The Fawn Response and CPTSD

(plus some stuff about religious fascism!)

Welcome to Healing is My Special Interest, the newsletter at the intersection of late-diagnosed neurodivergence and healing from high control environments. Today’s essay is a bit of a doozy and it includes lots of the thoughts I have percolating as I research and write a book on Dr. James Dobson, with my partner Krispin Mayfield. As always, this newsletter runs on the support of readers just like yourself! If you enjoy my work, please share or consider becoming a paid supporter. I am so, so grateful to be able to write about EXACTLY what I want to write about, and I promise I do not take that privilege lightly.

The Fawn Response

Photo by Vincent van Zalinge on Unsplash

“CPTSD is a more severe form of Post-traumatic stress disorder. It is delineated from this better known trauma syndrome by five of its most common and troublesome features: emotional flashbacks, toxic shame, self abandonment, a vicious inner critic and social anxiety.

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 Until I read Pete Walker’s book, I had never heard CPTSD clearly articulated before. He brings  awareness and education to complex trauma and how to heal from it—especially for folks who are in the thick of dealing with the long-term impacts of repeated abuse and neglect in childhood. 

I first heard of his work because he was at the forefront of people talking and writing at length about the fawn response. He is responsible for creating what is now known as the 4F’s--what we commonly call the fight/flight/freeze nervous system response is actually fight/flight/freeze/fawn

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. The fawn response (also known as the appeasement response) is relatively new in the field of psychology, with Walker first writing an article about it 20 years ago, in 2003. 

Walker has been obsessed with the long-term impacts of childhood trauma from parental abuse and neglect, and he kept noticing a different nervous system response in his patients. He found a pattern where a child would learn that fight/flight/freeze would lead to more punishment, so they learned to abandon themselves/please and pacify the parent as a self-preservation strategy, with severe and long-term mental health consequences as a result. Here are a few examples of the fawn response: 

• A child who apologizes profusely for something they didn’t do in order to calm their parent’s anger

• A young adult who chooses a career based on her parents’ wishes and not her own

• Someone who verbally agrees with what their partner is saying to avoid an argument, even if they don’t truly agree

• Someone who goes to any lengths in an effort to “keep the peace” in the home, even when they’re being abused

• An employee who is hyper aware of their boss’s moods and takes on extra responsibility solely to avoid upsetting them

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Walker’s book is 10 years old, and since then, there’s been a growing awareness of the fawn response (here’s a good introductory article on how the fawn response plays out in a racist society, for example)

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. But it is a relatively new term for many folks and it is grossly understudied and under-researched. And I have my own hunches as to why that is, and all of them depress me.

As I am deep into researching evangelical authoritarian parenting books of the 1970s-2000s, it is clear to me that the end goal of coercive control parenting methods is the fawn response. Evangelical parents wanted to create co-dependent children who would never disobey them. The goal of this type of evangelical parenting was to prevent children from individuating into fully formed adults with different religious or political beliefs. This is what was promised to parents when they read books like Dr. Dobson’s Dare to Discipline and The Strong-Willed Child

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. And his methods of corporal punishment along with swift retribution for any and all disobedience for pre-verbal children created many kids who were forced into mirroring exactly what their parents wanted to hear, as they were systematically trained to abandon their own wants and needs to survive. Raising children without a sense of individuality or self  was the goal because that would replicate white conservative Christian voters. Hampering the development of a child’s own perspectives, autonomy and values was good for authoritarian Christianity, and it was really, really good for Christian fascism. It created a special kind of co-dependency that kept children emotionally bound to agreeing with and mirroring their parents, rather than paying attention to their own feelings and experiences. 

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Here is how Walker explained his revolutionary discovery of a 4th nervous system response, something he developed after working with hundreds of childhood abuse survivors: 

“Codependency is defined here as the inability to express rights, needs and boundaries in relationship; it is a disorder of assertiveness that causes the individual to attract and accept exploitation, abuse and/or neglect.) I have named it the fawn response...the fourth ‘f’ in the fight/flight/freeze/fawn repertoire of instinctive responses to trauma. Fawn, according to Webster’s, means: “to act servilely; cringe and flatter” and I believe it is this response that is at the core of many codependents’ behavior. The trauma-based codependent learns to fawn very early in life in a process that might look something like this: as a toddler, she learns quickly that protesting abuse leads to even more frightening parental retaliation, and so she relinquishes the fight response, deleting “no” from her vocabulary and never developing the language skills of healthy assertiveness. (Sadly, many abusive parents reserve their most harsh punishments for “talking back,” and hence ruthlessly extinguish the fight response in the child.

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What happens when your fight response is systematically targeted in early childhood and never allowed to fully develop? Dr. Dobson knew. He knew what would happen to a large percentage of children. He knew that you could break a child’s spirit in such a way where nobody even knew. He figured out a way to abuse children and call it holy, because he  needed a large swatch of people who never, ever protested abusive systems—and instead seemed to believe that they (and everyone else) deserved them.

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The more I research CPSTD the more I see similarities between the fawn response, late-diagnosed neurodivergence, trauma from high control religions, and the psychology of religious authoritarianism—mainly, I see similarities in how few resources we have when it comes to these concepts. They’re all undervalued, and under-talked-about in our culture and in the literature around healing from trauma. And a part of my brain (perhaps it is related to childhood trauma, perhaps it is related to the autism) can’t help but see a pattern here: these are all issues that haven’t been talked about enough, because they are all things that help authoritarianism

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The fawn response is the desired threat response for authoritarian parents, religious leaders, and governments. CPTSD is the necessary result of capitalistic/authoritarian homes and makes people susceptible to exploitation and control. Late-diagnosed neurodivergent people were ignored and unseen because families and societies did not want to take our accommodations or our cries for justice seriously. High-control religions and the trauma they enact are not discussed because so many people have cultural or familial ties to these systems and are caught up as enablers. The psychology of religious authoritarianism is downplayed and ignored because the US has a problem naming its biggest (and internal) threat, and always has.

I’m aware this sounds a bit conspiratorial, and maybe it is. But it’s been sobering for me to realize all the things I have experienced as an undiagnosed autistic nonbinary person born to white evangelical authoritarian parents are only just now starting to be researched and discussed. Even if I had been able to be aware of what I experienced and name it as traumatic, there would have been zero resources for me back in the day. But luckily, times are changing, and it’s honestly an exciting and clarifying time for those of us who are interested in the patterns of authoritarian control and toxic family systems. 

A quick note on Pete Walker’s book: I love a lot of it and find it super accessible to trauma survivors, but I wish his scope was a bit broader

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. Much of his work is focused on helping survivor’s see that they were the victims of parental abuse and neglect, and how this leads to complex PTSD. I believe that there are other ways to develop CPTSD as well—including being undiagnosed or unaccommodated neurodivergent in an ableist society, being born Black in an anti-Black society, or growing up in a high control religion (along with many, many variations on this theme). I do agree with Walker that there is an appalling lack of frank discussions on the long-term impacts of neglectful and abusive parents—and I think the exploding popularity of books like Lindsay C. Gibsons Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents points to the reality we are at a cultural moment where people are wanting to grapple with facing the pain of their childhoods.

But for many of us--especially those of us who grew up in high control religions—grappling with our childhoods is terribly difficult to do. To heal from CPTSD means we have to be honest about the pain that impacted us as children. Plus, speaking up about the long-term impacts of childhood abuse is, of course, at odds with the authoritarian parenting methods many people grew up with—including mainstay evangelical parenting books written by Dr. Dobson, John MacArthur, the Ezzos, and Michael and Debi Pearl. The recent docuseries Shiny Happy People on the IBLP Bill Gothard cult shows this in great detail: all of the Duggar children from the TLC show 19 kids and counting are shown happy and smiling and compliant. The older girls take care of the younger children, hair down their back and wearing modest long dresses. How could we have known they were abused, people whisper. They looked so happy! I heard this a lot in my childhood. See, I remember hearing, see how happy our children are! They obey immediately and with a smile. They know how to honor god and honor their mother and father and the police and all god-given authority. 

What was not said by our parents and pastors and politicians was this: what we want are children who learn to honor authority outside of themselves and obey it unquestioningly, to the detriment of their own mental health. But I am saying it now, because it’s the only way I can make sense of what happened to me, and so many others, and I think it is finally time to talk about it.

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The fawn response—along with multiple factors of CPTSD—are approved and even the preferred states that authoritarian parents and governments want their subjects to act like. Here are Walker’s list of the hallmarks of CPTSD:

Emotional flashbacks 

Tyrannical inner &/or outer critic 

Toxic shame 

Self-abandonment 

Social anxiety  

Abject feelings of loneliness and abandonment 

Fragile self-esteem 

Attachment disorder 

Developmental arrests  

Relationship difficulties 

Radical mood vacillations 

Dissociation via distracting activities or mental processes 

Hair-triggered fight/flight response 

Oversensitivity to stressful  situations 

Suicidal ideation 

Some of these issues—including fragile self-esteem, attachment disorders, and hair triggered fight or flight responses—have been known to be valuable to totalitarianism. People from Hitler to Dobson knew that psychologically, people who were stuck in reactionary states were easier to manipulate and control

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. And the less self-esteem someone has, the more they look to an outside authority figure to “save” and “lead” them. (I have been reading Wilhelm Reich’s book The Mass Psychology of Fascism and while I don’t agree with all of it I found his section on the authoritarian ideology of the family and how it is used to support fascism to be extremely sobering and relevant to discussions of white evangelicalism in the US!) It is interesting to note that both narcissistic parents and narcissistic wanna-be-dictators have the same playbook: someone in the family system or society serves the role as the scapegoat (fight), and someone becomes the codependent enabler (fawn). We have seen and will continue to see the devastating impact on those who are culturally scapegoated (from the holocaust to the current shrill rhetoric and violence against trans adults and trans youth), and the fallout from being the perfect child / stuck in the fawn response. I will come back to these issues in other newsletters, but I wanted to type this all out just so people have a sense of where I am basing my thinking these days. I don’t view healing from CPTSD just as a form of personal self-care (although that is totally valid!). For me, I view it as a way to defeat religious authoritarianism and the rise of Christian fascists in the United States 🙂

But returning to the internal world of experiencing CPTSD, some of the most impactful aspects are the inner critic, toxic shame, and self-abandonment. These are internal symptoms, thoughts on a loop that keep the survivor in a prison of their own mind and cause them to continually doubt themselves and abandon themselves in order to find a sense of safety, belonging, and love. The reason children develop these symptoms is because developmentally, their needs, feelings, and concerns went unmet—and if they expressed them then they received contempt and scorn. The people who were supposed to give them unconditional love and acceptance were not able to give that. So, Walker and others have noted the pattern that happens to children who experienced this kind of upbringing; “Early abuse and abandonment forces the child to merge his identity with the superego, the part of the child’s brain that learns the rules of his caretakers in order to get and maintain acceptance. “ And this leads to perfectionism / the development of an intense inner critic: “Perseverating on finding a formula to win over her parents, the child eventually embraces perfectionism as a strategy to make her parents less dangerous and more engaging. Her one hope is that if she becomes smart,  helpful, pretty, and flawless enough, her parents will finally care for her.””

The fawn response, Walker says, often occurs when someone has a narcissistic parent. The child of a narcissist ‘is parentified and takes care of the needs of the parent.” He writes that “pressing a child into codependent service usually involves scaring and shaming him out of developing a sense of self.” And of all the 4F types, “ fawn types are the most developmentally arrested in their healthy sense of self” because of how dangerous it was for them to protest anything in their family, much less have their own developmentally appropriate thoughts and feelings (especially if they differed from those of their parent)

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. The fawn response is a way the nervous system keeps a child safe, when developing a sense of identity apart from the parent would only lead to pain, shame or other danger.

It’s interesting for me to read Walker’s work on CPTSD as someone who, in the past 2 years, has had to come to terms with a) Being undiagnosed autistic my whole life b) How religion and my toxic family system has impacted me and will the rest of my life. For me it is all intricately connected. After being diagnosed autistic, I started to accommodate my nervous system for the first time. I learned to stop self-abandoning. I started to identify and deal with my passive suicidal ideation. I started to learn to weather emotional flashbacks (without having that language for them, I was just better able to understand I was in a shame spiral or stuck in ruminating thoughts). In fact, I started to become aware of and to slowly work on many of the issues that Pete Walker says are hallmarks of CPTSD.

I think a lot of people are at this level in their healing work and in identifying that they cannot will themselves into being better in all of these symptoms. But what I don’t see a lot of people doing (at least publicly, who knows what is happening privately) is taking the next step and looking at who and what in your childhood led you to have these symptoms. 

I held off on thinking about my childhood as long as I could, until I started to realize I wanted a life that was lived outside of survival mode. I was tired of always being triggered into the fawn response around certain people, my outrageous inner critic, being motivated by feelings of shame, and abandoning myself for the sake of my parents / god / other people. I started to understand these weren’t personal failings but rather coping mechanisms I learned from my family and my religion

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. When I was a child, I simply couldn’t comprehend that my pain was coming from a parent or a toxic religious system. So I learned to internalize it. Something was wrong, so it had to be me. Something was wrong, and it was up to me to make it OK. Something was wrong, and if I tried very hard to be perfect, maybe I could make it all better. Until one day, as my nervous system started to rest, I started wondering if maybe I wasn’t the problem after all. 

In fact, maybe me—and everyone else who has been a victim of coercive control and is waking up to the trauma it brings—are the ones who can help combat toxic family systems, wherever they show up. Because one day the fawn response runs out—and as I am here to testify, once you see the patterns it is very, very hard to go back to pretending like everything is fine. 

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Next week I will be writing a bit more about what I have done to combat some of these trauma symptoms in my life like the inner critic and the fawn response and the slow ways I am seeing healing happen. Complex trauma takes place over years of life, and the same is true for healing. But I’m so happy to have a blueprint for moving forward. As much as my autistic brain anguishes at the lack of research, attention, and care paid to these issues, it is undeniably exciting that we are alive right now. When we actually can and ARE starting to have incredibly important conversations on how to heal our nervous systems after they have been hijacked by people caught up in toxic systems. 

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For now, I would love to hear from folks about what they think about the fawn response? For me it perfectly encapsulates my childhood experience in a high control white evangelical home. What about you?

(comments are for paid subscribers only)

1.  Pete Walker, Complex PTSD: from Surviving to Thriving pg. 3.

2. This is how Walker breaks down the 4F’s : “Traumatized children often over-gravitate to one of these response patterns to survive, and as time passes these four modes become elaborated into entrenched defensive structures that are similar to narcissistic [fight], obsessive/compulsive [flight], dissociative [freeze] or codependent [fawn] defenses.” pg. 13

3.  From this website: https://www.aplaceofhope.com/what-are-the-freeze-and-fawn-responses/

4. Here is another fascinating article on racism and the fawn (or “appeasement”) response: https://medium.com/rae-x-nkem/when-agreement-is-not-consent-118e8d2f279e

5.  Dobson was a master at teaching emotionally immature parents how to create a toxic family system where one child was the scapegoat (the strong-willed child), even giving them the language for it and normalizing this narcissistic family system. Many of the strong-willed children depicted in his book are just toddlers and teens with normal developmental differentiation, or they appear to be neurodivergent.

6. Again, this is Pete Walker’s first article on the fawn response, from 2003. http://www.pete-walker.com/codependencyFawnResponse.htm

7. Another reason these issues are not talked about or researched probably also correlates to how they disproportionately impact women and gender non-conforming people.

8.  Recently I have realized I have this same complaint with many of the brilliant books I have read recently. Pete Walker and Wilhelm Reich (author of The Psychology of Fascism) are two examples of people who can and do get transfixed on there being ONE main event behind the evils they have observed (parental abuse for Walker and sexual repression for Reich). As I am slowly recovering from CPTSD I am working on my binary thinking, and am starting to realize that humanity and society are so much more complex than I can imagine. I will continue to try and fight against binary thinking and keep the complexity of humanity in my sights, while understanding the very desirable urge to find simple answers for complex questions.

9. I’m gleaning these thoughts from all my readings of Dobson, plus reading this book. A fascinating similarity between Hitler and Dobson (and many fascists/authoritarians in general) is how they know how to manipulate the reactionary lower-middle class families. Many people in history have overlooked how vital the lower-middle class is to ushering in authoritarian movements, and we do this to our own peril!

10. Walker, pg. 123

11. Today’s essay is dealing primarily with the fawn response, but there are other responses children have to parental or societal abuse. I have also been doing a lot of research into the scapegoat, or the child who fights back (the strong-willed child!). Hopefully soon I will be able to share about that!