fight, flight, freeze, and fawn

Hot, very hot days, the garden is brittle and dusty. In the morning, we harvest. Amazing as it is, there are trees full of pears, apples, plums, a row of blueberry bushes, beetroot, fennel, carrots like never before and a long maze of blackberry vines climbing along the hedge. We water sparingly in drips and drops, buckets of waste water from the kitchen and the shower. The house is cool with all the blinds down during the day, ceiling fans here and there. At night, a light breeze flies through the rooms, now that all windows are open and I listen to the martens fighting and mating, their shouts are very loud and shrill, almost like the crying or anguished screams of a person. 

Just before dark, we cycle along the river - nothing mighty about the narrow trickle of the Rhine these days. 

picture taken by Meike Böschemeyer/local paper

I count the swans, seven, with one black one among them. The light is so beautiful, the last rays of the sun colouring the clouds pink and purple. We stay until the last daylight fades. On the bench just before we turn away from the river, a young Arab couple has set up a small campside table for several nights in a row now. The other day, we stopped and wanted to wish them a pleasant meal and discovered that they are both deaf. We only managed a brief exchange of smiles and waves.

This here below has been on my mind for many days now. I recognise myself, my mother, myself again, and well, so many women. 

  

. . . the hypervigilance so many women feel toward others’ emotional states is not dysfunction. It is very often an accurate response to real power dynamics. When women develop finely tuned antennae for the moods in a room, they are not being oversensitive. They are being precise.

A woman’s nervous system that hesitates before disagreeing, that softens every request, that scans faces before speaking – that nervous system is not confused. It has correctly mapped the territory. Her nervous system is running an accurate cost-benefit analysis of authenticity in environments where authenticity has a well known cost and consequence for her.

When you scan a room before you speak, you may not simply be anxious. You could be calculating. Your body just might be running a complex algorithm honed over years: Who has power here? What happened last time I disagreed? Can I afford the consequences of being fully myself in this room?

That is threat assessment not a personality flaw. 

(There are) four survival responses: fight, flight, freeze, and fawn.

The term “fawn” was given to us by psychotherapist Pete Walker, who observed in his work with complex trauma that some survivors learn to secure safety not by fighting or fleeing, but by appeasing: merging with others’ expectations, anticipating their needs, becoming indispensable or invisible as the moment requires.

. . . fawning is what a nervous system does when its social-engagement circuitry becomes a survival tool – when connection itself is drafted into defence. It is the strategy of choice when fighting means certain defeat and fleeing means abandonment or destitution. Far from being passive, it is arguably the most sophisticated of the survival responses: a real-time diplomatic operation conducted by your physiology on your behalf. 

Now ask yourself: for most of recorded history, which sex has most often faced exactly that configuration – unable to win the fight, unable to afford the flight? Fawning is not a female flaw. It is a rational adaptation to a specific, gendered predicament, repeated across generations until it became embodied.

Your people-pleasing isn’t a weakness. It’s your body’s brilliant attempt to navigate systems that were never designed for your thriving.

Honour that intelligence.

 

Ailey Jolie