#fawn response

from A Well-Trained Wife: My Escape from Christian Patriarchy by Tia Levings (2024)

Pat said reactivity was a trauma response.

I was familiar with fight or flight. But less familiar with freeze and fawn. She explained fawning as supercharged people-pleasing. It’s engaging in behaviors (often self-betraying behaviors) in an attempt to appease and pacify a traumatic threat.

Fawning placed everyone else’s needs over my own, which also, perhaps conveniently, modeled Christian behavior. […]

People preferred to be fawned over more than they liked to hear a woman in fight response, but both responses were my reaction to feeling triggered. Fawning was my attempt to pacify a perceived threat and my relationships were entangled by it.

It shouldn't be normal for half the country to actively be voting to hurt the other half.

It shouldn't be normal for the half of the country that's being abused to make excuses for the abusive half. To argue that they're actually good people deep down who will totally change if you just show them enough kindness.

It shouldn't be normal for the half of the country being abused to constantly self-police because they think fighting back will make their abuse worse.

It shouldn't feel like the strategists and leadership for the abused party are running on fawn responses to their abusers, even at the expense of leaving their own behind, to the point of compromising their own values.