serafaery

"A fourth type of triggered response can be seen in many codependents.(Codependency is defined here 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.) I have named it the fawn response...the fourth ‘f’ in the fight/flight/ freeze/fawn repertoire of instinctive responses to trauma. Fawn, according to Webster’s, means: “to act servilely; cringe and flatter”, and I believe it is this response that is at the core of many codependents’ behavior. The trauma-based codependent learns to fawn very early in life in a process that might look something like this: as a toddler, she learns quickly that protesting abuse leads to even more frightening parental retaliation, and so she relinquishes the fight response, deleting “no” from her vocabulary and never developing the language skills of healthy assertiveness.(Sadly, many abusive parents reserve their most harsh punishments for “talking back”, and hence ruthlessly extinguish the fight response in the child.)"

I was actually physically beaten when I protested abuse - spanking was a regular part of my childhood, from my parents and my step-parent (and probably my brother but I don't remember - he was ten years older than I and we wrestled hard, often).

Fawn Response