showers and slowly extended them. I hate cold showers. 
   + Complimented a stranger at the grocery store. 
   + Did one thing a day that scared me a little bit (too much too soon can lead to freeze so go slow). My scary thing was making requests. I grew up with a (post-)communist mentality: you do it all, it all sucks, there is not enough to go around for everyone and you shut your mouth and deal. Believing I have the right to have needs and god-forbid make requests is my lifelong practice. So I asked Dave to hand me the butter (!), and asked my kids to do little chores. To my surprise, everybody mostly loved being of service. 

2. Upregulate - As a recovering people pleaser I admit that I am more comfortable with chill “sports stuff” like mellow yoga, meditation, yoga nidra. I mixed it up. Did something upregulating that raised my heart rate - took the stairs, cycling class, danced. Erg. I did not like the sound of that at first but it worked. Sometimes going for a walk works better for stilling my thoughts than sitting down to meditate. 

3. Got in touch with healthy Anger - BOUNDARIES BABY!
   + Journal or talk with a trusted friend about your relationship to anger. What are your core beliefs about this emotion? 
   + I took 4 rounds of “jaguar” work with Kimberly Ann Johnson, who teaches body ways of connecting to your inner wolf mother. 

4. I am learning how to feel and be with other unpalatable emotions like Fear, Doubt, Shame, Disgust, Envy. 
   + Practicing how to be with my feelings is my meditation. The balance between indulgence and denial is delicate: to let myself go through a feeling and not squash or exaggerate, just be present and respond with allowing its presence is really helpful. 

5. Learned to use my voice - literally. 

   Hearing our voice fill a room not only affirms our self-esteem but communicates to our animal body that we are safe, can fully express and speak up for ourselves. Vocalizing massages your vagus nerve - it “puts” you in a ventral vagal state - the connected non-triggered state - and spending time with another human who is stoked for you and your voice is the ultimate co-regulation. It’s a win-win-win! If you need a voice teacher, email me back and I’ll connect you with Claire. She teaches online and from her office in Highland Park.

Estrogen, Oxytocin & Fawning

I took this section out to avoid it being super ridiculously long and will write a whole separate piece that explores the role of our hormones and the female fawn - our propensity to succumb to relational and societal pressures. 

Speaking of long emails. I want to acknowledge YOU. I realize that in our notification heavy lives, time and attention are our most valuable assets. I am aware and write these emails with appreciation for the trust you have in me to invest your time/attention in reading these ridiculously long emails.

Resources

🐰 Shall we, Alice? 🕳️

🕳️ Listen to this podcast episode: People Pleaser's Guide To Anger. If you don’t have a whole hour to listen - start at 23min. Half an hour of pure gold. 

🕳️ Gabor Mate: 
1. How To Stop People Pleasing and Set Authentic Boundaries While Staying Kind (6min) and 
2. The Dangers Of Being Too Nice (16min)

🕳️ Brene Brown on Courage To Be Authentic (6min) and choosing discomfort over resentment.

🕳️ Online groups & courses, currently taking waitlist sign-ups:
1. Activate Your Inner Jaguar course by one of my main teachers Kimberly Ann Johnson - i took for rounds of it.
2. People Pleasers Guide to Anger by Juna Mustad

🕳️ The best dance at home but also in community class with gaga dancer Zina Zinchenko (Batsheva not lady gaga).