When the Fawning Stops
Let’s talk about fawning, aka people pleasing.
Before we go into the ways it causes harm to ourselves, I want to start off by saying that I have a lot of gratitude for my capacity to fawn. It has helped me to survive. In that sense, it has fulfilled its essential purpose as a threat response, alongside fighting, fleeing and freezing (fawning is a first cousin of freeze, essentially an expression of being in a functional freeze.)
I was born to a mother riddled with unresolved trauma back when the notion of intergenerational trauma and the importance of healing it was an outlandish concept.
Long story short, her pain was unconsciously taken out on me from a young age, and until I became a teenager with (the best) bad attitude, it was my ability to fawn that helped me to survive.
On top of that came the experience of immigrating to the UK in 1989 from my native India when I was ten. Open racism was fairly commonplace in England back then, and as a brown little girl ‘fresh off the boat,’ fawning became my best friend.
It kept me safe, I would not have survived without it.
Most likely, you’ve also had a long and intimate relationship with fawning for your own reasons, especially if you’ve grown up with trauma or are visibly different from the accepted norms of the dominant culture.
But outside of that, fawning is a socially required + rewarded way of behaving in our world, so from that perspective, you’ve probably become quite familiar with it.
When we fawn, we’re stuffing an authentic expression of ourselves into the body, into our tissues and fascia. In its place, we perform - smiling or agreeing or behaving in ways that are dissonant with how we really feel and what we really think.
In an actual survival-related situation such as being robbed at gunpoint or being abused or bullied, fawning can be an intelligent threat response - as with fighting, fleeing or freezing. We don’t have to think about it. Our sympathetic nervous system mobilizes through a rush of the stress hormone cortisol, and we do what we need to do to get ourselves out of danger.
And as with all the threat responses, fawning becomes detrimental to our health and well being when it becomes coded into our personality and behavior through layers of calcified trauma and an excessive amount of inflammation-causing cortisol in our system.
It becomes detrimental when the body and nervous system start looping on being in a life or death situation in the absence of clear and present danger.
The difference with fawning as a threat response is that it’s expected and crucially, rewarded, in our social dynamics.
Social media, for instance, with its culture of ‘likes’ and ‘followers,’ is rooted in the seeking of external approval, which in itself is a trauma response that necessitates the performance of fawning. Meanwhile, all this distortion is rewarded by the all-seeing eye of the algorithm.
This of course plays out in our in-person social dynamics too. Social media is simply a useful and clarifying petri dish that reflects this unfolding.
What happens then when we begin to slowly, gently, compassionately interrupt our automatic fawn response and start to engage with our authenticity more?
Quite simply, we turn towards becoming willing and radically comfortable with being disliked and disapproved of.
This may not be the answer that the (unintegrated) ego likes very much but it is in fact delightfully natural and liberating. The less we fawn and people please, and instead feel into embodying who we naturally are, moment to moment, luxuriating in the beingness of our own energy, the more we will piss people off.
And also, the more we will draw resonant connections and relationships towards us. It becomes less about quantity and more about delicious quality. By attuning to the frequencies of our own rhythm, we organically step out of the controlling constructs of the artificial algorithm - whether in digital or in-person social spaces.
We allow in spacious liberation. Not only for ourselves but for others to have whatever response they have to us: they’re free to like us, not like us or be completely indifferent to us.
We can embody the ever-evolving practice of not making it mean anything about us or about them.
But first, we take small + gentle steps towards melting the stuck trauma in our systems, bringing them to present time, and start feeling safe to begin the process of interrupting the default fawn response.
For the next four Sundays in The Light Gets In (April 28th & May 5th, 12th & 19th) we’re going to playfully engage in understanding, interrupting + tending to the fawn response.
You’re free to join one session or as many as you like. Find out more here.