I’ve got a bone to pick with our use of the “fawn” response.

Look, as relational trauma therapist to people who have been subject to systemic oppressions, appease mode litters the sessions I provide.

But if I’m honest, there’s something half-baked in our conversations featuring the “fawn” response.

Do I think the fawn response is real? Of course.

I see the fawn response alive and well in survivors of interpersonal violence with the way they walk on eggshells and lunge into placating action to keep the peace.

I see appease mode online in the woman of color trying to get a clear diagnosis on a medical issue without angering the medical professional they need help from.

I see the fawn response in men who have become so passive in an earnest attempt not to be the belligerent, toxic masculinity role models they grew up with.

But I also see the fawn response get weaponized. It can be wielded as a sword of victimhood.

I see the fawn response talked about as if there’s this preponderance of scientific evidence for it – there’s not (that doesn’t make it not a thing, that just goes to show a potential bias with it).

I also see other social defense strategies too that we don’t validate as nearly as much as the fawn response.

And I think this plays into larger issues:

We’d rather play the victim than do the work of deeply feeling our vulnerability and pain.

We’re deeply uncomfortable with the idea that each and every one of us is capable of perpetrating harm.

We refuse to look at perpetrators in trauma-informed ways. Like, when do we ever talk about the nervous system of the narcissist?

For some reason, we still can’t wrap our heads around this simple truth: there are no perfect victims or villains.

And I think this detail is stopping us from doing the real work we need to do to end cycles of generational trauma.

Think about it: if we took this binary approach off the table how different would the world be? Our relationships? Our systems? Our leaders?

(Ugh! I’m reallllllllllly wishing all these PDFs in power would have gone to a solid therapist who went deep with them early on rather than going down this path of acting on unresolved decedents of colonizers shit (Because, villains aren’t born, they are shaped through experience (seriously, no baby is born bad))). But I digress.

Needless to say, I’m thinking about my field’s hand in all of this.

So let me spell it out a bit here.

Alongside the ways people weaponize the fawn response and emphasize appease mode over other social adaptive strategies reiterates the “victims or villains” narrative, this gap in clear, consistent language in the trauma field sets us professionals up to collude with rather than challenge these biases.

We need to do better.

In my work with clients, I used to describe appease mode as “a hyperaroused response characterized by prosocial behaviors done from a place of fear.”

It sounds legit. But here’s where things break down with appease mode and the polarization of victims and villains that this frame creates: sometimes appease mode includes antisocial behaviors alongside prosocial ones.

Technically speaking, to appease is, in a way, to manipulate the situation. To be socially strategic. Or to steer it in some kind of way.

Not in a malicious kind of way, but in a survival kind of way.

At times that’s exactly what you need to do to stay safe. I am not knocking that.

Staying safe sometimes does involve acting, pretending, flat out lying, manipulating, charming, laying low, gossiping, triangulating, and on and on.

Look, I’m not here to judge the things we need to do when we do not feel safe. But I do take issue with the black and white thinking that gets in the way of us having the honest conversations needed to heal and grow.

Like, do we not feel safe because of something that happened in the past or in the present? How are we showing up in this space? Where’s the power we do possess? Do we actually have some unidentified need here that would be better addressed through other actions? How can we find a safe space and safe approach for those needs rather than re-enacting trauma, over and over.

So, as a first step, here’s what I propose: let’s start talking about social steering as a category of nervous system responses that includes the fawn response right alongside manipulation and all the rest.

Because leaving other forms of socially adaptive strategies is biased and prevents us from getting real in our healing.

So, can we start there? Can we start identifying our STEER responses? And then break down what parts of our behaviors are prosocial and antisocial? Please?

Because when we don’t take full stock of ALL of our adaptive strategies, we run the risk of hurting people from our hurts.

Let’s create space for more real and nuanced understandings. More accountability. More growth and change.

Because that’s really the first step to change: creating a safe S P A C E.

In the immortal words of Mr. Rogers, “Anything that’s human is mentionable, and anything that is mentionable can be more manageable.”