Fawning…
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 explored how responsive fawning shows up in our behavior: self-minimizing, hypervigilance, anxiety, shapeshifting, conflict avoidance, resentment, excessive caretaking at our own expense and a desperation to be chosen.
This post, the fourth in a ten-part series on the fawn response, pauses our engagement with Ingrid Clayton’s book Fawning: Why the Need to Please Makes us Lose Ourselves and How to Find our Way Back to add a crucial category her work doesn’t cover—initiative fawning.
Full disclosure upfront, I made up this term. I’m not certain I love it but so far it’s my best attempt to name what happens when chronic fawning intersects CPTSD.