The Fawn Response

How People-Pleasing Became Your Survival Strategy, and How to Find Your Way Back to Yourself

You have never been a pushover. You have been a person whose nervous system learned, very early, that keeping other people comfortable was the safest available option. The fawn response is the fourth survival strategy — alongside fight, flight, and freeze — and it is the one most often mistaken for a personality trait. It shows up as warmth, agreeableness, and reliability. Inside the body of the person running it, it feels like a five-alarm activation being managed by social skill. Drawing on polyvagal theory, epigenetics, attachment research, and the neuroscience of the body's threat response, this book traces the fawn response through every domain it reaches — the nervous system, the body, identity, sexuality, friendships, money, and creative life. Not a workbook. A work of recognition — precise enough to be uncomfortable, and honest enough to be trusted.

by Nikita Datar

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