“While we typically think of ‘fight’, ‘flight’, or ‘freeze’ as responses ... it turns out there is a fourth F of trauma responses. It’s called ‘fawning’,” clinical psychologist Dr Ingrid Clayton writes in the first chapter of her third title, Fawning: Why the Need to Please Makes Us Lose Ourselves — and How to Find our Way Back.
A term commonly associated with sycophantic behaviour, ‘fawning’ is redefined within a trauma context and Clayton draws on the definition coined by Pete Walker, a psychotherapist and author of Complex PTSD, to contextualise the word in a psychoanalytical sense: “A response to a threat by becoming more appealing to the threat. Fawning as a trauma response puts our behaviours in the context of disempowerment or maltreatment,” Clayton elaborates.
Consider the following questions: Do you apologise to people who hurt you? Obsess about saying the right thing? Make yourself into someone who you’re not while seeking approval that may never come? You might be a fawner.
But worry not — Clayton’s book can help you break the pattern of fawning by both recognising it for the trauma response it is, and taking active measures to successfully “unfawn” yourself. With 20 years of experience — and drawing on both her clients and her personal fawning responses to traumatic experiences — Clayton demonstrates why we fawn, how to identify the signs of fawning, explores cycles of trauma bonds and re-enactment and, ultimately, teaches you how to learn to trust yourself, undo your fawning, and tackle the relational work of unfawning.
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