Am I Fawning In Relationships? (How Fawning Starts)
Do you see yourself in this picture?
You’re great at relationships. You just get people. You always have, for as long as you can remember. The slightest glance, the tiniest change in tone, the little frown someone gets on their face when they think no one’s watching, and something just clicks: you know what they need. Not only do you know what they need, but you know how to get whatever it is, too. And that’s what you do, time and time again. It might be the best birthday gift they’ve ever gotten, the exact thing they needed to hear after a hard day at work, or the date of their dreams with the quality time they clearly never got enough of before, but you figure it out and hand-deliver it to them. And the way their smile sparkles and they tell you they don’t know what they’d do without you?
Oh, that’s it. That’s the best it gets. Suspended in a bright, beautiful, blank place, you feel loved.**
But it ends. First, the moment. Then, weeks or months (or years) later, the relationship.
Why does it always end when you’re the undisputed champion of partnerships? The s-tier deliverer of unspoken wishes and desire? The dream whisperer behind those perfect, cute (and intriguing, might you add) profile pictures on dating apps? And worse yet, why does being broken up with after a couple of months feel like a part of you has died?
If you keep doing everything right, what’re you doing wrong? And how can you stop feeling hollow and numb until someone else comes along?
I’ve got good news and bad news.
The bad news is that you might be playing a role instead of being a partner.*
But the good news is that you’re not doing anything wrong. You’re not unlovable, undateable, or broken in some way a blog post has to fix. You are enough, because human beings don’t have to do anything to be enough. You don’t need to work for your loveable-ness (even though it might feel like you’ve always had to).
My goal is to help you see what might be happening in your dating life. Because that could be the key to having deeper, more fulfilling relationships where you can be instead of be on all the time.
How You See What They Want
It’s not in your head: you do indeed possess a superpower. Not many people can pick up on a moment of insecurity in their partner from a side glance or the way they shut the door when they came home. But I’m going to assume if you’ve read this far that you (or someone you love) has a history of trauma.
Why? Because being that attentive and sensitive to the smallest details in another person usually describes something called the fawn response.
You might’ve heard of fawning. It’s grouped in “the four f’s” of trauma responses: fight, flight, freeze, and fawn.
Usually, the definition of fawning goes something like this:
When someone is in an abusive relationship, they might stay and try to “fawn” their abuser, making sure their meal is cooked by the time they get home, their favourite beer is fully stocked in the fridge, and their kids are put to sleep. They “fawn” so that their abuser doesn’t explode. It’s a protective mechanism to prevent their abuser from causing more damage.
Is that fawning? It’s super oversimplified, but it can ring true for some people. Sometimes.
If you get anything from this blog post, though, let it be that fawning is a way to find safety by merging with other peoples’ needs, wants, and demands.**
What does that mean? And how could that ever feel safe? Certainly you haven’t ever done that; you don’t disappear in the moments you help other people. And it doesn’t all have to be about trauma! Besides, everyone people-pleases sometimes, right?
I’m going to spend the rest of this blog post explaining how fawning usually starts so that we can begin to appreciate it as separate from “just people-pleasing.”
How It (Usually) Comes Back To Childhood
Imagine a childhood with a good amount of rejection, conflict, and/or neglect. By “rejection,” I mean not feeling accepted for who you are. By “conflict,” I mean fights, stand-offs, or tension where you were involved or not, but you were aware of it regardless. And by “neglect,” I mean not feeling seen, heard, cared for, or nurtured, emotionally, physically, or otherwise.**
If that sounds like your childhood, and you have this perfect partner superpower, you probably became an expert at reading the adults around you in order to feel special, important to them, and therefore, loved.
Kids are intuitive. You knew on some level that the adults around you weren’t all that thrilled to see you. It might not have felt like they cared much that you were there unless you went above and beyond. So you did something exceedingly clever: you created a character.*
This character turned peoples’ frowns upside down and made them laugh, got you good-jobs, pats on the back, and the ultimate “Wow, look at you!” It learned how to please people early on, and it did it well. You played this character more and more until it felt like a second skin, because it felt amazing to make things better for people.
That character was protective. How? Because it prevented a whole lot of rejection.* It made you feel like you wouldn’t be forgotten about. And each time you “got someone right,” that felt like love.* Being seen. Being free, from worry, more hypervigilant hours spent analyzing the people around you, and not feeling like enough.
Let’s pause for a moment and appreciate how sad it is that any kid has to do this to feel loved. Other kids liked making adults around them laugh, but they felt special and loved when it didn’t happen, too.*** Everyone deserves to grow up with that stable sense of feeling important and cared for.
You had a different experience. And your true self, the one you were protecting, was there the whole time, right? Accessible and available to you? Making it easy to tell how you felt while you explored the outlines of your “perfect kid” avatar in every possible situation?
It wasn’t there. It got hidden.* When that character was on the stage being the “perfect kid,” you were, in a very real way, fighting for your survival. So it looked like you were still engaging, connecting deeply with people, and “so mature for your age.” But you were responding to a threat to your very survival when you were young, vulnerable, and helpless if adults didn’t properly care for you.* The real you hid so that you could shapeshift to please those people around you, out of a trauma response just like fight, flight, and freeze.
Over time, the closer you got to anyone, the more you brought out the character, because being close to people felt just as touch-and-go as being close to those adults you needed to perform for.* Surely, if they didn’t accept you for who you were, no one else would, right?
The result? More character and more hidden you. And each time you felt important by figuring out what people needed, you began to identify with their needs more than who you were underneath it all. Because meeting their needs felt like being seen, accepted, and able to keep surviving.*
Imagine that kid. Really bring to mind their face, their age, their smile, what they look like when they’re scared, and not being able to be comforted when they needed it the most.
What else would that kid identify with? What else could be more important than feeling seen?
In the next blog post in this three-part series on fawning, I’ll be talking about how that kid became an adult who kept trying to keep themself safe despite knowing deep down that the people who were supposed to protect them didn’t. And they survived. They’re reading this and taking a brave step toward understanding themself on a level they might not have revisited for most of their life.
For now, just know that you deserved to feel safe and accepted for who you were. And you still do. Fawning is a trauma response that deserves to be met with compassion and care so that you can feel that safety and acceptance. Offering yourself however much of that as you can is the first step to healing.
Did this ring true for you? Looking for a therapist who specializes in the Fawn response? Our therapists Book a therapy matchmaking appointment with our therapist matchmaker to begin your healing journey today. (Therapy is only available in CA.)
Interested in learning more about our unique approach to trauma therapy?
These blogs talk more about the basics of EMDR:
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References:
*Aigner, C. (2022, November 29). Love or fear? The please/appease survival response: interrupting the cycle of trauma. Summit.sfu.ca. https://summit.sfu.ca/item/35736
**Davis, S. (2022, February 21). Rejection Trauma and the Freeze/Fawn Response. CPTSD Foundation. Retrieved February 24, 2023, from https://cptsdfoundation.org/2022/02/21/rejection-trauma-and-the-freeze-fawn-response/
***Paredes, R. (2022, May 30). Understanding Trauma: The 6 Types of Trauma Responses. Mindbetter. Retrieved February 24, 2023, from https://mindbetter.com/trauma-response-types/