The Fourth “F”: Why We Fawn and How to Recover

You’ve likely heard of fight, flight, and freeze. The first two being our active defensive responses (fight or flight), and the last, freeze, being the immobilized defensive response our systems will go to when fight or flight aren’t available. But you may not have heard of the fourth “F”: fawn. You might think of fawning as people-pleasing, over-accommodating, not rocking the boat with your own boundaries, needs, or wants. 

In her book by the aptly named title Fawning, clinical psychologist Ingrid Clayton unpacks this fourth “F”, why we fawn, the costs of fawning, and how to find our way back to ourselves. We can start to understand fawning as appeasing or accommodating the very people and relationships that are causing us harm. In this way it is a very effective strategy when we need to survive a harmful relationship. Fawning masks the fear and anxiety of a harmful situation with pleasing and appeasing behavior. You might think about the example of someone ensnared in a domestic violence relationship. It might be safer for that person to go along with the violence and abuse, to smooth things out as much as possible, all in an effort to survive.

While a brilliant survival strategy, fawning is costly. Mentally and emotionally, it disconnects you from yourself. To suppress and deny any boundary, need, or desire, you kind of have to lose yourself. For many fawners, this is initially a tool. It’s what your system did to survive. With unresolved trauma, like any of these defensive responses, we can get stuck in a fawning response. We can become habituated to a please and appease response. Long-term, this can lead to not knowing what we need or want, being totally unaware of our own boundaries, and resenting the people we might be over-accommodating.

Finding your OK-ness

The start of any trauma recovery work is going to be with your orientation to safety and a sense of being ok in the here and now. When clients come to me to do trauma recovery work, I tell them, “Until you feel safe in the present, we cannot explore the past.” I need my clients to have a sense of “I’m ok right now” in their mind-body system in order to do trauma processing. Without it, we risk re-traumatizing and perpetuating the story of trauma in the body. So the beginning of this work is: how do you know you’re ok right now? What let’s you know you feel safe? How much of you feels like it’s here right now? These questions and their answers help give me a sense of where you’re at in your experience of safety and ok-ness. 

I love one of the questions Ingrid Clayton poses in her book: Am I in danger, or is this discomfort?

This is so important for a traumatized system to begin to discern. Our systems in a trauma response can confuse discomfort for danger. As unpleasant as it is to feel, discomfort is not the same as danger. We need to be able to tease those apart so you can feel and tolerate the discomfort, without confusing it for danger and thus, shifting into what may be a well-worn trauma response of fawning (or fight, flight, freeze).

Feel the feelings

Once we have a present-moment experience of safety on board, we can begin to explore what’s happened to you and begin the unfawning process. Initially, this might feel really foreign and uncomfortable. You may feel out of sorts, triggered, depressed or anxious. 

Uncomfortable? Yes, surely. It may be infuriating for me to say, but the discomfort may be important to the unfawning. You’re letting yourself feel some of the feelings you’ve been cut off from in your body for a very long time. There may be a lot of stored up emotion to move your way through. That’s what me and other therapists are here to help support you through. 

Trusting yourself and finding your voice

In all that fawning, you’ve likely lost your north star. It didn’t feel safe to have a voice, to express your needs or boundaries. But now it is (assuming we’ve got present moment safety on board already). This work is a little more abstract, but it might start to look like an increased awareness of your own needs or wants. What does it feel like to be aware of that? And then there’s boundaries. Can you find the edges of your boundaries? Somatically, maybe you use your hands to feel the edges of your body, squeezing or patting your arms and legs. Here, your body is a resource. Because a chronic fawner is used to overriding signals of boundaries or boundary violations in their body, we need to bring the body awareness of boundaries and limitations back online. If there is a “yes” or a “no” in your thinking brain, can you feel where else your yes or no is in your body? What’s that like to be with?

The work of unfawing is deeply uncomfortable work. For both the fawner and the ones we’re used to people-pleasing. As Ingrid put it in her book, when we stop people-pleasing, the people are not pleased! So know this work is complex, with rough edges. But it is worthy work, because it makes for a more awake and consciously lived life. 

If you're reading this and resonating with the descriptions of fawning, you might need support on your journey to healing. I hope you’ll consider reaching out about how trauma therapy can help. And go check out Ingrid’s book!