The FIVE Stress Responses, Part II: Fawn & Fix Explained

Stress is not bad, and it’s not going anywhere. Yet how you handle stress isn’t random!!! It’s your nervous system’s pre-programmed way of keeping you safe from perceived threat.

In this second of a two-part series on the five “F” responses (fight, flight, freeze, fawn, and fix), I go in-depth into the latter two—which are newer to be recognized and hugely important because they are learned behavioral adaptations rather than automatic physiological tendencies like the first three. 

BY THE TIME YOU FINISH LISTENING, YOU'LL DISCOVER:

• The core fear at the root of the fawn response that leads someone to maintain social connection at all costs—even the great cost of self-denial and abandonment
• Why so many high-functioning women naturally default to the fix response
• What the fix response is REALLY masking for (it’s a doozy!)
• Why understanding stress responses is the key to understanding ALL human behavior
• What true ‘emotional regulation’ really looks like

AS MENTIONED:

• The Five Stress Responses, Part I: Fight, Flight, & Freeze Explained: https://www.buzzsprout.com/2471152/episodes/18778797
• Prior podcast episode on ‘martyr mentality’: https://www.buzzsprout.com/2471152/episodes/17083616 

FOR SO MUCH MORE:

Book a free consult to learn more about healing your nervous system so stress no longer sabotages you—or your relationships: https://tidycal.com/solutionsforsimplicity/free-consult)

Get on the waitlist for the next round of my 6-week program, Moms Made NewTM so stress no longer sabotages you—or your relationships: https://solutionsforsimplicity.myflodesk.com/mmn-waitlist

HOMEWORK:

Share your default “F” response(s) with me via email through the link in the show notes or DM me on Instagram @solutionsforsimplicity. 

COMING UP NEXT:

Join me back next Tuesday at 5am Eastern for a powerful quiz to help you discern which stress response(s) best match your (or others') default tendencies.

CONNECT WITH AMBER: Website | Instagram | YouTube | LinkedIn 

Ready to finally get to the root of your problems and change your life FOR GOOD? Book your free 60-minute consult to learn more about working 1:1 with Dr. Amber.

Transcript

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Whatever your personal F-response, please know this. You don't react that way because you're dramatic or animalistic or stupid or irrational. You react that way because that's how your nervous system learned to protect you. It's all protective in nature, but we have to learn to get to the root by recognizing your triggers and helping your nervous system learn better, more healthy and productive ways to manage your stress in those moments. Welcome to More Time for Mom, where overwhelmed moms get science-backed strategies to overcome the hidden sources of stress stealing your time and joy. I'm your host, Dr. Amber Curtis. Ready to make more time for you? Let's dive in. Last episode, I introduced the concept of stress responses. I'll link that in the show notes so you can go listen to that one first if you haven't already. But in there, I covered the first three F's. Fight, flight, and freeze. Those three are the standard, more traditional, and well-known survival responses, and they are all physiologically grounded, as opposed to some more learned adaptations we're discussing today. Reminder, everyone has a default stress response, one or two of these five Fs that you naturally gravitate towards, if not in every situation, then with particular people, for instance, someone you fawn or freeze around. The goal is to never judge ourselves or others for how they respond. I simply want you to have the tools to diagnose and acknowledge what is really happening in any given moment. The overwhelming majority of all human behavior is, quote-unquote, just an F response to some kind of perceived threat. Really. That's not to belittle it or make light of really harmful actions and behaviors people can take, but when you understand the world from a nervous system perspective, all human behavior makes sense. Notice as you're listening how so many of the characteristics I'm discussing mirror things that you may have been told are personality traits. They are not. Rather, they are deeply ingrained nervous system patterns that have been learned and repeated multiple times precisely because they worked. They did their job. They helped reduce a threatening situation in the past and probably on more than one occasion. Don't ever forget how much the brain prioritizes conserving energy. It would always rather default to what it knows than waste energy trying alternative solutions it doesn't yet have evidence could be successful. The big point is that every one of these five F responses is intelligent, automatic, but protective in nature. They are not moral failings. They are not unchangeable, immutable personalities. They are old safety strategies that simply got wired into your brain and body from a young age. All right. The fourth F response is called the Fawn response. Sometimes it's known as appease because we talked about fight, flight, freeze, or appease. But I love the F theme, so I prefer to call it the Fawn response. This term was popularized by trauma therapist Pete Walker. In his book Complex PSD, he describes Fawn as really being this people-pleasing tendency where someone over-accommodates to reduce threat. Note, again, that it is not one of the original Fs. It has emerged from all kinds of trauma therapy observations in the clinical world, but in my experience as well as a coach for 6 plus years, I see this response all the time, especially with my high-functioning, perfectionist, people-pleaser clients. This often describes so many of us eldest daughters. The Fawn response really overlaps with submissive, anxious attachment styles. It's all about befriending the threat to diffuse the situation and make the risk go away. The typical image associated with this response is a little doe-eyed baby deer who is so gentle and passive and innocent, doesn't want to upset anyone, and goes along to get along, hovering under the shelter of its mother's legs. Or you could think of two dogs where one inherently knows it is not the alpha, so it rolls over on its back with its belly up, legs in the air, showing its passivity. That is the fawn response. It's like the nervous system metaphorically rolling over and saying, please don't hurt me. I promise I'm not a threat to you. The core belief at the root of a fawn response is that if I keep everyone happy, then I'll be safe. Remember that the brain privileges social survival right up there with physical survival. And they're ultimately so interrelated because from the moment you're born, you know you're dependent on those around you for your literal existence. You can't afford not to be part of the tribe. So your nervous system vehemently wants to avoid anything that it perceives is going to get you kicked out. The feelings and symptoms associated with the FON response are tightening in your chest, smiling and trying to put on a friendly demeanor even though you're feeling upset on the inside, anxiety about others' reactions, hyper-awareness of others' moods and especially shifts in them, And then there is something that I really find in my coaching that I think is worth noting here, which is that oftentimes women who default to a FON response are so externally focused that they often present as being very disconnected from their own body. It's like you've trained your nervous system to ignore its own needs and desires so long that you don't even hear the signals it's sending you. Don't worry, that is so normal and it's so fixable, but it's there and it makes sense because if your brain thinks that others' well-being and happiness is more important than your own, then it will drown out any boundaries or needs that your body might have that could limit the effectiveness of your FON response. In marriage, this looks like over-accommodating, not expressing your needs, always saying yes, walking on eggshells, avoiding conflict to keep the peace. In motherhood, it can look like over-functioning and doing everything for your kids and trying to make sure that all of their needs are met before your own. Obviously, little kids have needs and we want to meet those needs, but there also need to be some healthy boundaries where you are taking care of yourself, too. It more often looks like taking responsibility for your kids' emotions, always wanting to make them happy, and swooping in to make them feel better the moment they're upset or something goes wrong. It looks like giving in to what your kids want because that's easier than tolerating the discomfort of their reaction to not getting what they want. And overall, just you feeling responsible for everyone else's happiness, even if it has nothing to do with you. Again, it's a protective response. It's protecting your attachment to others. The Fawn response says, if they're okay, I'm okay. But the shadow or downside of this is that the Fawn response can really lead to resentment, loss of identity where you don't even know who you are apart from what you do for everyone else. emotional depletion, not to mention physical exhaustion from over committing and constantly giving, giving, giving. It's like the martyr mentality I mentioned in episode six. I will link that one in the show notes as well. Just anecdotally, I'm finding that so many women come to me in their late thirties, forties, early fifties, their perimenopausal years, at which point they hormonally and energetically no longer have the capacity to care as much about everyone else, or at least to meet everyone else's needs like they used to. This often shows up as a new kind of anger or even rage where they are so furious and annoyed at how much people ask of them. But then these women are wondering what's wrong with them. because their current response is so different than the fawn response they've always had. And the other people around them don't know how to handle it because they've gone from being a super agreeable, people-pleasing person to someone who finally says no and speaks up for what she wants. And then that feels threatening to others because it's so not what they are used to that person doing. The fifth F is the fixed response. This is not one of the original F-responses, but it shows up frequently in high-achieving anxious women, and I see it in all kinds of my clients, so we have to talk about it. Like the Fawn response, this is a learned adaptation. it's often described as compulsively problem-solving, rescuing, or over-functioning in order to reduce internal anxiety. While physiologically there can feel like a lot of underlying energy and activation associated with this response, I consider it different than the fight response because that energy isn't physically or verbally directed at the threat. In my experience, the fixed response is like the nervous system trying to subconsciously circumvent the threat, thinking, if I just solve this problem, then the threat won't even exist. This was me for years. It seems so apparent and I honestly laugh at it now, but after getting suicidal from the stress of juggling my demanding career with raising young kids, I was on such a mission to find the planning, productivity, and time management strategies that would solve all my problems, genuinely believing there must be one right way out there, and that if I could just find it, then everything would be perfect. I devoured every piece of personal development and psychology research I could find, applying my PhD research skills to interpret all these scientific studies that most people not only don't have access to, but aren't trained in deciphering. Some of the things I found were helpful. And they are, in fact, what led me to start my business seven years ago because I was convinced they were the missing puzzle pieces that every mom needed to, quote unquote, balance it all. I couldn't see at the time how none of that was ever getting anywhere near the root of the problem. And when I remained stressed beyond belief, I couldn't understand why. Now it's no wonder. That's what the fixed response is all about. Getting the surface level symptoms to go away because you can't stand the discomfort of the real threat beneath it all. The fixed response is a behavioral pattern that grows out of parentification. I will have a whole separate podcast delving into that. I know I have mentioned it multiple times here on this podcast, and it definitely deserves more attention. But basically, parentification is where a child had no choice but to be responsible for things he or she really shouldn't have been. things that a healthy, fully developed adult normally would have taken care of and the child would have been sheltered from. But in the absence of a healthy, emotionally regulated adult, the child's nervous system stepped up to take responsibility in order to pursue safety and maintain connection with their caregiver. There are so many wonderful psychologists and clinicians that are discussing this fixed response more nowadays, like Gabor Maté, Terry Real, Lindsay Gibson. But again, this is a maybe hybrid and learned behavioral stress response. It could be seen as part FON because you are taking that over responsibility for a situation. It's part flight response because there's a lot of anxious energy and that drive to avoid the threat. And then it's part fight because it's all about exerting control. It's your brain saying, if I solve the problem fast enough, the anxiety and uncertainty will go away. But I will always teach this as a fifth F response because in my mind, it really is so distinct from all the others. In your body, the fixed response feels like this overwhelming energy to do something. It's classic overthinking. Coupled with incessant mental scanning like hypervigilance where you are always looking around for something that is out of place or needs to be done and that you can fix as a way of defusing or even preempting threat. In marriage, this shows up as offering solutions when your husband just wants to vent. It looks like taking over tasks because someone isn't doing them quote-unquote right. It's maybe trying to manage your husband's emotions. And few of us necessarily want to admit this, but I think it shows up a lot as this subconscious belief that we can fix the other person, right? That we can change them or we can make them better, or we can help them with XYZ instead of letting that be on them. Similarly, in motherhood, the fixed response looks like immediately rescuing a crying child. And side note, of course, when it's a newborn or young toddler, you absolutely want to be there to comfort them when they cry. But if it is a child crying because they're having big feelings about, say, not getting what they want, we don't want to fix that. We want that child to learn the skill of feeling discomfort in their body and having to process through it themselves. We don't want to steal that opportunity away from them or then they'll never learn to handle their own problems. It looks like not letting them struggle Solving problems before they can feel them. And then I really have to watch out for this with my kids, given who I am and what I do, but that's overcoaching, where we are always trying to help them do better, think better, have these solutions that have proven so successful for us, instead of giving them time and space to figure things out for themselves. The fixed response is just your nervous system trying to protect you from your own discomfort. It's the belief that if I can eliminate the problem, I won't have to feel this painful emotion or feel this stress. But like all the other F responses, it too has a shadow side, which in this case would be that if you're always fixing the problem or preventing problems from even arising, then you and your children never build resilience. your husband, your co-workers feel micromanaged, and you burn out. Here is the punchline. Stress is not bad, and it's not going anywhere. Every nervous system just learns a particular way to handle stress, to get away from perceived threat, and restore its sense of safety. The more the same response is used and proves effective, the more that F-response will become a neurotag, a well-worn path that the nervous system defaults to subconsciously, no matter the specifics of a new situation. It's so, so essential that you learn to understand your own neural programming and default stress response so you can be aware of how your actions are likely just perpetuating rather than ever actually resolving your stress. Whatever your personal F-response, please know this. You don't react that way because you're dramatic or animalistic or stupid or irrational. You react that way because that's how your nervous system learned to protect you. It's all protective in nature, but we have to learn to get to the root by recognizing your triggers and helping your nervous system learn better, more healthy and productive ways to manage your stress in those moments. Now that you know what the five F-responses are, let's talk about what emotional regulation looks like. Regulation is not the absence of activation. We want the ability to get activated. It's good to be able to, say, run out of a burning house or fight back against a stray dog that's trying to attack you. The activation itself isn't wrong. It's simply a sign that your nervous system perceives a threat. But recall, or maybe you're just learning for the first time, that your nervous system cannot think rationally when it's under threat. Stress always impedes cognitive ability and literally shuts down blood and oxygen to the prefrontal cortex part of your brain where you could think intellectually and analytically. Your nervous system is going to offer you an instant, subconscious, physical response to the threat in the form of one of these F responses. And the ultimate skill is then learning to recognize that you are triggered, not make that wrong, but have the tools you need to calm down and re-regulate your nervous system so that your rational brain is accessible to you again. Regulation is the ability to notice that you are activated. but then pause and choose an intentional response that is going to help you stay connected to yourself rather than abandoning your authentic needs and desires, and stay connected to others instead of acting in ways that only harm the bonds of real, secure attachment. For example, a regulated nervous system can let their husband watch a football game without getting angry, Or let their child cry tears because their ice cream has fallen off the cone without swooping in to fix it by giving them more. It's letting conflict exist without panic. It's letting things be messy without spiraling or making it mean anything about you or your worth as a person. It's honoring your own boundaries, even if other people get upset. And it's really empathizing with someone in need instead of trying to rescue them from feeling their hard feelings. As with the last episode, this is a lot to take in. So I'm going to end it here and really encourage you to listen to these two stress response episodes multiple times. You will surely pick up on different things each time you do. But we have now covered the basics of the five, yes, five stress responses. Fight, flight, freeze, fawn, and fix. At the risk of sounding like a broken record, none of them is better or worse than another. And they are so important to know because they are at the heart of all human behavior. When you understand these 5 tendencies, you really see them everywhere and you more easily recognize that other people's behavior isn't about you. It is simply a sign that their nervous system is perceiving a threat and is offering them this reaction as a way to try to get out of it. Your homework for this episode is to reach out to me by email through the link in the show notes to let me know which of these 5 most resonates with you and sounds like your default response to stress. It can totally be more than one. And if you don't immediately know or want further confirmation to help you understand your default tendencies, join me back here next Tuesday at 5 AM Eastern, where I will guide you through a super powerful quiz to do just that. I also really, really urge you to take advantage of my free consult call through the link in the description and get on the wait list for the next round of my Mom's Made New program where I walk you through all this in so much more detail and really help you get to the root of your stress. Until then, remember nothing you do changes how wonderful and worthy you are. Have a great day. I know more than anyone how precious your time is, so the fact that you spent it listening to this podcast means the world. Make sure to subscribe, and if you got value out of this show, I would be so honored if you'd leave a review and share this episode with another busy mama who needs to hear it. We've got this.