I mostly remember fawning, but now I am wondering if I had some freeze response in there . . . fidgeting, feeling like crawling out of my skin but not being able to, shutting down, isolating myself . . . when I was older like 8-9 the fawn response definitely became the most prominent one. And I was really, really praised for that in my family.
Fawn. I fawn so expertly that my name should be changed to Bambi. I have so many memories of going clothes shopping and just nodding my head to whatever the sales person brought - even though I hated it. And then we'd get home and I'd have sensory meltdowns every time I put the clothes on. And neither my parents nor I could figure out what happened between point A and point B. And the kicker is - had I been able to be honest in the moment, I'm pretty sure my parents would have honored my voice. But I couldn't find my voice because my brain decided the sales person was an "authority" and so it got locked up in fawning.
I definitely think that parents who parented this way overlook how it impacts EVERYTHING. Like, "why couldn't you just speak up for yourself?" but when you've learned that speaking up for yourself some of the time results in spanking or shaming, it becomes a default mode to keep yourself safe
Incredible insight! This is why I LOVE this community! I’m always walking away from a hairdresser or doctor unhappy. Not getting what I want, not feeling heard and wondering what happened! I must see them as authority too and fawn!
I guess I can thank Dobson for my unwanted haircuts and inappropriate medications.
Even though I am a fawner now, I can think of several instances of flight when I was very young.
I would play hide and seek with my siblings, so I was aware of a lot of good hiding places. When my mom was upset with me, I would instantly run and hide where it would be really difficult to get to me, and I would stay there for hours. I remember one time, hiding under the double bed. My mom couldn’t get to me, and my dad happened to be home, so she sent my dad after me. My dad lifted the bed up. He saw me curled up in terror and relented. I still remember the look on his face. Shock. Sadness. Tenderness. He is not a terrible man. He gently put the bed back down and walked out of the room. My mom eventually calmed down.
As I got older, I remember other times running out of the house and hiding in the dusty barn attic, up a really tall tree…so many places on a farm to hide for hours.
I got very good at being very, very quiet and still.
I know, right? I’m just now unpacking all of that. If my kids ever ran and hid from me, I’d be mortified.
I don’t remember him ever actually hitting me, but he did take his belt off and snap it. Do you know what I’m talking about? Autistic me can still feel the snap — “just” the sound of the leather. It was terrifying.
My older brother and sister would do the same to me, snap a belt at me. Taunt me just for fun. “Just being kids, yeah?”
After I stayed away from the family this past year, my sister wrote me a letter telling me how she was always my protector. Don’t I remember the good times? It’s messed up. I’m proud of myself for writing back with several instances of how she would torment me and then comfort me and how “interesting” that is.
Anyway, I appreciate this group where we can talk about these things and pick them apart logically. No kid should be terrified of their family.
Based on what I do now (even just before reading the prompt), I’d say my main response is flight. I have to distance myself from the stressor in order to process how I feel otherwise the overwhelm is paralyzing. And if I can’t flee, I freeze or fawn. That said, as I’ve been paying attention to my body lately, I’ve also found that part of me wants to fight back. I’m so tired of complying or letting things that cause me moral injury go unaddressed that I’m like a tiger beginning to furiously ram against the bars of its cage.
Did anyone else retreat into daydreaming and living in extensive imaginary worlds as a child? Would that fall under a flight response?
I feel like my fight response is getting stronger these days as well (and as a society, I see this trending too!). I am not an expert but a quick google says that disassociation or maladaptive daydreaming (both of which I also experienced as a kid) fall under the freeze response. When we can't fight or flee, we escape by going into our minds.
I read voraciously as a kid, which was absolutely my best escape (especially because it was praised by the grownups). So actually I’m curious about it being a hybrid of flight and fawn in my case??? It’s also noteworthy that my books-of-choice were always about orphans, or children who had lost one or more parents. 😬 Curious if you remember what your daydreams tended to be about?
To be fair, there's a lot of children's literature that features orphans or otherwise being away from the grown-ups. That in itself is something to think through some time -- though maybe mostly to allow kids agency for plot purposes. But also - same.
I would have said mostly fawn, because I always saw myself as the compliant child. I have a sister (who is one of life's best gifts) who is less than a year younger than me. When my mom talks about those days (and to be fair, they had to be hard for her) she talks about me having to hold onto her coat or otherwise be unreasonably compliant -- and it sounds like I was. I've realized, when my own kids were toddlers, that I may have never had the freedom to not be "good" or just age appropriately irresponsible. I escaped into books as soon as I learned to read them, so maybe that's a flight thing. My parents liked that I seemed "smart" but it also annoyed my mom that she would find me "hiding in the dark, reading". (I don't remember intentionally hiding, but just wanting to read.) And I read pretty much whatever I chose, which was wonderful. Honestly, I was more "good" than compliant -- I wasn't a helpful kid, but I did my best to avoid trouble, and I really did want to please God and my parents.
Reading the descriptions of Fight, flight, freeze, or fawn, I realized that just a few weeks ago, I had a freeze response. My phone conversation with my mom veered into her criticizing my sister unfairly and falsely - my body felt very anxious and my vision tunneled - something that must have happened many times, but I had never identified it before. But for the first time ever, instead of trying to change the subject or defend my sister (which has not ended well or been successful) I just said, "that's not true. I think we need to stop talking now." And we did.
It's so fascinating that the more I hear other people process their nervous system responses the more I realize that I utilize all of them in different ways . . . and I can also notice a lot more quickly when I am experiencing it in the present (and learn to breathe through it!).
Most of my life, in all honesty, has definitely been Fawn - especially as a small child. (It's been incredibly hard as an adult to realize that what I thought was simply being a "good person" as I was taught growing up was very frequently a betrayal of my own needs and mental health. Finding a balance between the drive to "fix it" for everyone else and actively engage with my own needs has been hard - and I'm still learning)
A dash of Fight kicked in as a teenager (All of that pent up anger had to go somewhere, I guess) and has been there ever since, but more often than not, for the longest time, that Fight was reserved only in the defense of other people. Learning in recent years (And convincing my brain/body) that that reaction can be reserved for my own preservation has been a hard one to grasp, as well. But, we're getting there.
"fight was only reserved in defense of other people" wow this resonated with me. I am slowly learning to fight on behalf of ME sometimes and it is really, really great.
Same! I love that for both of us. The realization that I can in fact set boundaries and stand up for myself after so many years essentially being trained to think I existed solely for those around me has been amazing and life affirming.
I was in all four responses pretty often, except I couldn’t utilize flight “successfully” until I was older; if I ran away or even retreated into myself, I would get much worse consequences (because it added “disrespect” to the initial “infraction.”) So I had to learn when I was older how to “run away” in my mind while keeping up the mask in front.
I was very “strongwilled” from six months old (my first spanking story) until around 10 years old. I could be in “fight” with my mom, because she was less scary/could hurt me less, but with my dad it was freeze. He would start making accusations and demanding I give a reason for why I’d disobeyed, and I would panic and have difficulty speaking. So he’d yell louder, make more threats, which would make it worse. Nothing could resolve or calm down until I’d been spanked multiple times….but I don’t remember fighting the spanking, only freezing.
The fawning didn’t kick in full force until around age 10, after I “rededicated my life to Christ” at summer camp and stopped “fighting” with (demanding autonomy from) my mom every day. I was the “success story” for my Dobson-loving parents. Fawning became my MO for the rest of my life, though thankfully much less these days.
I find it so sad / fascinating how our threat responses got woven into family narratives (like the strongwilled 6 month old story . . . UGH). I was a "colicky" baby until I suddenly became the perfect child as a toddler. I often wonder what happened in those years / months to make me stop asking for any of my needs to be met.
Rachel, D.L. and Amanda, you are reminding me of my own Strong Willed Child villain origin story, told repeatedly by my mom over the years: I was 2 yo and had pneumonia. The doctor said that it was okay for me to travel and so the family took a (completely unnecessary) 10 hour car trip. Apparently I cried the whole time and fought my mom hard when she tried to give me medication. She continues to be upset that I would fight her when she was just trying to help me by giving me meds. I've accepted this narrative unquestioningly for years, but the most recent time she told it, I fought back on behalf of Toddler Hannah. Knowing all my sensory issues, and how miserable it is to be sick, I questioned why she thought it was a good idea to take a sick kid on a long road trip, and asked her to consider that maybe I was fighting her because I was feeling sick and overwhelmed. Discussing this with my therapist, she wondered if there was some attachment problem on my mom's behalf that lead her to have such a troubling response to her child's pain, and hold onto it for more than 40 years. Maybe. Or maybe Dr. Dobson had conditioned her to view developmentally appropriate behavior as sinful.
Perhaps not surprisingly, I recall using the fight responses most when I was overwhelmed by sensory input. In doing some work in therapy on some issues recently, I'm coming to realize that those fight responses probably occurred after repeated fawning behavior did not get me what I needed from my parents and I could not not take any more.
Oh, Hannah! That's awful! I'm so sorry that happened to you. I wish I could hug toddler Hannah and take care of her the way she deserved. Sending all the love.
I was always considered "bad" and "strongwilled" because my parents did cry it out for HOURS at a time when I was a NEWBORN. My screaming for hours and hours was so *difficult* for my *parents* and they couldn't *sleep*. I used to feel bad for them, until I realized that not everyone has terrifying flashbacks of falling into a pitch black pit and being totally abandoned and helpless and unable to even change positions... Wait, not everyone has PTSD from their infancy? I don't have sympathy for them (as new parents) anymore. But for so long I was convinced that *I* was the bad guy.
Rachel!! Hi!! Glad to see you here. Thanks for sharing your story. My heart hurts for you. I did more fawning/freezing/flight than fight but I saw how hard it was for others deemed "strongwilled". I was also considered a "bad" baby. Such a terrible system to be raised in. I've been dealing with a lot of the harm done at our undergrad lately as well as following the Mayfields' work. It's a lot to work through. Glad to have a community to process with.
Flight with a side order of freeze. Part of it was my unconscious need to be away from people to process emotions. But mostly I learned very early to hide myself, hide things i did, put off the bad reactions as much as possible. The hiding made my mother even madder so it really didn't work- she was big on taking responsibility for things and believed any hesitation was bad. All the consequences seemed like big ordeals/ over reactions and I just wanted to avoid them hoping things would be calmer with time. I still react with flight even if it's myself I'm hiding from but at least I'm more aware of it now and do it less.
I'm doing research about the developmental stages, and I've been reading Erikson on how children will develop a pattern of hiding behavior because they learn that whatever they do has a likelihood of being considered "bad" and so it's just safer to hide :(
Taking responsibility and immediate hesitation being bad . . . both of those sound very familiar to me. That is SO much pressure on a kid, especially one that needs time and space (and possibly even safe co-regulation) to be able to access and process their emotions.
A lot of my childhood was spent fighting, and then flight. Fighting was definitely not acceptable, especially for a girl, so I became more of a “walk away from the situation” person as an adult.
I fawned like whoa. Doing whatever I could to calm those creating the chaos, but trying to calm meant that I needed to stay in chaos. It's still the nervous system response I fight the most today.
yeah, it's so interesting to hear about Porges talking about this -- how you actually have to be active in order to calm things down, the responsibility falls to you to help soothe the threat. So sad to think about any kid in that situation.
Yes. So incredibly sad. So when I start to feel dysregulated, instead of thinking about how to calm the chaos, I think, "What does self-compassion look like right now?", which is how I'm trying to reparent the inner child in me so she can find peace.
Oh this is such a heartbreaking truth. Fawning is inherently tied to placating the threat, which means you need to be around them when they are dysregulated.
I was all fawn for the early years, with freeze for the big T traumas, I experienced. Eventually, I felt totally frozen and disconnected from my emotions. My ability to compartmentalize and fragment, served me well for so long and got me through some deeply overwhelming experiences. As I’m working on healing as an adult, I’m seeing more fight/flight and it feels like… growth-because I actually FEEL. I view it as a sign of more nervous system flexibility and even get some of those beautiful glimmers of safety on a regular basis now too. I’m super thankful for the polyvagal framework to give language to my experience.
Three cheers for the polyvagal framework! I also have been able to see how the fight response in particular for me is a growth point (and getting in touch with my anger is actually really great!)
I remember being unable to stop myself from asking "why" and challenging my parents verbally, which of course got me spankings for being "defiant." As I got older and the spankings were less effective, my parents tried to ground me but I was already a homebody so they took away my books and TV and computer games.
It never broke my need for answers,or my belief that I was entitled to understand. (I've since identified as an Enneagram 5, surprise!)
But as an adult I find the hardest pattern to break is the fawn response. My dad was volatile, and would erupt in anger at the slightest thing. I learned early on to be small and quiet anytime he was agitated. A small mistake or too-loud noise or any kind of "sass" would turn his angry, berating, belittling attention towards me. I've caught myself having the same reaction when my gentle, loving husband gets frustrated or when he asks for my help with something around the house. It's been a journey to even identify that pattern, and start to break it apart.
It's so lovely to be an adult and get to ask our "why" questions as much as we want to, isn't it? Enneagram 5s are some of my favorites for this reason alone ;)
Yes! I've learned that asking and understanding are a superpower both in my work and personal life. I'm consistently given kudos at work for my ability to understand and improve processes. It's so validating to know that skill is good & helpful, not defiant & sinful!!
Mostly freeze for me. Still my main response to stress. And if I can get past the freeze, it's flight (but in like a slink away sneakily and hope no one notices sort of way). I have a bit of a wild story from my childhood that I don't remember, but that my older sisters have told me about a few years ago that really opened my eyes to my freeze response--and that it's always been there (not something I developed in the pandemic, like I had been thinking as I kept finding myself in freeze mode that first year particularly). I'll tell you about it sometime. :)
I mostly remember fawning, but now I am wondering if I had some freeze response in there . . . fidgeting, feeling like crawling out of my skin but not being able to, shutting down, isolating myself . . . when I was older like 8-9 the fawn response definitely became the most prominent one. And I was really, really praised for that in my family.
Same here. Mostly fawn, but some freeze. That's why I thought I was an introvert. Turns out I was just constantly triggered.
Fawn. I fawn so expertly that my name should be changed to Bambi. I have so many memories of going clothes shopping and just nodding my head to whatever the sales person brought - even though I hated it. And then we'd get home and I'd have sensory meltdowns every time I put the clothes on. And neither my parents nor I could figure out what happened between point A and point B. And the kicker is - had I been able to be honest in the moment, I'm pretty sure my parents would have honored my voice. But I couldn't find my voice because my brain decided the sales person was an "authority" and so it got locked up in fawning.
I definitely think that parents who parented this way overlook how it impacts EVERYTHING. Like, "why couldn't you just speak up for yourself?" but when you've learned that speaking up for yourself some of the time results in spanking or shaming, it becomes a default mode to keep yourself safe
YESSSSS. This.
Incredible insight! This is why I LOVE this community! I’m always walking away from a hairdresser or doctor unhappy. Not getting what I want, not feeling heard and wondering what happened! I must see them as authority too and fawn!
I guess I can thank Dobson for my unwanted haircuts and inappropriate medications.
Fawn. Now my automatic response to everything is “what’s wrong with me” and “what did I do wrong”. And please let me fix it.
Even though I am a fawner now, I can think of several instances of flight when I was very young.
I would play hide and seek with my siblings, so I was aware of a lot of good hiding places. When my mom was upset with me, I would instantly run and hide where it would be really difficult to get to me, and I would stay there for hours. I remember one time, hiding under the double bed. My mom couldn’t get to me, and my dad happened to be home, so she sent my dad after me. My dad lifted the bed up. He saw me curled up in terror and relented. I still remember the look on his face. Shock. Sadness. Tenderness. He is not a terrible man. He gently put the bed back down and walked out of the room. My mom eventually calmed down.
As I got older, I remember other times running out of the house and hiding in the dusty barn attic, up a really tall tree…so many places on a farm to hide for hours.
I got very good at being very, very quiet and still.
oh that story about your dad got me in the feels. No kid should feel that terrified.
I know, right? I’m just now unpacking all of that. If my kids ever ran and hid from me, I’d be mortified.
I don’t remember him ever actually hitting me, but he did take his belt off and snap it. Do you know what I’m talking about? Autistic me can still feel the snap — “just” the sound of the leather. It was terrifying.
My older brother and sister would do the same to me, snap a belt at me. Taunt me just for fun. “Just being kids, yeah?”
After I stayed away from the family this past year, my sister wrote me a letter telling me how she was always my protector. Don’t I remember the good times? It’s messed up. I’m proud of myself for writing back with several instances of how she would torment me and then comfort me and how “interesting” that is.
Anyway, I appreciate this group where we can talk about these things and pick them apart logically. No kid should be terrified of their family.
Oh wow, your story unlocked memories of me hiding. I remember spending a lot of time in the back of my my closet.
Based on what I do now (even just before reading the prompt), I’d say my main response is flight. I have to distance myself from the stressor in order to process how I feel otherwise the overwhelm is paralyzing. And if I can’t flee, I freeze or fawn. That said, as I’ve been paying attention to my body lately, I’ve also found that part of me wants to fight back. I’m so tired of complying or letting things that cause me moral injury go unaddressed that I’m like a tiger beginning to furiously ram against the bars of its cage.
Did anyone else retreat into daydreaming and living in extensive imaginary worlds as a child? Would that fall under a flight response?
I feel like my fight response is getting stronger these days as well (and as a society, I see this trending too!). I am not an expert but a quick google says that disassociation or maladaptive daydreaming (both of which I also experienced as a kid) fall under the freeze response. When we can't fight or flee, we escape by going into our minds.
Thanks for the clarification, I appreciate you taking the time to answer.
I read voraciously as a kid, which was absolutely my best escape (especially because it was praised by the grownups). So actually I’m curious about it being a hybrid of flight and fawn in my case??? It’s also noteworthy that my books-of-choice were always about orphans, or children who had lost one or more parents. 😬 Curious if you remember what your daydreams tended to be about?
To be fair, there's a lot of children's literature that features orphans or otherwise being away from the grown-ups. That in itself is something to think through some time -- though maybe mostly to allow kids agency for plot purposes. But also - same.
I always daydreamed about being an orphan... 😳 (And I read all the time as well.) I want to think about those things some more.
I would have said mostly fawn, because I always saw myself as the compliant child. I have a sister (who is one of life's best gifts) who is less than a year younger than me. When my mom talks about those days (and to be fair, they had to be hard for her) she talks about me having to hold onto her coat or otherwise be unreasonably compliant -- and it sounds like I was. I've realized, when my own kids were toddlers, that I may have never had the freedom to not be "good" or just age appropriately irresponsible. I escaped into books as soon as I learned to read them, so maybe that's a flight thing. My parents liked that I seemed "smart" but it also annoyed my mom that she would find me "hiding in the dark, reading". (I don't remember intentionally hiding, but just wanting to read.) And I read pretty much whatever I chose, which was wonderful. Honestly, I was more "good" than compliant -- I wasn't a helpful kid, but I did my best to avoid trouble, and I really did want to please God and my parents.
Reading the descriptions of Fight, flight, freeze, or fawn, I realized that just a few weeks ago, I had a freeze response. My phone conversation with my mom veered into her criticizing my sister unfairly and falsely - my body felt very anxious and my vision tunneled - something that must have happened many times, but I had never identified it before. But for the first time ever, instead of trying to change the subject or defend my sister (which has not ended well or been successful) I just said, "that's not true. I think we need to stop talking now." And we did.
It's so fascinating that the more I hear other people process their nervous system responses the more I realize that I utilize all of them in different ways . . . and I can also notice a lot more quickly when I am experiencing it in the present (and learn to breathe through it!).
Most of my life, in all honesty, has definitely been Fawn - especially as a small child. (It's been incredibly hard as an adult to realize that what I thought was simply being a "good person" as I was taught growing up was very frequently a betrayal of my own needs and mental health. Finding a balance between the drive to "fix it" for everyone else and actively engage with my own needs has been hard - and I'm still learning)
A dash of Fight kicked in as a teenager (All of that pent up anger had to go somewhere, I guess) and has been there ever since, but more often than not, for the longest time, that Fight was reserved only in the defense of other people. Learning in recent years (And convincing my brain/body) that that reaction can be reserved for my own preservation has been a hard one to grasp, as well. But, we're getting there.
"fight was only reserved in defense of other people" wow this resonated with me. I am slowly learning to fight on behalf of ME sometimes and it is really, really great.
Same! I love that for both of us. The realization that I can in fact set boundaries and stand up for myself after so many years essentially being trained to think I existed solely for those around me has been amazing and life affirming.
I was in all four responses pretty often, except I couldn’t utilize flight “successfully” until I was older; if I ran away or even retreated into myself, I would get much worse consequences (because it added “disrespect” to the initial “infraction.”) So I had to learn when I was older how to “run away” in my mind while keeping up the mask in front.
I was very “strongwilled” from six months old (my first spanking story) until around 10 years old. I could be in “fight” with my mom, because she was less scary/could hurt me less, but with my dad it was freeze. He would start making accusations and demanding I give a reason for why I’d disobeyed, and I would panic and have difficulty speaking. So he’d yell louder, make more threats, which would make it worse. Nothing could resolve or calm down until I’d been spanked multiple times….but I don’t remember fighting the spanking, only freezing.
The fawning didn’t kick in full force until around age 10, after I “rededicated my life to Christ” at summer camp and stopped “fighting” with (demanding autonomy from) my mom every day. I was the “success story” for my Dobson-loving parents. Fawning became my MO for the rest of my life, though thankfully much less these days.
I find it so sad / fascinating how our threat responses got woven into family narratives (like the strongwilled 6 month old story . . . UGH). I was a "colicky" baby until I suddenly became the perfect child as a toddler. I often wonder what happened in those years / months to make me stop asking for any of my needs to be met.
Rachel, D.L. and Amanda, you are reminding me of my own Strong Willed Child villain origin story, told repeatedly by my mom over the years: I was 2 yo and had pneumonia. The doctor said that it was okay for me to travel and so the family took a (completely unnecessary) 10 hour car trip. Apparently I cried the whole time and fought my mom hard when she tried to give me medication. She continues to be upset that I would fight her when she was just trying to help me by giving me meds. I've accepted this narrative unquestioningly for years, but the most recent time she told it, I fought back on behalf of Toddler Hannah. Knowing all my sensory issues, and how miserable it is to be sick, I questioned why she thought it was a good idea to take a sick kid on a long road trip, and asked her to consider that maybe I was fighting her because I was feeling sick and overwhelmed. Discussing this with my therapist, she wondered if there was some attachment problem on my mom's behalf that lead her to have such a troubling response to her child's pain, and hold onto it for more than 40 years. Maybe. Or maybe Dr. Dobson had conditioned her to view developmentally appropriate behavior as sinful.
Perhaps not surprisingly, I recall using the fight responses most when I was overwhelmed by sensory input. In doing some work in therapy on some issues recently, I'm coming to realize that those fight responses probably occurred after repeated fawning behavior did not get me what I needed from my parents and I could not not take any more.
Oh, Hannah! That's awful! I'm so sorry that happened to you. I wish I could hug toddler Hannah and take care of her the way she deserved. Sending all the love.
I was always considered "bad" and "strongwilled" because my parents did cry it out for HOURS at a time when I was a NEWBORN. My screaming for hours and hours was so *difficult* for my *parents* and they couldn't *sleep*. I used to feel bad for them, until I realized that not everyone has terrifying flashbacks of falling into a pitch black pit and being totally abandoned and helpless and unable to even change positions... Wait, not everyone has PTSD from their infancy? I don't have sympathy for them (as new parents) anymore. But for so long I was convinced that *I* was the bad guy.
oh my gosh, that story about how summer camp sealed the deal on a fawn response.... makes so much sense.
Rachel!! Hi!! Glad to see you here. Thanks for sharing your story. My heart hurts for you. I did more fawning/freezing/flight than fight but I saw how hard it was for others deemed "strongwilled". I was also considered a "bad" baby. Such a terrible system to be raised in. I've been dealing with a lot of the harm done at our undergrad lately as well as following the Mayfields' work. It's a lot to work through. Glad to have a community to process with.
I was a freeze and fawn person. Overly compliant and usually so overwhelmed that I would just shut down.
makes me think about how being compliant can be such an overwhelming experience in itself!
Flight with a side order of freeze. Part of it was my unconscious need to be away from people to process emotions. But mostly I learned very early to hide myself, hide things i did, put off the bad reactions as much as possible. The hiding made my mother even madder so it really didn't work- she was big on taking responsibility for things and believed any hesitation was bad. All the consequences seemed like big ordeals/ over reactions and I just wanted to avoid them hoping things would be calmer with time. I still react with flight even if it's myself I'm hiding from but at least I'm more aware of it now and do it less.
I'm doing research about the developmental stages, and I've been reading Erikson on how children will develop a pattern of hiding behavior because they learn that whatever they do has a likelihood of being considered "bad" and so it's just safer to hide :(
Taking responsibility and immediate hesitation being bad . . . both of those sound very familiar to me. That is SO much pressure on a kid, especially one that needs time and space (and possibly even safe co-regulation) to be able to access and process their emotions.
A lot of my childhood was spent fighting, and then flight. Fighting was definitely not acceptable, especially for a girl, so I became more of a “walk away from the situation” person as an adult.
It seems clear that the fight response was the one targeted most by corporal punishment, so many of us had to develop another response.
I fawned like whoa. Doing whatever I could to calm those creating the chaos, but trying to calm meant that I needed to stay in chaos. It's still the nervous system response I fight the most today.
yeah, it's so interesting to hear about Porges talking about this -- how you actually have to be active in order to calm things down, the responsibility falls to you to help soothe the threat. So sad to think about any kid in that situation.
Yes. So incredibly sad. So when I start to feel dysregulated, instead of thinking about how to calm the chaos, I think, "What does self-compassion look like right now?", which is how I'm trying to reparent the inner child in me so she can find peace.
Oh this is such a heartbreaking truth. Fawning is inherently tied to placating the threat, which means you need to be around them when they are dysregulated.
💯 So damn heartbreaking. Thankfully, I'm moving on from this more and more, and it helps to name it, but good grief. It is a hard cycle to break.
I tend to fight with a bit of fawn. Mostly the fight manifests in fighting myself, with peers it would be fighting them and with adults it was fawn.
"fighting myself" whoa, I am going to have to think about that for a bit.
I was all fawn for the early years, with freeze for the big T traumas, I experienced. Eventually, I felt totally frozen and disconnected from my emotions. My ability to compartmentalize and fragment, served me well for so long and got me through some deeply overwhelming experiences. As I’m working on healing as an adult, I’m seeing more fight/flight and it feels like… growth-because I actually FEEL. I view it as a sign of more nervous system flexibility and even get some of those beautiful glimmers of safety on a regular basis now too. I’m super thankful for the polyvagal framework to give language to my experience.
Three cheers for the polyvagal framework! I also have been able to see how the fight response in particular for me is a growth point (and getting in touch with my anger is actually really great!)
I remember being unable to stop myself from asking "why" and challenging my parents verbally, which of course got me spankings for being "defiant." As I got older and the spankings were less effective, my parents tried to ground me but I was already a homebody so they took away my books and TV and computer games.
It never broke my need for answers,or my belief that I was entitled to understand. (I've since identified as an Enneagram 5, surprise!)
But as an adult I find the hardest pattern to break is the fawn response. My dad was volatile, and would erupt in anger at the slightest thing. I learned early on to be small and quiet anytime he was agitated. A small mistake or too-loud noise or any kind of "sass" would turn his angry, berating, belittling attention towards me. I've caught myself having the same reaction when my gentle, loving husband gets frustrated or when he asks for my help with something around the house. It's been a journey to even identify that pattern, and start to break it apart.
It's so lovely to be an adult and get to ask our "why" questions as much as we want to, isn't it? Enneagram 5s are some of my favorites for this reason alone ;)
Yes! I've learned that asking and understanding are a superpower both in my work and personal life. I'm consistently given kudos at work for my ability to understand and improve processes. It's so validating to know that skill is good & helpful, not defiant & sinful!!
Mostly freeze for me. Still my main response to stress. And if I can get past the freeze, it's flight (but in like a slink away sneakily and hope no one notices sort of way). I have a bit of a wild story from my childhood that I don't remember, but that my older sisters have told me about a few years ago that really opened my eyes to my freeze response--and that it's always been there (not something I developed in the pandemic, like I had been thinking as I kept finding myself in freeze mode that first year particularly). I'll tell you about it sometime. :)
I think I still have a lot to learn / unpack about the freeze response!