Better to fawn than to fracture

Fawning gets a lot of bad press, but have you ever thought of its redemptive qualities?  Essentially fawning generally depends on two things.  It’s a trauma response out of relationships that we depend on for provision BUT that are ALSO a threat.

In essence,
THE PERSON WE DEPEND ON FOR SAFETY
IS UNSAFE

These relationships leave a person in a position of ONLY being able to please or appease the person they’re dependent on, because if these people aren’t pleased and appeased, they remove their love by removing what they’re providing.  It’s a controlling dynamic of what’s often termed “conditional love,” which is not really love at all.  The opposite dynamic is the setting of boundaries which is an intentional conditional love resembling tough love.  There are conditions for good reasons; to ensure that the transgressions that have come to be expected in the dynamic have set and natural consequences.  Control is necessary in toxic, unsafe dynamics to protect the vulnerable — those who don’t abuse power, and especially those who don’t have such power.  But in an otherwise free situation, conditions serve only as control, and those conditions set up a situation where a person feels threatened unless or until they give over what’s demanded of them.

Many people don’t like the connotation of fawning as a “trauma response,” but the fact is these responses are conditioned in people over the years as they continue to be exposed in these dynamics.

Now to the content of the article:

It’s often better to fawn — to please and appease the one exerting power unjustly, via intention and by prior agreement with oneself — than to fracture the situation by trusting a precious truth to someone who can’t handle that truth.

Fawning by intention is a strategy where a person has agreed beforehand in a particular relational dynamic that it’s the only thing that can be safely done.

Rather than it being a trauma response, a person chooses this response knowing it’s the only option if they’re to wrest some control back from a person who insists on coercion, even if that control is self-protection.

FAWNING IS NATURALLY PROTECTIVE

Flying under the radar, fawning can resemble the grey rock method, which alerts none of an unsafe person’s instincts to threat — those who are so easily threatened and who threaten upon feeling threatened.  Fawning says to would-be aggressors, “there’s nothing to worry about here, I’m not a threat to you.”

It’s better to fawn than to fracture because it’s naturally protective to fawn.

FAWNING BUYS YOU TIME

In many social situations, we don’t know how to cope, how to respond, and this just reinforces our feelings of inadequacy and disempowerment.  So if there’s a way to deal with an impossible situation of “I’m damned if I do and I’m damned if I don’t” then we use it.  Fawning is that way.

It’s better to fawn than to fracture because it saves any potential stress for another day, and who knows, the threatening person may be dealt with in the natural course of life.  When forced with a course of action, anxiety rises, and there’s a preoccupation with the threat.  But to buy time brings back equilibrium.

FAWNING SAVES NOT JUST US BUT OTHERS TOO

Many people who fawn, doing so intentionally, do it not only for the protection of themselves, but for others too.  This is what one parent does to control a volatile situation their children are exposed to.  This is what one team member does for other team members when they’re all present with a toxic team member.  It is both a motherly and a fatherly instinct to protect one’s young.

It’s better to fawn than to fracture because along the way you see that others too are threatened and forced to adjust, and that gives you the opportunity to reach a hand of support that you would want if the situation were reversed.