Selflessly Selfish

This is going to be one of those blogs that started out as a tangent inside my personal journal. I haven’t had the time to write a blog in months, but some realizations are too loud to stay tucked away in a private notebook.

Lately, I’ve been reading a lot about psychology and apart from self diagnosing myself with every disorder in the DSM-5 — as you do on a Wednesday afternoon — I’ve also discovered a fair bit about how we all operate, shaped by our unique life experiences.

In particular, I learnt about the existence of a fourth trauma response — distinctly different from the 3 you’ve probably read about.

Fight, Flight and Freeze

These 3 need no introduction, but they’re still fascinating to think about. When we think of remnants of human evolution, we generally picture the big hits: think opposable thumbs, our small — but nonetheless present — tailbone, or most famously, the useless — and yet expensive — wisdom tooth.

But evolution isn’t just about weird bones and redundant molars. The most remarkable hallmarks of a species that has spent a million years trying not to die aren’t something you can post on Pinterest.

The most amazing part of evolution is the non physical stuff — stuff which is hard to quantify perhaps but is in many ways magnitudes more important than a silly tail.

Our brain — and indeed the brain of most animals — has evolved to handle traumas in 3 ways.

Fight: The immediate urge to get aggressive, double down, or physically confront the source of the stress.
Flight: The “nope” response. The sudden, overwhelming need to be literally anywhere else, usually involving a rapid exit.
Freeze: The deer-in-the-headlights. When the brain short-circuits and decides that if you just stay perfectly still, maybe — just maybe — the problem will stop seeing you.

But while you will find these primal instincts in most animals, there’s one that is uniquely human.

It’s what the psychotherapist Pete Walker calls “Fawning.”

Fawning

I sincerely encourage you to read Pete Walker’s article about this. The entire PDF is barely 4 pages long and I promise you, there isn’t a better way to spend 5 minutes of your life.

Pete Walker explains the concept much better than I ever could, but I’ll still take a shot at it — Fawning isn’t actually about being nice.

It’s about what happens to you when people are not nice to you.

Yes, fawning is when you try to please people in order to avoid conflict, criticism, or abandonment. It’s when you go out of your way to make others happy, even at the expense of your own well-being.

But like every other trauma response, fawning is much more about you than the people you’re trying to please. If a single off-hand comment from a friend sends you into a spiral of anxiety and self-doubt, it isn’t necessarily because you value their opinion.

Hell, it need not even be a friend. It could be a complete stranger. It could be a random comment on the internet. It could be a passing remark from a cashier at a store.

It could be the most asinine take from a complete nobody in your life and yet you could spend hours obsessing, overthinking, and ruminating about it.

Which is exactly why fawning is so insidious. It’s not about the other person — it’s about you. It’s about your need for validation, your need for acceptance, and your need for love.

The cause

The reason Pete Walker distinguishes fawning from simply being a people-pleaser is because fawning is a trauma response. And as is the case with trauma responses, people who engage most deeply in it are often the most ignorant about the fact that they’re doing it.

Walker links fawning to childhood trauma, particularly to situations where a child is abused or neglected by their caregivers. But truth be told, if you try hard enough, you can link everything to that.

I think a better way to put it is such: For those who have not received empathy, kindness, and love in their formative years, there’s two major ways to cope with the resulting trauma:

You can become a cynic. You can decide that the world is a cruel place and that people are inherently selfish. You can build walls around yourself and refuse to let anyone in.
You can become a fawner. You infer — incorrectly — that while your caregivers may not have been kind to you, other people might be. You can try to win the affection of others by being nice to them, hoping that they will reciprocate. Because you never received kindness, you assume that if you give it, you might get it back.

To put it simply, you try to be the person you wish you had in your life.

The irony, of course, is that beneath all that, the only person a fawner is trying to please is themselves — trying to buy back a sense of safety that was stolen a long time ago.

And they fail spectacularly at it.

Pick your poison

But make no mistake — this is a losing battle.

If your only source of validation is external, you will always be at the mercy of others. You will always be chasing a high that you can never quite reach.

External validation is great drug — there’s a reason all of us crave a boss who appreciates our work, a partner who loves us, and friends who care about us. None of that is anything out of the ordinary.

But tying your entire self-worth to the approval of others is a recipe for disaster. And if you needed more proof that life is just a cruel joke, what do you think happens when you’re sad because someone said something to you?

You go to someone else for comfort and the cycle repeats itself. That’s the great thing about drugs — they sell you both the problem and the solution.

Conclusion

If you’re here for a fulfilling conclusion that wraps everything up and provides a nice and elegant solution to all this, I’m sorry to disappoint you.

In many which ways, you could say that fawning is the most human of all trauma responses. It’s the one that’s most deeply rooted in our need for connection, love, and acceptance.

For better or for worse, I think it’s also the most common. So the next sentence is as much for you as it is for me: stop giving a shit about people who don’t care about you.

It might be tempting to blame yourself for not doing enough to make them like you.

But it was never going to be enough anyway.