Let’s Fawn, Shall We?

Fawning over someone is the way you treat a crush or a pop star; you give them your adulation. It’s fun unless the act of fawning becomes a reflex defense against the misbehaviors of others or disrupts our ability to make connections.

The Fawn Response, as it is known, is a social adaptation that ranges from engaging with benign norms to an active form of defense against trauma and danger, or perceived danger.

We might pretend to have enjoyed a speech given at an event just so we don’t have to explain ourselves, and to keep with the spirit of why we chose to be there in the first place. It’s on the spectrum of fawning, but it’s healthy.

Think about the ways you fawn that are within a healthy range. These will serve as a baseline tool to measure your responses overall. Plus, this exercise will assist in sussing out where you might be stroking someone’s ego, and can just stop doing it now.

The Fawn Response also deserves its due for enabling thousands of escapes over the centuries. Seducing and manipulating captors is a classic strategy for taking control of the situation. Fawning is just smart, sometimes.

Fawning sustains a person over a period of time in conditions that are less than psychologically ideal but unlikely to change. Sometimes it’s just best for your day-to-day life to give your vengeful supervisor more credit than they deserve. Fawning is still fighting for yourself, sometimes.

Think about how you use, or could use, fawning to make yourself more comfortable in a situation you can’t or don’t want to avoid.

In order to gain better and more consistent control over fawning, we need a foundational understanding of what the response does for us. When we understand how our fawning sometimes works for us, we are better able to grasp why it sometimes works against us.

Also, the shame that can collect around the fawn reaction is thick and hard to talk about. If we have an understanding of healthy, strategic, fun, and powerful fawning, we can relax some of the sting and give ourselves more space to sort through the possibilities we might have for future situations.

What are some things you have actually said and done during a Fawning experience? Think of as many exact words and acts as you can. Take your time. It doesn’t feel great, but if you prepare yourself with a deep breath and the kindness it requires to support anyone, even you, the process does not have to be terrible. It can be okay. Let it be okay.

Let yourself feel what comes with your memories. Laugh when you can. See yourself in a better light where you can. Consider that no one else noticed when that was the case. The point is to recognize that you can feel those feelings and not die. After that comes the radical acceptance part. What that means is you detach from your identity as a person who fawns. You accept that you manage a symptom, but you cease to see it as a shameful defect and commit to addressing the act of fawning as an adjustable, evolving, ever-shifting part of your human experience.

Any of our maladaptive reactions can become more manageable if we address them directly and consciously. There is no magic wand here; our emotional wounds require conscious attention and applied effort to integrate into who we are and how we live.

The point of following through with the exercises presented by Dialectical Behavior Therapy is to develop alternatives to our emotional habits and the tools to redirect ourselves. In order to do this, we must attend to the exercises and suggestions. In other words, show up. The process can seem irrelevant or clichéd at times, but you are building resilience in the parts of your mind that suffer because the obvious is often neither spoken nor examined. Do both. Give yourself that long, deep drink of attention, and you will be in a greater state of health.

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