· Responses to overwhelm can be thought of as falling into 4 Fs – Fight, Flight, Freeze and Fawn
· Freeze and Fawn although not widely talked about are particularly important for ND and parents of ND to know about
· It is important to be able to recognise these responses in yourself and your child so you know it is just a response to overwhelm and the focus turns to helping the nervous system reset not on behaviour
Responses to overwhelm can be thought of as falling into 4 Fs – Fight, Flight, Freeze and Fawn
I refer to overwhelm rather than stress response because we can be faced with stress that we can deal with so it doesn’t lead to these responses. There can also be ongoing small stressors that lead to overwhelm when we stop being able to keep up with the stress that is coming in quickly enough. It isn’t always the proverbial tiger in the woods, it can also be having to constantly try and get by as a square peg in a round hole. Every. Single. Day. So when the nervous system goes into overwhelm because of an acute stressor or just reaches the peak like a bathtub overflowing there are 4 types of responses: fight, flight, freeze and fawn.
Fight and flight are well known, when something triggers overwhelm a person can go into fight mode by lashing out physically by hitting, kicking or verbally by screaming, shouting; what can be called a meltdown. Or the person might go into flight mode and just try to get away, so a child might run out of the classroom or school or their home to just escape the stress.
Freeze and Fawn although not widely talked about are particularly important for ND and parents of ND to know about
Then you have freeze or shutdown. This is like when an animal in the wild “plays dead” when attacked in the hope that the predator will just move on. The person could become unresponsive, they don’t answer when you talk to them, they might even smile because as contrary as it sounds this can be a response to overwhelming stress by the brain. Their nervous system has gone offline, just like the old blue screen of death on a computer. At that stage no input is getting in, you need to put into action whatever they need to reboot their system – which likely won’t happen quickly.
The last of the four Fs is fawn. The least talked about of the overwhelm responses. Fawning is when the response to overwhelm is to behave in a way that you believe others want you to and say what you think they want to hear. It can be thought of as very similar to people pleasing, but to be very clear there is no conscious decision to take this approach. It is likely that when faced with chronic stress, like being in a classroom every day that is overwhelming for them, the child has observed that quiet and compliant children get compliments, as well as those that help the teacher so their unconscious brain sees the connection and they start behaving that way themselves to either blend into the background or receive praise. They are NOT attention seeking - their nervous system is going into overwhelm and they are doing what their brain has recognised as a way to not have even more stress occur.
A fawn response and autistic masking have a lot of similarities but autistic masking can happen even when there isn’t overwhelm. They are both not a conscious decision. The fawn response does tend to be more about pleasing people around you in order to reduce further overwhelm, whereas autistic masking tends to be more about helping someone to feel psychologically safe by suppressing their natural autistic responses, and can be done as a preventative measure. So a child may fawn when they are in a classroom, but mask when they are with their friends so they fit in.
It is likely you have a child who is fawning, or you yourself are fawning if when in social situations or at school they/you come across as calm, composed, obedient, and then when you are away from that situation and you can let down your guard you then go into a fight, flight or freeze mode. Your nervous system has recognised that it isn’t psychologically safe and has gone into fawn mode to cope. It is why you can be seeing issues at home but the school says – they’re fine when they are here in fact they are a model student. Leading to a dismissal that school is causing the issues and that it must be a problem at home.
It is important to be able to recognise these responses in yourself and your child so you know it is just a response to overwhelm and the focus turns to helping the nervous system reset not on behaviour.
Behaviour that happens when we are overwhelmed can be challenging for both the person who is overwhelmed and those around them, so it can be easy to just focus on the behaviour. I certainly tried that – we even had Stop, Think, then Act put on a wristband for my oldest. It is embarrassing now I know better, but at the time I knew they knew how to “act better” so I thought the solution was to remind them of that in the moment of overwhelm. I chuckle wryly to myself about that now – it seems absurd to me now to think a nervous system in overwhelm has the capacity to just come out of overwhelm in an instant because it reads a trite saying on a wrist band. The same with trying to get the child to take deep breaths or drink water – yes if we capture it early enough these may help to a degree, but you can’t deep breathe your way out of a situation where little mini stressors build up over time, like a bathtub filling up with water that has the plug in or is only able to drain very slowly, whilst the stress just keeps coming in faster than it can drain.
This is why it is so important to know there are more than 2 or even 3 ways (if you already knew about freeze) of responding to overwhelm. I wish I had known about fawning sooner, it may have helped me to spot the signs that my oldest was in overwhelm for their whole time at primary school. I could have intervened sooner. When you know better, you do better, and I have had to work on the forgiveness of myself for not knowing better sooner.
Thanks for reading. Do you or your child fawn?
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