Yep, my main response is fawn and I could be terrified but smiling too. The mindset is "I'll show my belly so they are pleased and don't hurt me" and I'll do mostly anything to keep them happy to keep myself safe. It's basically trauma teaching you that your safety is dependent on other people being happy with your behavior.
I've also heard it refer to as "appease," but fawn fits better with the other 'f's.
Basically, it's having an automatic reaction of trying to be kind, funny, or charming to prevent potential harm. I learned from a really early age that if you can make the big scary person laugh or tell them what they want to hear, they are far less likely to hurt you, and you're more likely to get your needs met.
It's almost like a dog showing its belly and grooming a potentially threatening dog.
They don't "forget" it really, they just don't know about it. When the framework was developed in the early 1900s it was just fight or flight, which I think got culturally snapshotted as a phrase. Freeze got added next I think, and by then the seal was broken to add all sorts of things (which is good, it's good to have a more detailed view of acute stress responses). Now people will talk about the 7F's of fight, flight, freeze, fawn, flop, flood, and flock.
My older daughter falls into fawn whenever her sister throws a tantrum about something, and I'm actively trying to help her out of that, well trying to help both of them learn to stay in their window of tolerance, but that shit is hard to teach 7&8 year olds(and younger when we first started trying) because their window is so small to begin with.
But for some people their nervous system just defaults to certain responses from a super young age. My younger one kind of evenly fight or flight when she's in a hyperaroused state, but freeze when shes in a hypoaroused state(keeping things simplistic). My older one is pure fight when she's in a hyperaroused state and evenly freeze/fawn when hypoaroused.
My personal responses tend to be flight and fawn, and I did not have an abusive childhood, let alone a severely abusive one. I've just always tended towards fawn.
777
u/-nom-de-guerre- 13d ago
It’s fight, flight, freez, *and* fawn
everyone forgets fawn; and it is associated with severe childhood abuse and trauma