Fawning – is it a personality quirk, culture, or an expression of trauma?

‘Fawning – is it a personality quirk, culture, or an expression of trauma?’ blog article was written by Dios Ininahazwe, a Psychologist, Therapeutic Specialist and Burundian man in the NSW OurSPACE program at Australian Childhood Foundation. 

Every clinician’s heart has the desire to connect with their clients, to deeply understand their experiences, and genuinely appreciate their stories.

Nevertheless, understanding a client’s journey requires attuned curiosity, clinical wisdom, and cultural insights. This blog provides a reflection on cultural nuances that can blur our clinical judgement when working with individuals from cultural backgrounds other than our own.  

Understanding trauma responses in the context of cultural psychology is crucial. Trauma isn’t just a mental experience; it reverberates throughout our entire being. As Gabor Maté puts it,”Trauma is not what happened to us, but what happened inside of us”.

The coping mechanisms we develop in response to stress, threats, and danger can reshape our perception of the world.  

According to the Polyvagal Theory, when faced with traumatic stress, our nervous system triggers a cascade of reactions that push our mind and body into survival mode. This process is seen as a variation of the fight/flight/freeze response and potentially collapse and shut down. In this state, our higher reasoning and language structures are downregulated because we’re focused on survival, not rational thinking.

The result is a profound imprinted stress response that can linger, causing physiological, mental, and emotional changes in how we interact with the world (and ourselves). 

Among the four prominent trauma responses, fawning is a fascinating trauma expression in that individuals exhibiting fawning trauma responses tend to prioritise others rather than themselves.

They are codependent and aim to avoid conflict by aligning with other people’s wishes, needs, and demands to create a sense of safety. As such, fawning is a maladaptive way of creating safety in our connections with others by mirroring other people’s imagined expectations and desires whilst neglecting our own needs.

Nevertheless, the fawning behaviours rarely produce the desperately needed sense of deep connection, love, and acceptance. Instead, the fawner often experiences further feelings of rejection, disconnect, and loss of identity as their self-sacrificing efforts are seldom reciprocated. 

Fawning undermines relational safety in that the fawning individual feels compelled to repress their own needs and desires to accommodate others, often resulting in the fawner feeling inferior and worthless.

Underlying the typical self-sacrificing fawning behaviours and resultant feelings of helplessness and worthlessness is a deeply seeded fear of rejection and punishment, stemming from negative core beliefs of being “unlovable” and “I am not good enough”. As such, the fawner typically believes they do not deserve love, care, and support.

This profoundly impacts what the fawner is willing to accept and sacrifice to avoid punishment and earn love and acceptance from others.   

The problem is that fawning behaviours can be misunderstood as acts of kindness, caring, considerate, well-mannered, etc. This is particularly complex when working with individuals from cultures that perceive putting their own needs aside for the greater good of the collective as a virtue.

In such cases, the struggle for a clinician becomes the process of teasing apart fawning behaviours from what might be culturally normal. Resmaa Menakem insightfully wrote, “Trauma in a person, decontextualised over time, looks like personality. Trauma in a family, decontextualised over time, looks like family traits. Trauma in a people, decontextualised over time, looks like culture”.

This speaks true to my personal experiences since I migrated to Australia, and it is also observable across my community (Burundian community in Australia) as we strive to achieve a culturally meaningful life.

In my personal journey as an individual from a collective culture, I have often struggled to extricate my fawning tendencies from cultural norms as they often align with my cultural values and expectations.  

This personal struggle is one that many of us from collective cultures can relate to as we navigate the complexities of our cultural values and the expectations of the Australian environment.

A complicating factor for me (and perhaps for many other Australian migrants from collective cultures) is the recognition that maintaining my cultural way of life within the Australian environment is nearly impossible as the Australian environment lacks the contextual elements necessary for my culture to function.

For instance, the cultural expectation to put others’ needs before yours is based on the belief that the community will reciprocate your selfless act, which is difficult to achieve when one is not placed within the community with shared goals and values.  

As such, holding onto this value can create significant distress, while failure to uphold the same value may result in feelings of shame.

This is particularly challenging for children from collectivist cultures being raised in an individualistic culture. As such, fawning behaviours in young children from collectivistic cultures can easily be misunderstood as behaving within their cultural norms and vice versa.

The struggle to distinguish fawning from culturally appropriate behaviours is a personal one, but it is one that we can navigate together. 

I have found it helpful to ask myself the following questions when I am uncertain if I am fawning or behaving within my cultural norms.

Are my behaviours deviant from my cultural norms? That it is, am I behaving in ways that are inconsistent with my cultural norms? Are my behaviours distressing to me and those around me? Are my behaviours maladaptive? 

By taking time to reflect on these four questions, I have often been able to deepen my insight and find solace in the wisdom within. Reflection is a powerful tool that can empower us to distinguish between fawning and culturally appropriate behaviours, and it is a practice that we can all engage in to gain a deeper understanding of ourselves and our cultural contexts. 

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