![]() Avoidance can no longer be your means of avoiding the past. To recover requires awareness of your feelings. If you struggle with the fawn response, it will be important to focus on increasing awareness of your emotions. 3 Ways to Ease the Fawn Response to Trauma 1. Losing touch with your inner emotional life in the process of fawning impedes meaningful self-reflection and deep relationships with others. Honest opinions and goals may be difficult to construct if fawning is commonplace for you. It’s easy to lose touch with your authentic emotions, preferences, and desires. Sadly, appeasement or fawning is insidious in its ability to disconnect you from your sense of self. You may even feel unable to open up at all, preferring instead to align your feelings with others. Other’s anger or disappointment feels unbearable. ![]() To mitigate the risk of being vulnerable or disturbing relationships, you may bury or manipulate your emotions. People who rely on fawning to cope with trauma, often hide their true feelings in favor of harmony. You may tell yourself that if you accomplish this you will never feel the trauma of abandonment, abuse, or deep conflict. All in an effort to avoid other’s negatives responses or unpredictable reactions to your choices, behavior, or opinions. Saying no becomes difficult, self-sacrificing becomes your M.O. Making yourself as likable as possible becomes a preoccupation and/or reflex. You long for approval, acceptance, or relationship safety. If you lean toward people-pleasing, often the goal is to avoid doing anything offensive or worthy of criticism. Perhaps you recognize the following in your relationships: 1. ![]() What Does Fawning Look like in Everyday Life?Īppeasement behaviors after trauma can happen before we are even aware. We call this trauma response emotional appeasement or “fawning.”Įssentially, fawning is a means of soothing the anxiety and emotional pain with a façade of harmonious passivity and martyrdom to avoid conflict. Others shut down completely in freeze mode.Īnd some people, go another way to feel safer and more in control. Others take flight and make a quick getaway. To keep ourselves from experiencing such distress, we often go out of our way to escape the internal upheaval, triggers, or perceived danger connected to the past. Have you heard of “the fawn response?” Thinking about trauma, reliving it, and avoiding it can be a consuming pastime.
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