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Additional notes are below. Note, here I am using “fawn” in a very general way to denote the spectrum from “people pleasing”, going along with others for an easy life, to self-protective appeasing of more powerful people, to “giving in” and giving up on one’s own values to onboard the ideology of a group.
Transcript
The last instinct I cover in this series is to fawn. Some people say there are even more instincts (and Gary and I have actually found some subdivisions of freeze, that fit into Parkinson's umbrella of symptoms ).
Fawn is when you do as the rest of the group. So even if someone is bullying a friend of yours, you are hesitant to help your friend. you do as most people in this situation and it's maybe nothing.
That is a bit scary instinct to have because we have seen in history that this can lead to terrible things when you fawn. That you embrace what most people are doing. We can also call it the Lemming effect that you just follow the leader and do not think for yourself,
It can help you in so many ways to be friends with the leader of the group, but maybe it's against your inner values and beliefs, and that can cause you some trouble if you do the opposite of what you really like to do.
It can also be that someone persuades you to go into a dark room and not nice things can happen there. The fawn response, not being able to say no, is probably a mechanism of how a lot of people get lured into a violent situation.
Fawn is not an instinct that I often see in connection with clients, because then I'm one-to-one with people.
But I have helped some people with a diagnosis, where the thing behind all this is the urge to do whatever other people told them to do, sometimes called “people pleasing”. It was to help other people, it was to join other people, to obey and it can give you some trouble if you're not together with the right people.
So fawn, as with all the instincts are both good and bad. It's good to flee if there's something after you but it's bad if you cannot run away, like many of the stressors we face in modern life. It's good to fight if you have a real problem to fight for then it can give you an awful lot of energy, but it's bad if it's your normal task you are fighting with.
Freeze is a good instinct to take some time, hesitate and make the right decision instead of just jumping to conclusions in seconds. Fawn is good for socializing, being in groups, and having fun.
So every instinct has some good and some bad.
Fawn is good when you are in a group and you can just lean back on the group if it has good values if it's supportive and you can have a nice party it's good.
But if someone in the group tweaks values and beliefs and you start to suppress your own, or tease or bully other people, it's not a very good instinct to stay in.
A challenge for you next time you are in a 2. hand shop let these women inspire you (a reel, not all have access) or this woman and her garbage hats (individual confidence comes as we age)
Extra notes
Fawn is fun - being one with a group…. no doubt of that. But it has a dark side.
Fashion would not exist without the fawn instinct of wanting to be like the rest of the group.
People who just lean into a group and follow the group without examining their own values can be dangerous to themselves and their environment. Historically, we have had some terrible examples of this.
Most people have either been bullied or seen other people bullied by a group of children led by a leader. It is hard when it is children, but adults can do it as well.
When you generalize a whole group of people based on one detail of their “data set”, it comes from the fawn: the lonely mothers who gave birth and were not married (before 1970), gay men in the recent past, folks with Down syndrome who were put in orphanages, the red-haired, the "Karens", the ones with certain skin color, the (un)vaccinated and now again war based on religion. The last few years have been full of this "divide and conquer". The power of authority combined with our fawning instinct.
Better we stop ourselves and others when we/they put someone in a box of generalization.
We are human beings and we are all different.
If we work together and do not make greed and power our greatest values, we can create a fantastic world.
This urge to divide us all comes from a few group leaders who have the ability to activate people who have fawning as an instinct. They feed into a group belief that supports divide and conquer. I do not think war is possible unless a lot of people have this tendency to fawn and obey the orders of a leader.
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All of these instincts give you particular sets of symptoms and ways of looking at life and acting in life.
Fight, flight, freeze, Fawn, the calm state.
Where are your instincts leading you?
We all have our preferences of unconscious instincts.
The Fawn Stress Response