What Everyone Gets Wrong About Fawn vs Appease (even the Polyvagal Theory)

This was a great question from a recent unstuck Academy q and a, uh, differentiating between Fawn and Appeasement, and then bringing in a deep discussion of dissociation and recovery. I wanna share with you, and I'm really curious what you think. I always ground my thoughts in the Polyvagal Theory, primary source teachings. But this is one area where I split off from the Polyvagal Orthodoxy. Hi, I'm Justice Sunseri.

I am a therapist and coach who helps you live more calmly, confidently, and connected without psychobabble or woo woo. Welcome to Stuck Not Broken. This is of, uh, not therapy, uh, nor is it intended to replace therapy. Oh, and I removed as much of the students' audio as I could, and I replaced it with AI versions of their questions and discussion.

I am struggling to understand fawn and appease. I've only just begun the coursework, but would like to hear your thoughts on that. I deviate from the official Polyvagal, uh, Polyvagal Institute and Dr. Porges doctrine on this, okay? I deviate a bit. So in the book, I believe it was this one, our Polyvagal world, which is written by- yeah, him and his son. They lay fawning out as flight and fight plus shutdown, but I flight and fight plus shutdown is also freeze.

So in very generic terms, they're suggesting that freeze and fawn both have the same underlying autonomic activation. I personally don't like that. Um, to me, to me, fawning is a behavior. It's something that we would recognize as a behavior or, or a way of thinking. Um, it's, it's prioritizing somebody else, making sure their needs are met as a way to placate them. That is a specific behavior, I think comes from shutdown.

I would argue that fawning as a behavior is a solution to someone being not a solution, but a, an adaptation to chronic and deep and severe, shut down or freeze activation. So I look at this as someone is in a situation that is severe, like an abusive home, uh, hostage, hostage situation. So like something that they cannot escape. Um, and their state is chronically shut down or freeze. I argue there's there's gotta be a lot of free- shutdown in there.

So to adapt to the, to that state and get their needs met, they fawn as a, as a way to get their needs met and deal- and reduce the amount of danger in the- the amount of life threat in the situation. So that's how I conceptualized it, because one could have flight, fight and shut down active at the same time and not fawn.

So it doesn't make sense to me that fawning and freeze could have the same underlying neural pathways, unless we look at fawning as a behavioral adaptation to set down or freeze.

So same thing with appeasement, which I'm a little bit more on board with. Appeasement is, again, very con- contextually driven and behaviorally focused. The context would again, be a situation where they cannot escape, can't fight, can't run away. Shutting down is not gonna work because they'll, they won't get their needs met. They'll, they'll die. So appeasement, they conceptualize in the book as a combination of all of the states active at the same time.

In particular, in a situation like a hostage situation where they, or a kidnapping situation where they can't escape. And so one would appease, which is, which is a, uh, general set of behaviors they would appease in order to reduce the amount of potential life threat in the environment from the captor and the appeasement would also help them get their needs met. I would argue that appeasement comes from significant freeze or shutdown.

I would argue more shutdown personally, because when one appeases or fawns, they are, um, they're, they're really depends- they're, they could potentially be very much. Acting in ways that are not in alignment with their true values, like very much, I mean, they're pretty disconnected from themselves at that point. To me, that means there's a, there's a ton of shutdown and probably dissociation happening, which leads to these behaviors to get their needs met.

Could a fawn or appeasement behavioral adaptation be a way to potentially lessen the other person's defensive states in your own interest? Yeah, exactly. That's what I, that's what I was trying to say. Exactly. Yeah. It's, it's, these are strategies and not like they're, you know, someone's not like blueprinting this stuff out. Um, it's, they do what they have to do to survive in this situation.

So appeasement in particular, because they, it does seem to have some safety activation along with it. So this person who can appease ha- they can utilize all of their states in these situations, and they can come across as a friend to the captor or as an ally, you know, they can, like, I'm on your team, I'll help you hide from the police. I'll lie for you. Now, outside of that situation, that person probably would never think of doing those things or feel good about it or feel proud of it.

Right? But in that context, those behaviors help to reduce the, the, the danger, the literal, I mean the literal danger. So they might help that captor temporarily just bring their fight activation, probably their rage come down enough to where that the person who is appeasing or fawning can, you know, get through the day. So, with appeasement then, you would need some amount of social activation and thinking available. Whereas in fawn, that might be different. Yeah, you nailed it.

So appeasing is, there's a, there's a, i, I don't, it's, I don't think it's a true social connected empathy; I don't think it's a true like ventral vagal state. And that's- we could talk about it if that think is more complex, but like, I don't think it's a true connection. It's a pseudo connection, like a fake connection. Um, or I don't know, may, maybe the person does truly feel it. I, I don't know. I, I, I, I don't know. I can't get that part into it.

But regardless, there does seem to be some ventral activation in there to come across as a friend, and then with fawning, it's not friendship, it's more like, um, I'm, I'm invisible. I'm not a threat. Don't pay- don't pay attention to me. So, if a person is receiving appeasement behavior, then they're being co-regulated by it to some extent, right? Yeah, exactly. You nailed it.

So there is, there has to be like, if someone can smile at their captor or use their vocal prosy to calm them down there, there has to be some sort of ventral activation. So Yeah. And it's very much a one way thing, I think. Um, the, the person appeasing and using those strategies is getting their needs met, but they're not, they're not receiving co-regulation. It's, it's very much a one- I'm giving you this. And the person, the captor or the abuser, they're receiving it, um, not consciously.

They're not like feeling empathy and love. They're like, it's not like that. But they're, their defensive activation must come down enough to just, you know, get through that situation.

The way I think about this, and I don't know how to talk about this honestly, so I'll, I'll try and I'll stumble. In my mind though, what, what, when we get deep enough into a shutdown state, when, when our, what, this is my assumption. I have no evidence for this. This is how I think about it. Okay. When we get deep enough into shutdown, there's, there's dissociation.

We disconnect from ourselves and that could lead to, in severe cases, um, dissociative identity disorder that could lead to derealization depersonalization, like really just disconnected from the self, but. But we still have to function. We still have to get our needs met. We can't live in a dissociated state very long at all, like a truly, you know, dissociated or lemme start over. When we, when we truly shut down, we collapse, we play dead. We cannot survive in that state.

So our bodies, human bodies in particular, seem to have this ability to disconnect from what's happening. So even though it's a huge shutdown psychologically or in our brain, somehow we can- we can dissociate and then keep going somehow. And through that dissociation, we can actually take on what looks to be like a new personality. So that person who's a to me, that the person who's appeasing, they're, they're so disconnected from their authentic self.

They, they have to take on this new personality. I dunno how else to say it. This new system- value, way of thinking, way of feeling, way of acting. They take on these, all these new behaviors in order to survive the situation. I think the same thing is true for someone who's in fawn. They're, they're just deeply disconnected from their grounded true self. I don't like to get that phrase, but I don't know how else to say it.

So to me it's like once you get deep enough into shutdown or deep enough into dis dissociation, you still have to get your needs met. You still gotta go to work, you still gotta appe- you still have to survive in some situation that's horrible. You gotta go to school. And so it's to, to me, it acts as like a, a, a, a slate- like a clean slate. It's not, but it's almost like, here's the first level of me. I can't be this in this situation. So shut down, wipes that away.

And here's a new level, level two, which is very compromised and is now appeasing or fawning because I, I gotta survive, but this is not me. And so once I get outta that situation, once I can get help and self-regulate this level two person goes away. Now we're back to level one. But now level one has this shutdown, it has to deal with; this true self. Now this, this self has to deal with all that pain that it went through and dis- dissociated from.

And that's where a whole due level of like self-regulation has to come in. But that's just me. That's just the way I'm thinking about it. I have no evidence to, no polyvagal evidence to back that up. That that's just how I think about it. Maybe it's better as a metaphor. If someone is well regulated, in situations or with potential, um, predators, they would feel and push back against that.

But if it's a situation they can't escape, or if they were raised in a situation they couldn't escape, couldn't fight from, couldn't even successfully shut down in, well, what other option do they have? But to kind of like give themselves this dissociative blank slate and bring in a new personality. Although sometimes I do think it is a literal new personality, but it just to get through the day, to get through until they get to safety. It's almost like a, I don't know how to talk about it.

It's almost like a reset. It's like, um, version two. But version one's still there. It's just like way deep down and we have to go through version two to get back to version one. I find that fascinating.

How does this relate to unstucking, recovery, and going from version 1 to version 2? I wish I had a great answer, but I don't have enough. Um, I've worked with people who are dissociated. But not, well, actually, that's not true. I've worked with a couple people that have severe dissociation. If someone who's in level two, like severe dissociation and has this new almost personality, would they be able to, I don't know if they'd be able to use the, they need literal safety. Okay, great.

So now once they have literal safety, um, would they be able to self-regulate? Would they be able, I do- like, they'd have to come outta that severe dissociation first, and then once they do that and then reconnected their body, well, crap, now we gotta deal, deal with all this shutdown stuff. And that's gonna be severe because it's, it's connected to numerous longstanding, uh, trauma- traumatic incidents probably.

And then once you come outta shutdown, now there's gonna, well, it probably wouldn't even be just shutdown. There'd probably be a ton or freeze too. So it's like, I think the level two-ish kind of thing, my assumption would be that there's not a whole lot of state exploration. It needs to have literal safety. And then can we slowly reconnect with the present moment? Probably not in a lot of safety, but like can we reconnect with just the literal objective world?

And then can we start slowly building towards the internal world? And then if we can do that, then we could start doing some self-regulation stuff. But that would be a, a long process probably. Yeah. With this one client that came to mind and she had a severe dissociation and for and with good cause, um, what helped hers start to come out of it and we would meet and like later on she'd say, I have no idea what we talked about. And I couldn't tell because she was so functionally good at it.

You know, functionally she could come across like, yeah, I'm here, but she wasn't here. So we'd meet the next week and, and she say, I, I remember coming in here. But beyond that, I don't know what we talked about. So with her, this dissociation was so high that we just had to practice literally connecting to like, what's happening in this room right now? What colors do you see, what can you touch? Sensory kind of things. And that, that was a process. Took a while.

Then we had worked on feeling actual safety and that was quite a challenge, but she finally identified a blanket that felt good and so we felt that mindfully. And then from there we built into other safety pieces and um, and some actual self-regulation. And she got to a point where she was much more empowered, going to college. Was presence, was able to put boundaries in. Like, she made huge progress. And, uh, she, she did good.

But I, I, I guess the point is it was like, literally, can we just be, can we just be present? Not even like mindfully, but it's like, are you here? You know? It's not even like a deep mindful exploration. It's just, are you here or not? Can you name, can you, you know, feel things, I mean, tactically I have my fidget basket.

Thank you so much for joining me on Stuck Not Broken. Like I said, fawn and appeasement are areas where I tend to deviate from the official Polyvagal teachings. I see them as behavioral adaptations to a prolonged severe dissociative shutdown or freeze state. But what do you think? I've also created a free resource for you in the member center that may help you keep track of the official Polyvagal primary and mixed states.

It's the Polyvagal One Pagers, and it'll help you to understand the Polyvagal theory, foundational elements, including the primary and mixed states. I will have the download for you in the description. You can also download all my free stuff in the member center, which I'll also link for you in the description. Thanks again so much for joining me. Bye.