Fawning

The stress response we didn't learn about in school and why you might overapogize, people-please, and cling to people who hurt you.

Last Sunday, my friends and I got together for brunch, and the topic turned to dysfunctional family dynamics (as it does). One friend was talking about a woman they know who went out of her way to befriend her husband’s mistress¹ not once, but twice. Two different women; two different affairs. And she wasn’t just nice to them to get info or something; she actually befriended them. Call in the middle of the night to drive you to the hospital / hold your hand at the funeral / sit with you in divorce court type of befriend.

My friends were remarking about how weird it was—how strange to move toward someone who played such a direct part in hurting you and threatening your primary relationship. And yeah, I get that reaction on its face. But I also completely understand moving closer to the source of pain; I understand it very well.

The conversation reminded me of this one small, but life-shifting moment in 2016. I was a couple of years sober, still pretty raw but starting to grow more skin and put together patterns in my behaviors and relationships.

I was standing in my bedroom after a shower when I received an accusatory, angry text from a friend. Even though this had become a regular pattern with this person, I still felt the same bewildered shock each time it happened, like I’d been sucker punched. As I stood there dripping water on the floor, frantically re-reading her words, I initially felt a hot wave of rage run through me, but almost instantly it morphed into fear. My mind scrambled for the words that would stop the conflict and put out her anger and make everything okay as quickly as possible. I started to text something. No, I’d call. No, she may not answer, or worse, scream. Fuck.

For some reason right then, I was able to observe myself freaking out. It gave me just enough pause to sit down on my bed, take a breath, set down my phone, and think.

I decided to call another friend, someone who knew my dynamic with this person because we all lived in Boston together, but wasn’t close with her personally. I read her the texts, and after listening a little more, she asked what I wanted to do.

What did I want to do? I wanted to scream so loud my windows would shatter. I wanted to tell her to fuck off for sucker punching me again, and for all the times she’d done it before. I wanted to tell her she was crazy. I wanted to say all kinds of mean things, terrible things, things that had multiplied and transfigured and grown claws over the eight years I’d known her because I’d swallowed them. I told my friend this.

“Right. You’re angry. You should be angry. So what’re you going to do?” she asked.

I felt myself deflating as I considered the possibilities. I imagined raging back at her, and the fear of what would come at me in return made me wince. No way. I imagined trying to have an honest conversation—even just calmly asking her to stop sending me texts like that—and that, too, felt impossible. I started to think about everything she had going on in her life right then: her kids, her divorce, her sick brother, and began to feel bad for even having those terrible thoughts about her. I needed to be more compassionate. She’d been a great friend to me at times, and I needed her, didn’t I? Maybe I had let her down. Maybe she was right. I’ve been busy this week with Alma and work and maybe I haven’t been there. Maybe I’m just being selfish. Probably I am.

“I don’t know, I said, defeated and suddenly numb. “I feel frozen.”

“Okay, well,” my friend said. “Anger usually means a boundary has been broken. So start there. What boundary was broken?”

This was the moment my brain broke.

What boundary? WHAT BOUNDARY?! I laughed hysterically. “Dude. ALL OF THEM.”

---

That moment didn’t suddenly change everything, but it clued me into a few things I hadn’t been able to see before. First, that I was angry, and that maybe my anger was trying to tell me something important. Second, that if I felt like I’d rather die than express said anger, even in a constructive way, it might be a sign I had some things to work through. I also had this flash of insight as I continued to talk with my friend: what I was feeling was very familiar. It was part of my childhood. When I saw it through this lens I was able to make more sense of why I’d created the dynamic, and also why I’d stayed in it for so long.

I didn’t know it at the time, but I later learned this cycle: experiencing a violation, not trusting your intuition, second-guessing your feelings, internalizing blame, freezing up, and then doing anything to repair—it’s a classic symptom of narcissistic abuse. It felt familiar because I’d been going thought it since I was young with a particular family member, but I hadn’t caught onto the ways it showed up in certain friendships yet.

But here’s why the Brunch Story reminded me of Text Story: fawning.²

We’ve all heard about fight, flight, and freeze as trauma/fear responses. But fawn is said to be the fourth and lesser-known “F,” coined by therapist Pete Walker.

Pete writes, "Fawn types seek safety by merging with the wishes, needs, and demands of others. They act as if they unconsciously believe that the price of admission to any relationship is the forfeiture of all their needs, rights, preferences, and boundaries."

Fawning can look like over-apologizing, being unable to distinguish your feelings or needs from the other person’s in a conflict, acting fine and even great about exchanges or outcomes that are not fine or great, trying to merge with and over-flatter people you see as threatening.

Sound familiar? Are you making the cringe face right now? Yeah. When I learned about it, my whole life suddenly made more sense. The woman who befriended the women her husband had affairs with? Fawning. My behavior with this friend? Fawning.

Fawning can look like over-apologizing, being unable to distinguish your feelings or needs from the other person’s in a conflict, acting fine and even great about exchanges or outcomes that are not fine or great.

The thing is, just like every other fear/trauma response, it’s natural and mostly subconscious. If you do this, it’s tempting to harshly judge yourself, but that does no good. With more years in sobriety, more therapy, and more practice with boundaries, I’ve been able to pull myself out of friendships like the one I was in at that time (and also not attract them in the first place), but I still find myself doing the fawn here and there. The impulse is strong—it’s an impulse for survival—and so I try to remind myself of that when it happens, and then figure out what’s really going on.

So, what do you think? Any lightbulbs? Are you a fawner?

Later this week, I’ll be writing about another big perception shift that finally got me to start setting boundaries, with an excerpt from Push Off from Here. This will be for paid subscribers only.

xo,
Laura

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1. I’m using this term for brevity of language only. (I’ve been a mistress myself, so.) Also, there’s nothing categorically wrong with befriending your partner’s extramarital relations, but if it’s a pattern, idk, maybe worth exploring?

2. https://psychcentral.com/health/fawn-response