Photo by Haneen Krimly on Unsplash
So far we’ve defined fawning as…
an internal posture
that “leans all the way over”
to center another person
at the expense of our own personhood
in an attempt to
survive relational encounters of
disempowerment or maltreatment.
Last week we talked about how the fawn response isn’t controlling, lying, codependency or people pleasing. Ok, great. But what is it? What does it look like? When we are internally leaning all the way over, what are we doing on the outside?
This post is the third in a ten-part series on the fawn response and the process Ingrid Clayton calls “unfawning” in her book Fawning: Why the Need to Please Makes us Lose Ourselves and How to Find our Way Back.