Why Do I Change Depending on Who I Am With?
The Pattern
With one friend you are quick and a little cynical. With another you are soft and a little earnest. With your family you are someone you barely recognize on the drive home. The shifts are not deliberate. They happen before you notice them. You are not lying. You are doing the thing you learned to do before you could choose otherwise.
Origins & Context
Pete Walker's writing on the fawn response describes the child who learns to survive by attuning to the caregiver and presenting whatever version of self the environment will receive. The skill becomes automatic. By adulthood it runs in the background of every interaction.
Donald Winnicott would call the result a series of false selves rather than one. Each relationship invites a slightly different adaptation. The original self stays underneath, available in certain moments alone, surprised by her own opinions when she finally hears them out loud.
You are not lying. You are doing the thing you learned to do before you could choose otherwise.— Nikita Datar
How It Shows Up
You catch yourself laughing at a joke you do not find funny. You realize halfway through dinner that you have been holding an opinion you do not actually have. You leave the gathering and feel a fatigue that is not physical. It is the cost of having run five versions of yourself in three hours.
It shows up in the way you cannot remember what you wanted when the other person asked. The shape-shifting is so fast it overwrites the original signal. You answer with what fits the room, then later, in the car, you remember what you actually wanted and feel a quiet grief that you did not get to want it out loud.
Named in the Literature As
The pattern is named in the literature as the Fawn Response (Pete Walker), the survival adaptation of attuning to and meeting the other. It is also named as the False Self organization (Donald Winnicott), where multiple compliant selves form in response to multiple relational demands. Contemporary therapists describe it as the Reflexive Yes, the automatic agreement that precedes thought.
Related entries in this library include the Fawn Response, the Reflexive Yes, and the Adaptive Self versus Original Self.
Nikita's Note
I used to think I had no personality, just a high IQ for whoever was in front of me. It scared me. Then I realized the skill was protective. A small girl had learned to keep herself safe by reading every room she walked into. The shape-shifting was not deceit. It was loyalty to her own survival.
The work was not flattening myself into one fixed shape. It was noticing the shift in the moment and asking, gently, what would I say if the room could hold me as I am.
From the work
You are not lying. You are doing the thing you learned to do before you could choose otherwise.From When You're Ready by Nikita DatarAbout this book
Related Concepts
More in The Pattern Atlas
See all in The Pattern Atlas →I wrote about this in When You're Ready — available on Amazon.