Fawn: The Trauma Response That Is Easiest to Miss
“Fawn types seek safety by merging with the wishes, needs and demands of others.” - Pete Walker
“Fawn is the process of abandoning self for the purpose of attending to the needs of others.” - Dr. Arielle Schwartz
Fawning is taking care of others by suppressing my own emotions, needs, or identity. It’s something I’ve done since I was a very small child, and it’s something that I observe people doing around me almost every day. Fawning is a trauma response, and it’s also an expected social behavior in western cultures. We are conditioned to perform *prosocial behaviors in almost every social setting regardless of our internal state.
Standards of professionalism in most workplaces require fawning. Customer service jobs require fawning. Many social events require fawning - after all, no one wants to be the Debbie Downer at a party. Schools, from daycares to high schools to universities, require fawning to navigate social interactions and classroom etiquette. It is common for parents to think that entraining a fawn response will benefit their child in the world (although they would never use the word fawn to describe sacrificing their own needs for the sake of others).
We don’t usually recognize fawning in these circumstances. It’s easier to recognize fawning when danger is obvious, particularly as a response to violence or abuse. But giving up our Selves a little at a time to earn approval is also a kind of fawning, and if we fail to recognize this as a trauma response, we may mistake codependence for connection.
Fawn & the Polyvagal framework
In terms of polyvagal theory, when we neurocept (subconsciously perceive) a certain level of danger, the fawn response is one of the possible trauma responses that our body uses for survival purposes.
The fawn response involves both Fight/Flight and Freeze activation at the same time. This is like pushing the gas pedal on a car while the emergency brake is engaged - and why fawning as a habitual long-term protective strategy causes major health problems.
The Fight/Flight (sympathetic) system provides the power or fuel for movement and micro-movements that meet the needs of others. The Freeze (dorsal vagus) circuit causes dissociation and disconnection to suppress any expression that does not meet others needs and to protect our psyche from the loss of autonomy involved in the survival performance.
Fawning behaviors can use the facial and cranial nerves that we typically might associate with the Safe state (ventral vagus). Movement of our vocal chords, eyes, cheek muscles, mouths, etc without the Safe state doesn't have the same innate flow or rhythm to it, so sometimes it is very obvious when someone is in a fawn response. However, with practice (typically in early childhood) these movements can become smooth enough that others might not realize we are fawning, and even we might not realize we are fawning.
Fawn vs tend-and-befriend
The concept of the tend-and-befriend response was originally developed by Dr. Shelley E. Taylor on the observation that human beings “affiliate” in response to stress. We soothe our stress through friendships and community care. Studies have shown this stress response is more common in women than in men (due to socialization, not any innate difference). Here are a few examples: a woman who feels unsafe at work calls her office friend over to chat, a child who is bullied at school asks an adult for help, a parent responds to their baby’s cries, a person who was just in a car wreck calls their partner
Unlike fawning, tend-and-befriend is a function of the Safe state (ventral vagus social engagement) in response to neuroception of danger. Tend-and-befriend is not a draining stress response, and I typically don’t need any recovery time after it.
I’m writing about tend-and-befriend briefly here because it is easy to confuse the two stress responses. Both fawn and tend-and-befriend involve a social response to a threat. In tend-and-befriend responses, we use socialization and connection to face a threat together, to come alongside people and support them as we face shared danger or to ask them to help us cope with something. In the fawn response, people are the danger, and disconnection from ourselves is what allows us to seem social.
If my body is in a Safe state while responding to a stressor, I observe feeling connected to my True Self, an easy ability to set boundaries, the freedom to choose to play a role temporarily, and motivation to communicate from the heart. My HRV stays high, and my breathing stays deep. If I am fawning while responding to a stressor, I lose connection with my True Self and operate on autopilot. Deb Dana mentions one dorsal vagus cue that feels very aligned with fawn for me - a sense of disappearing. When I am fawning, I sense my Self is disappearing, and my sympathetic system is “in the driver seat.”
My fawn response is a very believable mimic of the Safe state. Most healthcare professionals fail to recognize when I am in a fawn response, and it's even difficult for my therapist to catch when I am fawning. But if I get quiet and listen to my heart rate, breathing, and subtle inner felt senses, then I can know for sure if I am in a Safe state or a fawn response.
The difference matters a lot to me, because I like to review my recent stressful experiences and guess at how much recovery time I might need. Knowing when I’ve been fawning (and when I’m crashing from fawning) helps me plan my self-care.
How social power in the clinical environment changes the perception of the fawn response
Fawning is a type of appeasement. Appeasement is an umbrella term for “any relational behavior designed to pacify interpersonal threat.” (All fawning is appeasement, but not all appeasement is fawning.)
The following quote from Rae Johnson and Nkem Ndefo illuminates why fawning is not as easily recognized by clinicians as other trauma responses.
“Members of dominant social groups may fail to recognize appeasement from others for what it is (an attempt to defuse anticipated aggression) and instead mistake it as sincere and unforced consent. Because the appeasing behavior is not genuine agreement but false agreeableness, not voluntary respect but expected deference, the authenticity of relationships between members of dominant and subordinated social groups is compromised. Research also suggests that social power can result in a diminished capacity to read the nonverbal cues of dissent or discomfort in those with less power”- Agreement is not Consent
The nature of privilege is that “you don’t know what you don’t know,” so those with more social power (including researchers) don’t always see and understand appeasement enough to even acknowledge it. Porges himself makes some inaccurate claims about fawn responses. In a podcast interview a few years ago, Porges said social engagement can’t be faked, which is a ridiculous claim to any neurodivergent person who has spent their life masking. (He has changed his stance on this since that podcast was recorded.)
The literature almost universally correlates external social behaviors with the Safe state without considering internal feelings, so I think most people have assumed that is correct. It is falling to the more marginalized people to educate researchers about what they don’t know, which is very slow progress in part because we aren’t credentialed like they are so they are less likely to listen. But also because our own trauma stories create our perception of appeasement/fawning, working with this topic requires significant resourcing and support. (I have actually been trying to write this article for over a year. I keep returning to themes in it with my therapist. Writing about fawn feels a bit like exposing a secret.)
When we consider the power imbalance between doctor and patient, between researcher and research participant, between neurotypical able-bodied professionals and neurodivergent disabled clients, we can begin to see why fawning isn’t recognized as much as the other trauma responses. When this trauma response is active in the clinical environment, part of its biological function is to not be noticeable. The greater the imbalance of social power, the easier it is for a fawn response to go unnoticed.
On the other hand, people with a significant lack of social power tend to share the ability to recognize fawning more easily. When viewing videos of domestic conflicts, encounters with police, or reality tv shows, marginalized people can often spot signs of fawning that are missed by those with more social power.
How the mis-reading of fawn responses & neurodivergent Safe states influences care
Autistic people and other neurodivergent people are greatly impacted by biased cultural assumptions about what Safe states look like and what trauma responses look like. Our fawn responses are often misread as Safe states, and our Safe states are often misread as trauma responses. This leads to ineffective and potentially traumatizing “care” that is aimed at “healing” our supposed trauma responses so that we will appear to be in a Safe state more often.
The cultural emphasis on prosocial behaviors over internal coherence led Porges to the false hypothesis that social engagement dysfunction is the defining characteristic of autism. (In reality, autistic inability to access the Safe state is a reflection of lack of support and real dangers in our world.)
I tried Porge’s Safe and Sound Protocol over a year ago, and I’m still grappling with the reality of its effects. It did indeed increase my capacity to access the Safe state (ventral vagus), but that didn’t look like what I was expecting. My reliance on the fawn response decreased and that didn’t go over well with everyone in my life.
It has been a welcome shift, but one that I was not prepared for, because when I did the intervention, I believed the experts who said it would make socializing easier. Now I understand, for many neurodivergent people, increasing our access to the Safe state will do the opposite. When we are fawning less, we show less stereotypical social behaviors. Fawning less frequently may not be safe in certain environments or situations and should not universally be held up as a goal for treatment.
As I seek to bridge a positive neurodiversity paradigm with Porges, it feels more and more important to me to distinguish between the fawn trauma response and the Safe social engagement state for myself and for other self-healers and for professionals.
I hope that the understanding of fawn in relational neuroscience continues to evolve in a way that aligns more closely to people’s lived experiences of fawning. I want to be able to show you evidence-based research where felt senses and internal experience are included in the assessment of a person’s vagal state, but that doesn’t exist yet. (please someone make it happen?)
The final idea I want to leave you with is a simple request. Please don’t judge how people are feeling based on how they are acting externally. If you really want to know if someone is in a Safe state, whether its a patient or a loved one or yourself, get quiet and listen to the heart beat and breathing.
*Defining Prosocial: In one sense prosocial behaviors are any behaviors that are positive, helpful, and intended to promote social acceptance and friendship. However in practice, prosocial behaviors are more narrowly defined to enforce neurotypical socio-cultural values such as eye contact, verbal conversations, interest in large group social activities, direct social engagement, turn taking, etc.
