The 4 Stress Responses - Part 4: Fawn (Video Transcript)

Hey everyone, I'm Kristen, the anxiety therapist, and today is part four of the four part series I'm doing on the fear response is also sometimes referred to as acute stress responses or trauma responses as a reminder. Those include fight flight freeze and today I'm going to be talking about the fourth one, the fawn response, which most people are unfamiliar with.

This was a term that was first coined by therapist Pete Walker, who did a lot of work with trauma survivors. Um so we see this response a lot with people who have experienced some sort of childhood trauma or abuse and it's it's said to be it's said to develop after the other three responses have kind of proven to be unsuccessful in maintaining feelings of safety.

So maybe we've tried that fight flight freeze and it didn't give us that sense of safety. And so we developed the fawn response, which is essentially, and when we're aiming to please appease or pacify the threat um in an effort to keep ourselves safe from further harm. So um it often leads to being sort of overly compliant in childhood.

You may have learned that being helpful and agreeable was sort of your only way to maintain a sense of safety, whether that's emotional or physical. Um and so you develop this habit of sort of ignoring your personal feelings or desires. So some signs to look out for with the fond response include um over agreement, you're trying to be overly helpful a lot of the time, your primary concern might be making somebody else happy as opposed to focusing on your own needs.

Um you have a really hard time setting boundaries or saying no to things. Um, you might have an overdependence on other people's opinions, you might feel taken advantage of a lot and you have, you're more at risk to being vulnerable to narcissist. So this might show up in who you choose as a partner in adulthood.

They might have some narcissistic tendencies or it may result from having a narcissistic parent. So when this goes, when we go into adulthood, this can sort of show up in different ways. And it often leads to a lot of people pleasing behaviors and possible codependency in relationships. It can also cause a loss of identity and um sort of a lack of concern for ourselves, right? Our needs and our desires are sort of the last thing to be considered.

We might have difficulty identifying our feelings and ignore our own beliefs, thoughts or truths and feel really uncomfortable if prompted for those by someone. We might feel overwhelmed at times but continue to take on more if asked. So this might show up a lot at work again, that that boundary setting is really, really difficult.

Or maybe with household responsibilities, just have a hard time saying no. And then finally you might actually experience disproportionate reactions to strangers. So you've sort of kept your feelings in and internalize those for so long and it doesn't feel safe to express those to the important people in your life. So those sort of get displaced onto strangers and so we might find ourselves um you know, overreacting to a situation that wouldn't otherwise be very triggering, that might seem pretty benign.

You know, to most people, so if any of this resonates with you and you know, a lot of the clients I work with do experience the fawn response a lot. They tend to be people pleasers and um kind of have a hard time setting boundaries, then feel free to ask a question or leave a comment or um you know, if you feel like this is something that I could help you with definitely reach out, offer free 15 minute phone consultations and we can see if we're a good fit to work together.

So I hope you found this video helpful. Um this is the last video in the four part series, but I will be offering some tips and advice for how to manage these few responses in the next video. So stay tuned for that and I hope you all have a great week.