Ep 126: The Fawn Response

This is one of our favorite kinds of conversations: where the nervous system, trauma responses, and the spiritual path intersect. We are looking at the four F’s of trauma response: fight, flight, freeze, and fawn. We are talking about how these normal, healthy responses can become identities and therefore keep us from fully nourishing lives. And in particular we are honing in on fawn, also called please, appease, or tend and befriend, since we haven’t spoken in as much detail about this particular response. But boy howdy do we know it from the inside out! If you consider yourself an empath, this one might strike a chord for you too.  

In this episode we discuss: 

• The fawn trauma response, also known as please, appease, placate, or “tend and befriend”. 
• How we can continue acting out “stuck” trauma responses so frequently that they become meshed with our personalities and identities. 
• Examples of what the 4 F’s look like as identities. 
• How shame holds these responses in place. 
• How you can’t put down by swinging the pendulum to the opposite extreme, which can be re-traumatizing, and ways you can instead tenderly begin to shift out of chronic states. 

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