Fight flight freeze fawn cptsd12/28/2023 ![]() ![]() People who are like this often find it difficult to stand up for themselves and what they believe in and instead validate behaviors, attitudes, or views that they don’t even agree with. According to an article by The Dawn Wellness Centre and Rehab, people fawn to avoid conflict and trauma by over appeasing people, but this can lead them to compromise their values a lot of the time. One of the reasons why fawning as a trauma response can impact us so negatively is because it erodes our sense of self. This is because, according to self-help expert Phoebe Priebe, “When we fawn, we disregard our own wants and needs and decide in that moment that the one thing that’s important is giving the other person what they want and need.” And by being too much of a giver, you end up struggling to feel “seen” by others for who you are as a person and not just what you can do for them. If you’re someone who’s prone to fawning, you’re probably the go-to person for a lot of people whenever they need a favor or want some help with something. ![]() With that said, here are 7 tell-tale signs according to experts that your problem with being “too nice” just might actually be fawning, a manifestation of your trauma: 1. So basically, fawning is a maladaptive response to extreme psychosocial stress (Walker, 2018). And when someone experiences something traumatic early on in their life, it can keep them stuck in one of these four modes. Our bodies will then go into either fight, flight, freeze, or fawn mode. This happens when our sympathetic nervous system becomes activated due to some perceived threat in our environments. To be more specific, it was therapist Pete Walker who first studied and wrote about this phenomenon in his book, “Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving.” Walker, who specializes in cases of C-PTSD, defines “fawning” as a maladaptive way of creating safety in our interpersonal relationships by essentially mirroring the imagined expectations, needs, and desires of others. ![]() Has anyone ever told you you were “too nice for your own good”? Do you often feel like being too much of a people pleaser has a negative impact on your life? While it’s easy to beat ourselves up for the way we let people treat us, psychologists have actually discovered that being this way - having a “fawn response,” as they call it - is one of the ways we adapt to perceived threats and internalize our trauma. ![]()
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