The Fawning and Appeasement Survival Responses

Defensive Nervous System Strategies in the Social and Cultural Context

Introduction

These days, we hear a lot about fight, flight and freeze stress responses. These are our “animal instinct” Nervous System responses and reflexes, which automatically kick in when our Nervous System senses that we are in danger. These concepts are often illustrated by the example of a dangerous predator which our Palaeolithic ancestors may have faced, such as a lion or a sabre tooth tiger.

However, we human animals are extraordinarily social creatures, and indeed rely on our social bonds and connections for survival. This has given us exceptional social abilities and powers to communicate with each other, from our unique ability to vocalize and produce speech, to our highly expressive faces, body language and hands. We also have developed extreme abilities to read other people’s inner states and intentions through their tone of voice, and tiny changes in their facial expression, gestures, and postures.

Indeed, because our ancestral survival depended so heavily on being part of familial, tribal or social groups, we also naturally developed Nervous System programs, responses and behaviours for avoiding and fending off threats and dangers arising from within the social and cultural environments. Such social survival skills include, in particular, the ability to avoid ostracization from the group, which could mean certain death.

However, we also needed strategies to avoid attack or theft of resources from group members who are stronger or of higher status, loss of protectors in the group, as well as fending off or avoiding attack by other groups. The outcomes of such strategies could include finding safety in numbers, being seen as a valued member of the group, or retaining or recruiting the protection and patronage of strong and high status people in the group.

In this article, we will consider some of the inter-personal survival responses, and defensive Nervous System strategies in the social and cultural setting, which have been previously identified. In particular, we are interested in those responses or strategies that recruit the “social engagement” functions of the threatened person’s Nervous System, including facial expression, prosody, volume or tone of voice, body language, posture and gestures, in order to escape the threat.

When a person’s Nervous System deems the situation is safe, these social functions are used for healthy inter-personal and group interactions. The Parasympathetic Cranial Nerves which govern these social functions have been noted to be part of a Ventral Vagus Complex of such nerves, which is also responsible for major restorative, detoxification and anti-inflammatory pathways. Thus safe social engagement is actually health giving and a vital source of wellness for humans.

However, when these social functions of the Nervous System are recruited for defensive purposes, the anti-inflammatory pathways are blocked by stress. Thus chronic defensive use of these social engagement functions during states or stress or threat is likely to be toxic in the long term. Like the other stress responses, they are only designed for short term or acute use. Unfortunately, the modern environment we have created is not conducive to these only being needed occasionally.

Fawning

fawn /fɔːn/ - to seek favour by acting servilely or with exaggerated attention; cringe and flatter - synonyms: bootlick; toady; suck up; kowtow; fuss.

The term “fawning” arose from the “co-dependency” literature (see next section), and seems to have originated with the work of Peter Walker. Walker called it the fourth “f” response of the Nervous System, after fight, flight and freeze. I am unconvinced that it is in the same category as these autonomic (involuntary or reflex) responses, but see it rather as a learned behavior. However, the details of the mechanism is immaterial to it being “a thing” which we can agree on exists.

According to Walker, this type of response is learned in childhood (infancy and toddler stages), when a child’s life is physically endangered by their caregivers, or by the caregivers withdrawing from their roles of providing protection or in meeting the child’s survival needs. In particular, fawning arises in situations where engaging in fight, flight or freeze responses is itself dangerous, such as when fighting or answering back, running away or being unresponsive is likely to provoke physical attack or withdrawal of caregiving.

Walker posits that:

“a final scenario describes the incipient co-dependent toddler largely bypassing the fight, flight and freeze responses and instead learns to fawn her way into the relative safety of becoming helpful. She may be one of the gifted children of Alice Miller’s Drama Of The Gifted Child, who discovers that a modicum of safety, the ultimate aim of all four responses, is obtained by becoming useful to the parent. Servitude, ingratiation, and forfeiture of any needs that might inconvenience and ire the parent become the most important survival strategies available.”

“Boundaries of every kind are surrendered to mollify the parent, as the parent repudiates duty of being of use to the child; the child is parentified and instead becomes as multidimensionally useful to the parent as she can: housekeeper, confidant, sounding board, surrogate parent of other siblings, etc.”

Walker continues:

“All this loss of self begins before the child has many words, and certainly no insight,… all hints of danger soon immediately trigger servile behaviors and abdication of rights and needs.”

Like for many other forms of Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs), these types of experiences and learned behaviours have very significant implications for bad outcomes in later and adult life, see my article:

Adverse Experiences, Stressful Episodes and Chronic Diseases

for further information.

In particular, according to Walker, children who learn to chronically fawn for their own survival, often end up displaying “co-dependency” behaviours in their adult relationships. Walker defines co-dependency as

“the inability to express rights, needs and boundaries in relationship; it is a disorder of assertiveness that causes the individual to attract and accept exploitation, abuse and/or neglect.”

However, it is vital to understand that the fawning was not itself a maladaptive response - it is what kept the child alive, so this is the Nervous System doing precisely what it is designed to do: ensuring survival. The fault lies with the developmental environment the child was born into. The problems arise when the child carries over the learned behaviours into their adult lives and relationships, where they are not adaptive or appropriate.

Co-dependency

According to the principal book on the subject by Pia Mellody, “Facing Co-Dependency: What it is; Where it Comes From; How it Sabotages Our Lives”, co-dependency was first observed in the family members of alcoholics and drug addicts, thus the name. However, it is important to understand that the term now has much wider application, as it is also observed in many adult relationships not involving chemical addictions.

Indeed, Mellody actually goes as far as to describe it as a disease in its own right, due to the fact that, like other forms of coping or survival styles arising from ACEs, there is a strong correlation with poor health outcomes in adulthood.

Mellody’s short article “Co-dependence: The 5 Core Symptoms” is a good introductory source for theses concepts, from which the quotes below are taken.

According to Mellody, the first of the five cardinal signs of co-dependency is difficulty experiencing appropriate levels of self-esteem. This comes in two forms: relying on, or comparison with, others to determine self-worth; arrogance and grandiosity - feeling superior and finding fault with others. In either case, their esteem is not self-esteem, but what Mellody terms “other esteem”: being based on external things like wealth, status, the opinions of others.

“The co-dependent person becomes a human doing rather than a human being”.

The second sign is difficulty setting functional boundaries.

“A personal boundary system is an internal mechanism that both protects as well as contains an individual’s body, mind, emotions and behavior.

It has three purposes:

1. to help an individual prevent themselves from being victimized;

2. to prevent an individual from being an offender;

3. to give an individual a sense of self.”

The third sign is difficulty owning their own reality.

“People who are co-dependent do not know who they are. They have difficulty recognizing and defining their own reality. Reality is defined as the following four aspects:

1. the body - how we look and how our bodies are operating;

2. thinking - how we give meaning to incoming data;

3. feelings - appropriate expression of our emotions;

4. behavior - what we do or don't do.”

The fourth sign is difficulty acknowledging and meeting own wants and needs.

“People who have difficulty with this core symptom can fall into these four categories:

1. too dependent: expect others to meet needs completely;

2. anti-dependent: ‘I alone can meet my needs’;

3. needless/wantless: not aware of needs or wants;

4. confuses wants and needs: attempts to meet needs with wants."

The fifth sign is difficulty experiencing and expressing reality moderately. According to Mellody, this symptom is usually most visible to other people. Co-dependents tend to go to extremes, including:

“they may dress very flamboyantly or dowdily;

they may be very thin or very fat;

they may have extreme self-care habits, or none at all;

they may think in terms of good or bad, or black and white.”

Again, although the co-dependency arose from the need to fawn in childhood, which allowed the child to survive in their maladapted developmental environment, the behaviour extended to adulthood is not adaptive. Indeed, one of the consequences is that co-dependents tend to be prone to being targets of predatory people, or to the control and manipulation by narcissistic personalities.

Appeasement

The best treatment of this area which I’ve ever read is the article “When Agreement is Not Consent” by Rae Johnson & Nkem Ndefo. They separate out the childhood fawning and maladaptive co-dependency learned behaviours, from another survival response, which is very much adaptive in adulthood: appeasement.

Johnson & Ndefo define appeasement thus:

“simply put, appeasement is any relational behavior designed to pacify inter-personal threat. Although it exists on a larger continuum of strategies… these behaviors vary according to the amount of perceived power held by the parties involved. Only when the power differences are experienced as significant does appeasement come into play. Appeasement asks for nothing from the person holding power except that they do not harm us.”

“When we have no hope of winning or getting what we want, appeasement is designed to at least let us live to fight another day. Fight-and-flight defence responses are protective against predators, but they are less useful when the aggressor is a member of your own species or especially when exile or escape from the group can be perilous. Impulses to overtly defend oneself by fleeing or fighting are suppressed and hidden behind socially acceptable behaviors that defuse the danger, making the appeaser smaller, weaker, and less threatening.”

Johnson & Ndefo point out that appeasement is more than a culturally constructed artefact, and indeed is part of our natural mammalian biological repertoire. They explore appeasement responses in dogs, chimps, and bears.

They sum up:

“in [summary], we appease when the nature of the relationship makes escape impossible, defensive attack is not prudent, and playing dead is not realistic. More specifically, we appease in situations where the unequal power relationship is embedded in the lifeworld of the victim. In these contexts, it’s fairly easy to see appeasement as a … survival strategy.”

Again, Johnson & Ndefo point out this co-opting of the social engagement for defensive stress responses is not healthy, and the chronic need to appease in a maladapted social or cultural environment will be pro-inflammatory on the body:

“… the appeaser faces a double bind of sorts. If they fully express the defence response, they risk potential violence or exclusion from the group, but if they simultaneously freeze the defence response in an act of appeasement, then they pay the heavy metabolic price of high stress system activation. Biology and cultural conditioning influence one another in both the response and the outcome.”

Feigning

In her article in Psychology Today, Cathy Malchiodi, points out that the term fawning has unfortunately become culturally loaded, and when

“used to describe ‘people-pleasing’ or ‘passivity’ when confronted by possible assault, terror, or atrocity, the negative connotations of “fawning” are depreciative, pejorative, shame-based, and perhaps, culturally or gender-biased.”

In her work with traumatic stress, Malchiodi noted that these types of strategies include complex, active and conscious elements, such as negotiation and improvisation. She continues:

“… a less shame-based term—to feign, a purposeful action taken in order to escape danger and defuse threat. By definition, feign implies a more artful invention than just mere pretending. As a trauma response, an individual may simulate befriending, deferring, negotiating, and/or bargaining in service of self-preservation or saving another.”

“Feigning may also be part of the other three trauma responses (fight, flight, freeze). For example, some individuals report consciously pretending to be immobile, as animals automatically do to distract predators. In these cases, it is not just the body’s dissociative response; for these individuals, it is a deliberate and decisive action when in danger.”

The main issue here is to remove the stigma and blame from the victim:

“… important to recognize how these adaptive responses helped in the moment for survival, but may no longer be helping in the long term, impacting mental health and quality of life. This recognition is particularly important in eliminating the shame that many survivors experience, blaming themselves for not fighting or fleeing an assaultive, abusive, or terrorizing situation.”

Socioception

Dr Stephen Porges coined the term “neuroception” to describe the fast sub-conscious process by which the human Nervous System constantly evaluates whether the current situation and environment is safe or dangerous, by scanning the environment for signs and portents of safety versus danger/threat, and for making snap decisions. Physiological shifts occur according to results of these neuroceptive evaluations, whether to relax, mobilize or freeze.

Neuroception also accounts for who else is present, for example whether we are alone in a potentially dangerous situation, or whether we are supported by others who can help render, perhaps through protection, collaboration, or safety in numbers, the situation less dangerous.

Importantly, our neuroception reads and interprets the neuroceptive processes of other people, via the state of their Nervous System, through facial expressions, tone of voice, body language and posture, touch, and I suspect many other subtler signs, e.g. pheromones, electro-magnetic fields, thermal signatures, and more, see:

How Other People's Physiology Affects Our Emotions and Internal States

Here, I am going to coin a new term myself for the part of the neuroceptive functioning which gets it cues from other people to evaluate the current situation: socioception. Thus, when more than one person is involved in a potentially dangerous or threatening situation, the physiological shifts experienced by each individual arise from a subtle interplay of their socioceptive responses, leading to complex group dynamics.

Since a person with a Nervous System that is in safe mode can convey this sense of safety through positive or empathic facial expression, melodic tone of voice, relaxed posture and stance, and if proximate, re-assuring touch, this can help other people’s socioception to also decide the situation is safe. This ability of one person’s Nervous System to calm that of another is called “co-regulation”.

Conversely, if a person is feeling threatened, the externalization of their Nervous System state, displayed through angry or fearful facial expression, screaming or shouting, defensive postures and mobilizations, grabbing on to others, etc, can influence the socioceptive evaluation of other people towards feeling threatened or endangered too. In large groups, this can have a domino effect, leading to mass panic.

How much weight one person’s socioceptive evaluation gives to the cues arising from a specific other is likely influenced by many factors, such as their relationship, family ties, past experience, (im)balances of power, (dis)regard, (dis)respect. So a strong or charismatic leader might be able to significantly influence the socioception of many other people present, a child will react very strongly to the Nervous System state of a parent, and a person who is chronically will be significantly influenced by the Nervous System state and “bedside manner” of a doctor during a medical appointment.

Socioception also evaluates whether other people are themselves a source of danger, not only in deciding if a stranger is a threat or is friendly, but also if a familiar person is in a physiological state which is safe to be with. While the threat reaction to a stranger might include autonomic mobilizations or immobilizations similar to those which arise when faced with a dangerous animal, say, socioception may have a much more intricate and subtle role in threat reduction from a familiar person.

This is especially the case where there is a significant power imbalance in the relationship and one person is reliant on the other for provision of essential resources, such as food, shelter, money, physical assistance, protection, care, love.

This is the situation in infancy, for example, when a baby is totally reliant on a parent to provide the essential resources for life, and with infirmity in old age, but is also very relevant in healthcare and caregiving of debilitating chronic illness. An existential threat arises for a reliant person if a provider disconnects or withdraws, in which case the essential resources may become unavailable, or there is a danger of becoming isolated or unprotected.

Provider withdrawal not only includes the act of physically leaving, but also social disengagement when the provider's own Nervous System feels unsafe and shifts to a defensive, and hence more selfish, physiological state, in which the the reliant person's needs become deprioritized.

Socioception constantly evaluates the provider's face, voice, gestures, touch, etc., for signs of connection or imminent withdrawal. As well as overt signs such as anger or fear, the socioception of a reliant person is prone to detect a threat of withdrawal or disconnect if it perceives a provider is belittling, blaming, shaming, ignoring or criticizing them. Thus being shamed is a significant source of stress and danger for a reliant person.

When a disengagement or withdrawal trigger is sensed, an appeasement stress or threat reduction response may arise in the reliant person, consisting of seeking to influence (calm) the provider's own physiological state, and make them feel safe. This involves the reliant person altering their own tone of voice, facial expression, body language and behaviour in order to try to shift the physiology of the provider towards a state which reduces the risk of disconnection, and hence the potential loss of access to resources and protection.

As the reliant person masks their own physiological state, emotions and feelings, this is not a true socially engaged state of both people being relaxed and feeling connected, and since it is still a form of stress response, it does not convey the benefits to health, restoration or growth that true social engagement and connectedness does.

A person’s socioception will be very history dependent, so a relational situation which one person finds safe and enjoyable may be evaluated as life-threatening by another person's danger sense. In particular, socioception is greatly influenced by history and past experience, and can become more sensitive to danger cues arising from other people, as stressful social experiences and relational traumas mount up during life.