Stop abandoning your Self
An interesting thing has been downloading for me over the past year and a bit, slowly with grace and intention.
It’s been there on an intellectual level for a long time - but as with most things approached simply from the thinking mind, it’s like reading about the taste of honey rather than actually tasting it.
Instead, what’s been happening is a slow unfurling of this realisation on a multi-sensory level. I’ve been taking my time tasting it, being with it, allowing it to move through my fascia, bones and nerves, letting the medicine do its thing in my endocrine and immune systems, my cellular and atomic structures, letting it move my body in new ways.
And this is what’s been moving through me: every time I sidestep my truth by fawning (people-pleasing), I abandon my Self - the essence of me, my soul.
Fawning - if you’re not familiar with the term - is a trauma response that makes us appease others while overriding our own needs and boundaries. Along with fight, flight and freeze, fawning is another way that we’ve been forced to adapt to whatever threatening experiences we’ve had to endure as children and into adulthood.
These trauma responses are not wrong in themselves. We need them in situations of danger. They’re adaptive- which is to say, they help us to survive through actual threatening experiences.
But in traumatised nervous systems, they become maladaptive.
They become unconscious compulsions because most nervous systems that contain unresolved trauma usually oscillate between extreme hypervigilance and complete shut-down.
To clarify what trauma is - and this is something I’ve written about before, and will no doubt repeat in the future ;) - trauma is energy that has become stuck and pathologised in the body.
On a physiological level, trauma can be caused by any difficult experience where the energy hasn’t been fully tended to, causing our nerves to contract around that energy. And then it becomes like a scratchy old record, because that same stuck energy is repeating itself in our unconscious reactions.
Fawning is a particularly insidious trauma response in terms of its maladaptive potential because it’s so socially ingrained - mandated even. Our culture and society demand that we submit our inherent worth and value to the arbitrariness of external approval. Nowhere is this more garishly apparent these days than on the popularity-contest-on-steroids that is social media, where the disapproving guillotine of being “canceled” looms ever present.
These days, we’re programmed to fawn to the algorithm, to contort and commodify our life-force to the grasping of external approval - because our already traumatised collective consciousness has become colonised by the belief that our very safety and livelihoods depend on this.
We can decide to unsubscribe from social media altogether - which more and more people are doing, with no detrimental effects to their safety or livelihoods. In fact, many I know seem to be thriving.
Go figure.
Or - circling back to fawning - we can choose to engage with social media on our terms, without the trauma response of fawning and subsequent Self-abandonment.
Because this is the essentially what the physiological mechanics of fawning are (as well as the other trauma responses, except that maladaptive fawning is culturally mandated):
An unwillingness and inability to feel uncomfortable feelings.
Self-compassion break: This isn’t our fault. There’s nothing wrong with us. Avoiding discomfort is natural.
And also: no sapling ever broke its way up through the topsoil and out into the warm sunlight of its own unapologetic Self-approval without some healthy discomfort.
This is where discernment and finding safety in our Self comes in. Once we know how to find safety within, we simultaneously create capacity in our nervous systems to feel what needs to be felt, we’re able to discern what is actually life-threatening, and we stop fawning in order to appease other people’s nervous systems to the detriment of our own Being.
We embody our own flavour of grounded, Self-responsible sovereignty, and invite others to do the same. Not everyone’s going to like our particular flavour - and we can be ok with that - celebrate it, even! - without taking it personally.
I do me, you do you.
From here, we’re more connected to our intuition (our connection to the legit super-power of intuition goes offline when we’re operating from unconscious trauma responses), and consequently our decision-making becomes more tuned in with our own authenticity.
Oh, and our nervous systems are nourished with capacity and resilience; this organically lets other people attune to our regulated nervous systems, without us having to really "do" anything except be grounded in the medicine of our Being.
Not too shabby.