Understanding Self-Abandonment as a Trauma Response:
First, let’s help you understand a bit more how this developed and why it keeps happening.
Fawning, a trauma response commonly associated with people-pleasing behaviors, involves putting others’ needs above one’s own to gain acceptance and avoid conflict. See why I hate the term people-pleasing? It’s a misnomer. It’s conflict avoidance. The ONLY reason you care if this person is pleased isn’t out of some sense of humanistic goodwill, it’s more in the vein of “I’ll do what you want just don’t make me a target/hurt me.” It emerges from a deep-seated fear of others’ responses and a desire to protect oneself from harm or rejection.
Again, before we go too deep into “this behavior is gross, stop it. Why do you do this? Just love yourself,” I need you to know that this is a healthy and natural human response gone awry. Humans are tribal creatures. We are not intended to live alone and fend for ourselves. It’s part of why we get depressed when isolated. We have this response so that we can cry out for help and save our own lives. We can’t see in the dark, we have forward facing predator eyes, we don’t have claws- we’re pretty screwed on our own. We are quite dependent as infants. My point here is that electricity in your body? It’s a callback to that response. It’s a stuck response that you are supposed to have as an infant. As an abandoned baby human that physical pain- yes, I said physical pain- that lights up your body with panic and TERROR is intended to motivate you to scream so an older human will find you.
Think about that: the feeling you get when you’re prompted to fawn, to avoid conflict, is intended to make you scream or cry out. Y’all- IT HURTS. It isn’t in your head. The feeling you’re feeling is terror and it hurts. Your conflict avoidance is a literal avoidance of pain. So have some compassion for yourself in all of this. You’re working correctly! The alarm is just mistitrated and needs to be adjusted. You’re not some super-nice, pathological, weirdo that wants everyone to be happy at your expense. I promise.
The Impact of Self-Abandonment:
While fawning may provide a temporary sense of safety, it often leads to a profound inner void, a feeling of being unloved, and a disconnect from one’s true needs and desires. It disconnects you, or really reinforces disconnection, from yourself. The act of fawning protects you in the moment but it fails to fill this void, no matter how much external validation or love one receives.
Even more, it makes you prone to rejection sensitivity
because this rejection from others reinforces the validation of your rejection of yourself. It reinforces your feelings in that part of you that’s angry and hurt and isolated and told that you don’t matter enough to be allowed to show up in your boundaries, preferences, and the way that YOU want to show up in the world.
Often, it makes you into someone you don’t want to be. Here’s a harsh truth so prepare yourself. It’s one everyone who engages in this has to face. This is contextual so I want to warn you of that- this isn’t across the board, but in the context of this behavior- this is a manipulative behavior. Ultimately, you are being inauthentic and you are manipulating others into leaving you alone. Yes, even if it means you’re doing something “nice” for them in that moment. It’s not real. It’s generally not completely what you want to be doing and you’re building and maintaining relationships based on a false self. Yuck. However, I’m going to reinforce that whole self-compassion piece which is critical in healing this. You’re engaging in a survival instinct. It isn’t your fault. Your nervous system is wounded. You just need to heal so that you know when this response is needed and when it isn’t.
Hint:
This isn’t needed in healthy spaces. Barring any MAJOR issues like war, abduction, or another seriously traumatic incident- as an adult it’s not needed!
How did this happen? How did I become this person?
I’m going to make this super easy to understand. Ready?
You’re having a flashback. One sentence. There it is. People-pleasing, fawning, conflict avoidance, whatever you call it: It’s what’s called a somatic flashback. Initially it was an evolutionary response working correctly in a time that you were abandoned in some way: emotionally or physically. However, in one or more moments you felt this feeling and it created a chain of triggers- it created multiple instances that imprinted on your nervous system. So, now when you feel this feeling? You behave as if you’re back in that moment. You are reliving every moment that made you feel this physical feeling and the overwhelm of that is prompting you to act as if you are back in that moment!
From what I see in my office and working with complex trauma, this is a callback to childhood. Really it’s a callback to multiple moments. No, I’m not going to blame your parents. Maybe it was them, I don’t know, but in general I find that it’s a collection of things that happened to you. In complex trauma we discuss generational trauma a lot. Wounded people raise wounded people and there’s no malice intended. There is still accountability and responsibility to be had, but I’m not one to villainize the parents. It isn’t useful and most people aren’t really interested in this longer term as they heal anyways. I prefer productive interactions. That being said, what I’m intending to say is this probably came from multiple interactions, that may or may not have involved moments with parents, siblings, friends, not friends, abusive relationship patterns, strangers… it all adds up. And- honorable mention for ADHD and late diagnosed ADHD here: the continual rejection socially that we encounter plays a huge role in this as well.
As a child we are stuck. We can’t set boundaries or determine to leave a relationship or interaction the way an adult can. There’s a power differential. So, we engage in our defenses: fight, flight, freeze, or fawn. In longer term situations, fight and freeze don’t generally work long term. So we learn to dissociate and to fawn. We learn to go along to get along. We lose our voice and we absorb that some part of ourselves is unacceptable, too much, crazymaking, or the cause for why we’re abused- and we learn to hide it. Over time, this becomes deeply ingrained in us. It becomes habit, a deep groove in our brain map of responses, and automatic. We learn that we are helpless to get away and we condition ourselves on how to keep safe as we stay. We continue this behavior as adults which only perpetuates the problem. We collect more trauma because unhealthy people bounce off of boundaries, which we don’t have. We shrink and we disappear. Until something happens, one day we’ve had enough, we notice, and we try to figure out what to do about it.
