Traumatic Responses...
We have long heard about flight, fight or freeze. These are natural responses to a threat to our safety. When presented with danger, we can: flee the situation, we can attack or we can stop in our tracks and hope the danger somehow misses us.
More recently, we have discovered there is another response: fawning. Fawning is where you attempt to appease, please, or placate another person in order to avoid conflict, criticism, or harm. The term was coined by therapist Pete Walker, who described it in the context of complex trauma.
How it works: When a threat can’t be fought or escaped, the nervous system learns that the safest strategy is to become agreeable and useful to whoever poses the threat. Over time, reading the other person’s moods and meeting their needs becomes a survival skill. It often develops in childhood with a volatile, critical, or unpredictable caregiver, and it can then carry into adult relationships, workplaces, and friendships.
What it can look like:
Saying yes when you mean no, and difficulty setting boundaries
Constant apologizing, even for things that aren’t your fault
Scanning the room for other people’s moods and adjusting yourself to match
Suppressing your own opinions, needs, or anger to keep the peace
Over-giving, over-helping, or taking responsibility for other people’s feelings
Flattery or excessive agreeableness, especially toward people who feel intimidating
Not being sure what you actually want or feel, because your attention has always been pointed outward
How it differs from simple kindness: Generosity comes from choice and leaves you feeling fine. Fawning comes from fear and tends to leave you drained, resentful, or anxious. The test is often whether you could say no without feeling a surge of dread.
Why it’s often overlooked: Fawning is easy to miss because it looks like being nice, cooperative, or a “good” employee, partner, or child. Others may praise it, which reinforces it. It’s also common in people who’ve been in relationships with narcissistic or controlling partners, where keeping the peace was the only workable strategy.
If you read Jane Doe’s initial text messages with her attackers, all I can see is fawning. Also, she is attempting to gain information about what happened to fill in the holes of her memory. I know the initial text messages seem to say that the sex she had was consensual. But people seem to be missing an important part, well several important distinctions:
At the time she wrote those text messages, she thought she had sex with two men. Not seven.
She was 10 shots in when she got there, so already beyond any legal capacity to consent to anything.
The frat guys then plied her with more booze and ketamine (a cat TRANQUILIZER), a drug she had never done before. What happened after that was a mystery she had to solve which took a bit of time and also had to be recreated from what she learned from others and then affixed to what she was capable of remembering.
At the time those texts were written, she is trying to save herself from the rumor mongering Greek life system and not alienate a man she really liked and was interested in. Her comments to him, fawning all over him, have to be placed in a larger context.
I know the internet wants to make this simple. She is either a rape victim or someone who regretted the decision and then cried rape. I get it, wouldn’t it be so lovely if our world fit into two neatly constructed boxes but life doesn’t work like that. Human beings don’t work like that.
What is being discovered as more and more information and evidence is released, is that this might not have been the first time the fraternity did with with a woman. There was talk about getting her there with this whole evening in mind that was NOT shared with her prior to her arrival. Acceptance, pleasing and mitigation of damage appears all over those early text messages where she is trying to find out what happened while also not pissing them off to the point they denigrate her completely. Was there self interest there? Of course! Was there self interest on the brothers part, trying to mitigate the rumors and to get their stories straight? Fuck yes.
Human beings are complicated and have conflicting motives all the time. It is not this is bad, this one is good kind of a deal. We are all a mishmash of competing ideas, wishes and motives. This is not going to be easy to sort out. What went down and why people did what they did, is going to take awhile to piece together and is not going to fit neatly into little socially acceptable boxes. We are complicated people who are motivated and have our behavior driven by more than one factor.
Which is why I think it is so important to come back to consent. From my perspective, Jane Doe being 10 shots in before she even arrived at the fraternity house, made her legally unable to consent. She was inebriated well past any legal standard of consent, so everything that happened after that, did not have her consent because she lacked capacity for consent the entire time.
I know that the above opinion will be unpopular. But it is the truth. If we started looking at human behavior and consent from a strictly legal perspective it would clear up our behavior immediately. The problem is that we don’t like the result.
Just think about how this would play out in the limited scope of college:
Women and men would need to be more aware of how much they were drinking and then keep in the forefronts of their minds about what a potential sexual partner might have drunk. Drunken hook ups would need to be evaluated on an ongoing basis. And women AND men would be responsible equally for ascertaining where each were as the night went on. If we altered the conversation from who did what to whom, and we started asking at what point did the people involved lose the ability to consent to what was going to happen next, it kind of clears it up pretty well.
But we aren’t going to do this because we are human beings whose behavior defies logic and reason a great deal of the time. While we all hate what happened at Cornell, so many of us resist reform that can change it. Alcohol and drugs fuel life altering decisions on college campuses all the time. And we pay a great deal of lip service to reform in this area. We say that we want change but our behavior around Greek life, hazing and intoxication begs to differ.
All I can see when I read those early texts from Jane Doe to the frat brothers is fawning. She is attempting to mitigate the damage, ascertain what actually occurred and not make a horrible situation worse, all while not pissing them off and having them hurt her and damage her more. If this feels far fetched to you, I ask that you, for just a fucking moment, go back in time and think about your daughter, mother, sister, aunt, best friend in Jane Doe’s situation and then walk through the night with that woman in Jane Doe’s place and see if you cannot possibly see it differently than your quick to judgment, “she wanted it and then she regretted it, so now she is crying rape.” Review the FACTS with the woman you love most in this world in Jane Doe’s place and see what you think then.
Traumatic responses are tricky and hard to decipher often. Our behavior doesn’t always makes sense. Well intentioned people say all kinds of fucked up shit to people who are deeply wounded and traumatized because of ideals about how trauma plays out that is not based in reality. As a society we are becoming more trauma informed. Which is good but we still have a long way to go.
You may not like that fawning is a traumatic response. You can think it is bullshit all you want, but it is real and it happens and I understand that it makes it harder to decipher human beings and relationships. But just because it is difficult to understand and doesn’t fit into the immediate boxes you have created to exist in this world, doesn’t make it untrue.
Fawning is as real as flight, fight and freeze whether you believe it or not.
And I pray that none of you reading this ever have to deploy fawning to survive. It is a complete mind fuck and make deciphering and understanding your trauma and what happened to you even more complicated and difficult. Which leads me all the way back to this concept of consent...if you are 10 shots in, the ability to consent is long gone. And perhaps this is where we should get comfortable ending the debate.
Now, please.
More on the line between a traumatic response and consent tomorrow...
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