Fawning: The Trauma "F" We Underestimated. A Therapist Healed Herself Of It, And Is Now Healing Others From Its Deadly Effects

A Lifetime Of Shape-Shifting Was A Successful Strategy Against Domination, Until It Started To Wall Us In: How Do You Stop?

I’ve lost interest in almost everything except intra-relational healing. So-called trauma healing. The re-birth is promises, to those who persist.

Childhood abuse and trauma lodges itself in a human brain, it lies in wait—it waits about 30 years. It takes your measurements. It sews the suit it plans as your straightjacket, very carefully. Then it strikes—usually when you think you’re finally safe.

You ignore it at your peril—most people do. They “get on with it.”

If the world has any chance at all, for redemption, it will only be because enough people confronted the radiating, old trauma it is so fashionable to pretend one has overcome with positive thinking and fridge magnets.

That’s not being good—that’s being avoidant.

It was Sofia Smallstorm who first mentioned to me—about two years ago—the concept of “missing persons:” People who become separated from the person they were “meant to be,” whether by way of toxic injections leading to autism, or severe childhood abuse, or perhaps an accident, war, intense shock, loss, or grave illness. She suspected I might be one of the missing. I suspected she was correct, and did not argue. I remember feeling stunned though. How did she know this?

I think it’s true. On timelines we’re not on, there are these people we would have been, if we had not been—forgive the dark phrase—soul murdered, by rage and wrath. In so many ways, so many forms, from infancy clear through the decades. Eventually, you become a husk.

The angry people—the red queens—they don’t go missing. They don’t suffer “chronic fatigue” or “depression.” They have all kinds of self hood and energy. They know exactly what is wrong with everybody else. (Bad attitude, lack of faith, self-absorption.) No—it’s hierarchy. Some people wind up being the people others have to please, walk on eggshells for; Others wind up stuck beneath them, pleading. Drained.

In the bombed, killed, maimed, displaced, and raped people of Gaza, we recognize something we’ve spent our lives trying to run from: Our powerlessness as children, to put out fires of wrath, for existing.

I’m not equating our plight with theirs—that would be absurd. Only saying the frequency is familiar.

Wrath and anger are, with good reason, acknowledged as the deadliest of sins, along with pride.

If we get a miracle, Netanyahu wakes up tomorrow and says: “Maybe we’ve done enough, to sate our thirst for revenge. Maybe we don’t need to destroy the entire world. We’ve made our point known. And let people think whatever they wish, about Israel, as they do about all other nations. Why should we alone be treated with a reverence no Queen has ever known? How many have to die, exactly, before it’s enough? Are we really aiming for a unified world of rape apologists, for our sake? People who seek to be cleansed of the charge of anti-semitism by way of adopting violent rape as the latest stripe on the woke flag? No. This won’t cure anti-semitism. It will only cause it to become endemic.”

I’m not being glib. It’s beyond all comprehension.

Which brings me to the theme of this writing: The fawn reflex, which arises to counter wrath, in situations large and small. Fawners are offering sacrifices (themselves, their truth, their feelings) to angry Gods, in hopes of bringing stability, by way of these sacrifices. It doesn’t work. Such people become, over time, “missing persons,” who lack agency.

You’re an angry person too, (fawner) but except on rare occasions when it comes out, you are indistinguishable from a very agreeable person. That doesn’t help. Rage follows you around—you are somehow a rage magnet. It could be because you’re a missing person. And that enrages people too. Then you take every supplement and mineral under the sun, to obtain energy, but what you really need is the energy of your own personhood and will. The energy you would get back if you didn’t lose all your energy shape-shifting.

Trying to please by agreeing to not exist, not have any hopes for yourself, except by demonstrating your capacity to tolerate abuse. It was a successful strategy, then, but now it’s hard wired into you, and slowly killing you.

The clinical term is: Traumatizing narcissism.

When “Complex P-TSD” is discussed, we invoke Pete Walker’s four Fs of trauma: Fight, flight, freeze, fawn. I used to mutter sardonically that I had a fifth to add: “Fossilize.”

I’m on a mountain, formerly a tiny farming village, between Granada and the sea. It’s very remote, and there are no distractions. The nearest gas station is a two hour walk from here. I’m pushing through, trying to find myself—rebuild. Resurrect meaning, voice, hope—without which, one should not write.

Rafa ate a lizard the other day. Alex vanished for 24 hours. We all stayed up all night, and finally, when he’d completed his mysterious male tabby initiation ritual, and I’d prayed the golden cord prayers enough times, and the other two patrolled non stop around the village to locate him, he turned up at 6 am, dirty and famished.

Prayers answered, I promised God I would never forget the joy of that moment. Turned out I could feel joy.

But I had been vanishing, going dim.

Day in and day out, between bouts of work on the book project, I reach for a signal, the signals that always reliably led to writing. But not lately. Tonight I’m writing even though I have no “signal.” Even if it’s strange or bad, I’m doing it, as an exercise in writing myself back into existence. And it doesn’t have to be correct or gleaming, it only has to be heart-centered.

I wonder, of course, if it’s a good idea to write about being a “missing person.” The fear is that all of you might unsubscribe if I told you I am experiencing a vanishing syndrome. If I did so without fawning, I would not try to prettify or idealize it.

I thought: If I can make it universal, break it down, explain it, it might be useful to others, who may also feel like they’ve gone missing.

Nobody here has ever contributed to any of the things I’m describing—quite the opposite. You all seem (mostly) to accept and understand me as I “am,” which also leads to guilt, because you deserve a hopeful, productive narrator, not somebody worried she is becoming a ghost on an Andalucían mountain. But what if confessing it is the beginning of transcending it? How many of us are half way outside our bodies, from so many shocks?

I think about “healing C-PTSD” day and night. I make myself sweep, mop, do the dishes, move about. I do humming exercises. I read my Bible, I give thanks to God.

But something is missing. It could be as simple as a collapse of all the illusions we had before October 7, or “MAGA,” or “MAHA” (which my sister has re-named “HAHA”) about the supposed value of all human life. It could be the prophecies about how doomed we are, by AI and CBDC—chemtrails and financial collapse. Or just the slow leeching away of hope, love, valor, and beauty. The fact that people are protesting outside the NY Times for Israel’s right to rape Palestinian prisoners. It feels like collective personality collapse, which, in turn, feels like sin.

When did psychopathy, state sanctioned sexual degradation, and child murder become the new woke—the thing you damn well better learn to hail and defend, like pedophilia 10 years ago?

What is the proper attitude, since despair is a sin?

Is “C-PTSD” spreading and growing because of all this, or is it because we’re failures at healing it?

I made a decision to write about “C-PTSD” as it progresses—because I think it’s a serious subject. No subject, to my mind, is more important: If you have lost selfhood, you must get it back. If you don’t, you’ll wind up entombed.

If I hear a person dismiss their trauma healing, or say, “It is what it is,” (a phrase I have always dreaded) I move away from them. We should seek life, birth, re-birth. If it’s not there for us, we should raise heaven and earth to get it back.

Two days ago, I heard the best podcast on C-PTSD I’ve ever heard. It was this one, with Tim Fletcher, who insists that if one has two years, a commitment, and the right trauma therapist, one can “heal.” One has to, he said, remove all “unsafe” people from one’s environment. That’s people who do have moods, and who might rage at a moment’s notice.

“You’re never a burden to safe person,” Fletcher said, “only to an unsafe person.”

Then, yesterday, I came upon Dr. Ingrid Clayton, who has carved out a new space in the healing trauma field—the least understood, least discussed of the four F’s, namely “fawn.” She wrote a book called “Fawning,” and I think she’s happened upon a whole new frontier.

She unpacks the fourth F like nobody I have ever heard, being one herself, in addition to being a psychotherapist (focused on helping fawners recover.)

She herself had a narcissistic, alcoholic, predatory stepfather, and it was he who brought out the super-fawner in her. There was not one word she said I did not 100% relate to.

Fawners commit slow soul suicide, and must stop it, by gradual acts of willpower. It’s a very strange beast—fawning. It robs us more than any of the other Fs.

Like her story of sitting in the family hot tub, when the abusive stepfather came and got in, then asked her to lean her head against his chest, so she could watch the stars better. Repulsed, and terrified, she perfected the behavior of a 13 year old who was anything but repulsed and terrified. She did as he asked. She shape-shifted. She even made sure, when she finally felt able to exit the hot tub, that she walked away slowly enough that he would not feel robbed of his delusion, or detect an iota of discomfort in her.

That’s what fawners do—that’s what women do, at all ages. Shape-shift. Stall for time. Cast about for a single person who can hear or see or care—until the realization dawns that we are that person. But it requires courage.

I listened with baited breath to the interview, fell asleep listening, woke up listening, and came to a realization I decided I wanted to write this about as openly as possible. Fawners don’t “lie” or manipulate—we actually, literally, shapeshift, and where there was once a person, there is now a puppet, a Pinnocchio, controlled by strings that in turn are controlled by some invisible force that hijacks our minds.

Her work as a therapist is to help people cut the strings, move through the world with agency, and feel themselves at last to be, as Pinocchio said, “a real boy.”

Fawners seek out isolation like no other neuro-diverse tribe. We tell ourselves we will one day want to do things like normal people. And this is the crux of all this, I want to state it clearly:

If you were reared in extreme trauma, and became a fawner, to survive, it doesn’t mean you are either a) nice, or b) pathetic—it means you aborted the space you were supposed to inhabit, as you borrowed the will, soul, and emotions of those around you. What happens eventually, is that you become uncontactable. Numb.

In my case, I reached a point of being unable to form bonds, (because of my own disassociation) and finally unable to initiate any communications at all.

I knew I could animate the composite me, and she could be convincing, but I also knew I couldn’t “show up,” embody, or aspire. There was no signal, in the end. Finally, I couldn’t even animate the imposter.

I no longer had any idea who I was. All of this progressed in a time of extreme stress—creating an avalanche effect—and I turned up where I had aimed to turn up (Spain) but with no “self” who had any ability to communicate, beyond a failing puppet, whose sole aim was to get through each day motivated only by an instinct to do the bare minimum. Not infuriate. Put out fires. Isolate. A hollow interior, feigning presence, but issuing acts that weren’t rooted, or coming from a true, present, trustworthy self.

It grows over decades like a thickening suit of armor, inside which one is trapped. The New Age advice to “love yourself” is, as Ingrid says, useless to people who may not have one. A self. You know that when you talk to people, they will be real and you will be issuing sounds you think resemble human being-ness, while being keenly aware that you’re severed from the very field that seems to nourish normal, embodied people.

You come to resemble a half ghost, worn down by a lifetime of fear of other people’s anger, which of course, generates more anger, especially when you go altogether mute, having given up all hope of being “accepted as you are.” Shame is not present only when you screw up, but always. It is especially excruciating when anybody insists on declaring you good, likeable, or valuable. That “thing,” which Ingrid calls “dirty pain” is always there, whether you “did anything” or not. Because you always tried to frisbee forth the endless things people seemed to want from you, you can’t imagine somebody wanting nothing. But when you dream of exiting puppet-hood, you dream of having friends who want nothing. When people ask for things, you do them from a place of disconnection. Until you stop altogether, because you have in effect had a very quiet nervous breakdown.

Not “nervous—” just depleted.

How can you re-integrate this severed self, retrieve this missing person? How can you want things when you entered the world only wanting the forestalling or abatement of rage, which you learned to read and scan like a fluoroscope.

To me, this is the most life-affirming trauma healing discussion I’ve heard in a long time—this and the Tim Fletcher video linked above.

These people, along with people like Peter Levine, Anna Runkle, Pete Walker and others, are soldiers in the last and most important war. The one in which we fight not to go claim a truth, or a political set of proofs, but our very souls.

We’ll know we are healing when we can say what we mean, what we need, without feeling that doing so is an affront to somebody else.

When we re-claim human-hood, which is messy, corporeal, and un-ashamed.

If I delete this like I have been deleting so many pieces, I’m back in it—the fear-driven self erasure. It’s better to just press “publish,” and forsake seeking approval.

I think these things are important.

I no longer think you can recover from anything, until you conquer shame.

There is nothing wrong with you.