“Why am I always a pushover? Next time I am going to stick up for myself.”

And next time? Same thing.

Does that sound like anyone you know?

We’ve all heard how the survival brain reacts to perceived threats with fight, flight, and freeze reactions faster than we can even think about the situation.

Fawn is the fourth f-word, it’s the fourth safety and threat neutralization tactic of the limbic brain. When the limbic system perceives conflict, anger, or social ostracism as an acute danger, one way it seeks safety is through radical appeasement.

Fawn is a response learned in early childhood and becomes a conditioned response. A child cannot fight or run away from an emotionally volatile parent, so it learns fawn as a form of proactive de-escalation; the child learns to read and anticipate the emotions of others and learns to smile, comply, take the blame, and suppress their emotions. Because the behavior is forged early and repeated often, it becomes neurobiologically hardwired.

A person with dominant fawn reactions will naturally and subconsciously

• Vigilantly observe others to predict and fulfill desires before they are even voiced.
• Suppress their own needs to feel like they belong and to avoid rejection.
• Distrust their own internal signals, making them prone to manipulation.
• Stay in abusive groups and relationships due to intense fear of the consequences.

The fawn or hyper-pleaser saboteur is driven by a need for love and approval, and it stops one from ever feeling secure in a relationship.

Many of us recognize those traits in ourselves and others.

We might plan an evening out and when our spouse frowns, folds their arms, and announces, “why can’t you plan anything fun,” we will apologize and change the plans to what they want.

As teachers, we might change students’ grades to avoid conflict with parents.

At work, we might accept unreasonable demands from superiors or coworkers because we fear being judged as not a team player.

Conditioning oneself out of the fawn default response takes time and effort. The following may make it sound simple. The steps are simple, but the process is anything but. It helps to have a therapist or knowledgeable friend acting as coach.

The path out of fawn starts with self-awareness and a question, “Am I doing this because I want to or am I doing this because I feel I have to or have no choice?”

After self-awareness, the second step is to calm the panic or anxiety of the limbic system. Mindfulness and breath work are good mechanisms for allowing the brain to calm itself by flushing out stress hormones that heighten fear and anxiety.

Third, with the limbic mind calmed, the brain can access its resourceful sage powers of empathy, exploration, innovation, goal alignment, and focused action.

As I’ve written earlier, from that Sage state, assertiveness becomes possible and healthy. Assertiveness isn’t aggression. It’s simply being clear about:

• What matters to you
• What you’re willing and not willing to do
• The boundaries you need to protect your well-being

Fourth is Learning how to be assertive without being aggressive. Kind assertiveness is a superpower. One very powerful way of doing that is to learn to phrase requests in the form of Nonviolent Communications (NVC). There is a two article series on how to use NVC as a nonthreatening and fear anxiety reducing form of communication here.

Fawning is a conditioned reaction to threat. Through repetition it becomes a hardwired mindset that eats away at one’s sense of self-worth and self-trust. It’s not a life sentence.