🦌 On Fawning—and Why I Was Wrong About My Most Toxic Trait, Part One

Fawns hide as their primary survival mechanism until they are able to run away—via Ben Westfall for the National Deer Association

“I wasn’t supposed to tell my story because it was better than anyone else’s, or worse than anyone else’s, or even that different from anyone else’s, but because it was the story I had—the same way you might use a nail not because you thought it was the best nail ever made, but simply because it was the one lying in your drawer.

. . . At three days sober, you can tell someone on her first day what the second day was like for you.”

—Leslie Jamison, The Recovering

Greetings, from my second proverbial day (seven in real-time) of a new seed of self-awareness. I’m still a fawn, learning to stand on wobbly legs, so take from today’s post what you will. I am not an expert, and only now can I affirm what part of me instinctively suspected when I started this Substack: part of unfawning¹ is dropping the pressure to be one.

I am wrong about many things, but one that’s especially gotten under my skin lately: the June three-part series on My Most Toxic Trait (spoiler alert: wanting you to like me). I heaped a lot of blame on myself, calling my behavior manipulative and lying, as I was taught to do by elements of codependency literature.

I am sorry if, in doing this, I shamed any of you, and now I am sorry for shaming myself. But I wasn’t then. When I wrote it just weeks ago, I felt defective for not being able to shake this trait already, once and for all.

When I wrote the “All the Way to the Memoir” series last week, I described being magnetized to it like a rubber-necker at a crash site because I suspected wanting to find my voice, critics be damned.

But deeper down, part of the pull might have also been recognition, knowing I, too, have unresolved issues with codependency and should probably start looking into meetings, especially since Liz G. seemed so gung-ho on twelve-step programs throughout the book and podcast tour. (And yes, I’m still fascinated by—and largely agree with—recent book criticisms, too.)²

But it wasn’t until reading Fawning by

Dr. Ingrid Clayton

just after finishing Liz G’s memoir, that I had a true aha life-quake—yes, of the very type Jia Tolentino snarks at—including dozens of aftershocks since.³ Starting with The Big One: Fawning is not a personality flaw, it develops as a survival instinct. It can be unlearned, but for much of my life, it seemed necessary to get by.

For children learning to navigate ongoing relational family dynamics, fight, flight, and freeze are not available options. You’re too young to fight, there’s nowhere to flee, and life goes on, so freezing won’t work either. As Dr. Clayton writes,

“With fawning, connection means protection.

. . . Sometimes referred to as please and appease, fawning is often equated with people-pleasing or codependency. However, both of those terms imply that we have some agency in our actions. Fawning is not a conscious choice. It is a survival mechanism. In a nanosecond, the reptilian brain selects the response that offers the greatest chance for survival. Afterward, the body remembers what was successful the first time and repeats it in the future. The fawner’s intentions were never to please or compulsively caretake. We were looking for power in situations where we were powerless.”

For most of my life, I maintained some version of I’M FINE, especially if threatened with therapy (more on that in part two). Books are safer than people; they transmit in one direction only, the one I’m comfortable with: them to me. No fear of being wrong, rejected, or judged.

I’M JUST FINE, K THX BYE, NOTHING TO SEE HERE.

I re-read the 55 Patterns of Codependency. That’s when it hit me, in combination with the fawning characteristics Dr. Clayton outlines in her book: If I am fine, just fine, then why do I regularly exhibit over thirty of these patterns? It’s as if a Polaroid photo started developing, and I could see my reflection in it (and in Dr. Clayton’s story): you are like this, you have just been too afraid to ask why.

In the middle of the night after finishing the book, a core memory surfaced. One that would look like absolutely nothing to the casual observer; an infinitesimal, utterly par-for-the-course childhood rite of passage for those with siblings. I have always known I am lucky to have a family who loves me dearly, and the fawner in me must say: I don’t see what I’m about to share as anyone’s fault. Still, it cracked open a fault line in my psyche that I’m only now understanding through a more compassionate light, thanks to

Dr. Ingrid Clayton

and her generous work.