← Trauma Rewired
Trauma Rewired
Sexual Fawn and Fawn
00:56:37
The four trauma responses are the brain’s way of protecting us from threat, real or perceived. They are noncognitive, reflexive outputs that are deeply ingrained in those that have experienced trauma, which makes them incredibly difficult responses...
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- [00:04]
A
Today we're joined with Luis Mojica, who teaches people how to release stress and trauma through listening to their bodies. He's an incredible somatics practitioner that we found through Instagram. And hearing his brilliant teachings and the way that he looks at our different responses relationally and how they show up in the body has really impacted me and how I view the nervous system's response to fawn response particularly. And that's what we're going to dive into today, talking about fawn response and sexual fawning.
- [00:39]
B
I'm really excited to sit with Luis today because this is someone who, in our space of the way that you and I understand and communicate trauma and somatics and how trauma lives in the body. Luis shares a very similar knowing as we do. And sexual fawning isn't something that even came into my realm until Luis did. And so I'm very excited to sit with his nervous system today and to to just be with him and connect. And we've explored fawn together before. On the podcast, we recorded its own episode. And understanding how this threat response has impacted the two of us and how it has driven so much of our behaviors. And in that conversation, we set it up so well for people to understand it. And I feel like fawn is the reflexive trauma response that gets the most personality credit as being the people pleaser.
- [01:43]
A
Absolutely. It's been really interesting for me to actually connect to Luis through Instagram and see the powerful insights that are there on that account about fawning and sexual fawning. Like you said, I wasn't even very aware of sexual fawning until reading some of those insights. And I feel like it's such a beautiful compliment to applied neurology and to neurosomatic intelligence, because as I work with my nervous system, now that I have these understandings, I'm able to begin to create the capacity to create change and to really engage in some of these powerful somatic practices that can release what's stored in my body and create new behavior. Because I'm also working intentionally with my nervous system on a regular basis to heal my deficits and create a more resilient system. Because some of this stuff is big.
- [02:42]
B
This is a very big conversation. And like you said, so much of NSI has really helped me to develop presence and embodiment and like whole body sovereignty. And in that sovereignty, that safety of my sovereignty, I can witness myself in fawn and in real time because I can regulate my nervous system in real time. And I have the tools I have the altitude of witnessing myself. I can really choose a new way of being or. Or remove myself from a situation. And as y' all are gonna hear, Luis talks us through one of his practices to witness Fawn and how one of us might engage in Fawn and being able to see how that begins to show itself moments before we actually engage. And this is something that you and I talk about a lot is when does the threat happen? Does it happen at the thought thought of the person coming into the frame of your picture? Does it happen later when you're in the presence of the nervous system? Like, at what point does that neurotag get triggered for that reflexive automatic trauma response that has really big emotional responses in it as well that are all tied back to our early development and how we're conditioned.
- [04:07]
A
Yep. And then how we can use neurosomatic tools to be able to feel those signals in our body and to engage in that awareness and understanding of ourselves. So I am very excited to jump into this conversation with Luis, the founder of Holistic Life Navigation. Welcome to Trauma Rewired, the podcast that.
- [04:31]
C
Teaches you about your nervous system, how.
- [04:32]
A
Trauma lives in the body, and what you can do to heal. I'm your co host Elizabeth Kristof. I'm the founder of the Neurosomatic Intelligence Coaching Certification, an ICF accredited course for coaches, therapists and practitioners that uses integrated neuro coaching to re pattern the nervous system and drive lasting transformation for your clients from the body to the brain working through the nervous system. And I'm also The founder of Brainbase.com, an online community where we use applied neurology and somatics for trauma resolution, behavior change, emotional processing and stress resilience.
- [05:06]
D
And I'm your co host Jennifer Wallace. I'm an educator for the Neurosomatic Intelligence Coaching Certification. And I'm also a neurosomatic psychedelic preparation and integration guide. I bring NSI into your peak somatic experiences. By working with the nervous system to prepare, we create safety, learn to regulate emotionally and make space for truths and broader awarenesses. We integrate those truths into a nervous system that can receive and embody them, creating resilience and a new path forward.
- [05:34]
C
Imagine being the kind of leader in your organization, in your business, in your community, in your own life who stays calm, grounded and fully present even in the most challenging conversations, truly hearing others and guiding clients or teams. From Reactivity to resilience At a time when burnout and overwhelm are at an all time high, people are craving this kind of leadership. And it all starts with a regulated, adaptable nervous system. If you're a coach, a therapist or an organizational leader ready to elevate your practice, join us for a free online workshop, Rewire and Rise Building Resilient Leaders with Applied Neurosomatic Intelligence. It will be January 15th at noon Central with me and with one of our lead NSI educators, Matt Bush. In this session we're going to go beyond understanding how your nervous system works. You'll learn how to work with it directly to calibrate responses and build capacity to lead with resilience. Plus, we'll stay after live to answer your questions and share details about the next cohort of nsi. You can sign up now at neurose O Matic.
- [06:37]
A
Com.
- [06:38]
C
We would love to see you there and connect with you live. A replay will be available after the workshop. You just have to register@neurosomatic.com Please enjoy.
- [06:47]
B
This very deep dive that we jump right into with Luis this season.
- [06:54]
A
As you all know, we've been exploring complex traumas and attachment wound and looking at how relationships impact our nervous system health and our overall health. And one of the topics that is really interesting for us to explore is the trauma response of Fawning and how that affects our nervous system. And one of the thought leaders in this field though, I feel like that's kind of a loaded term, but someone that I am constantly inspired by from Instagram when I see these posts, is joining us today and I am really excited to dive into this topic with you, Luis and hear more about how you came to understand so much about the trauma response of Fawn and where some of these insights are coming from.
- [07:43]
E
Thank you. Yeah, it's really nice to be with you. As you're saying that I'm noticing everything that I teach, I can only teach if I've experienced it. So I am so well experienced in the fawning response, like incredibly so. When I learned about it it was this kind of mind blowing moment for me of oh, this thing that I've been doing my whole life has a name and there's a purpose and a lot of kind of shame and guilt and even embarrassment faded away and I just understood and then started teaching about it and learning more about it myself. So it really comes from my own history.
- [08:17]
A
Yeah. I find so often it's the things that we want to heal in our own life that lead us into the big insights that really shape work and can make such a big impact for others.
- [08:30]
E
That's right.
- [08:31]
B
Yeah. That's what I was going to say, I mean, I go to school, I get as much as I can to learn from people, but my education, the value in what I have healed in my own life, is what I bring to the table to support others. And it's been the greatest education. Although that is a new perspective for me to take. It was, of course, so understanding what these outputs are protective, especially as we're going to move into sexual fawning like that in and of itself, it just lifted a ton of weight off my shoulders and was immediately like, okay, there's nothing wrong with me. But there is still, especially in sexual fawning. I noticed there are still some parts of me that do have some shame around pleasure and do want to hide from sex. And so I've been in this place of for about two years exploring celibacy again, because I really needed to heal these wounds. And I wasn't only healing my attachment style, but what I've learned from you is that I was healing the uncoupling that came with the early adverse child sexual experience because it was a relational experience. And so it was really confusing for me to develop sexually. And I went through all of the dissociative sexual encounters, to some parts even feeling like liberation. But can we explore how someone with early childhood sexual trauma could couple fear with intimacy and threat with arousal?
- [10:02]
E
Absolutely. So I'll explain somatically. First over couplings are. It's like when you think of Pavlov's dog or someone says something's Pavlovian. An overcoupling is a somatic training in response to something happening over and over again. Usually it can also happen once, like one big thing. But it's usually chronic experiences. And what an overcoupling is, it's a body association. It's essentially like a guarantee to the body where it expects this is going to be the outcome because it has been before. So when you have sexual trauma, especially developmental sexual trauma, which means happening throughout the course of your development, not just one experience, but many experiences, even as I say that, I just want to add, it can be one experience that goes so deep that it also affects your development, even if it only happens once. But so when you're developing, there's some kind of compromise, let's say, to your sexuality or your sexual experience or even your sexual organs. You said the word protective. The body will start going into a constriction, a somatic response, because it expects something in relationship to arousal or to touch or to the bedroom, anything where the situation takes Place is expected to be a threat or a violation. And so over a couple years of the body expecting that even if it's not happening, the body's practicing over coupling, let's say threat with arousal. The body can practice over coupling shame with pleasure. Especially if something felt good that quote shouldn't have. It's so nuanced. But essentially whatever the meaning your body or subconscious made from your sexual experiences, especially the traumatic ones, that becomes over coupled and then that becomes your physiological response to arousal.
- [11:47]
A
I think a lot of people are going to hear that and it's going to bring so much one compassion, but also just understanding of what is happening. I think it's important dots for people to connect that these things are not just cognitive but they're really a physiological reaction inside of the body that is driving my experience, my behavior, my ability to stay present. And so understanding that it opens up a whole new life lens of how to create change, but also just how to relate to yourself in those moments which I think is so important. And just to back up a little bit about fawn response in general, I do want to, you know, reiterate for people we've talked about fawn on here before, but reminding folks that it is a reflexive protective response that happens inside of our body that is a behavioral adaptation to placate a predator, to create safety. And then it manifests in all these ways in our life that might be be hard to recognize because we're not in what you would think of as traditional threat. But then we go into people pleasing or compromising ourselves in order to maintain our social connections which are real survival needs for us as human beings. And so I love the way that you talk about this. And would you just elaborate a little bit on how you look at fawn response from a somatic lens?
- [13:16]
E
Yeah. Fawn response is the body's just like you said, reflexive way to belong. It's how a body finds belonging with other bodies. And so there's two layers to that. There's like a social layer of just I want to agree, I want to fit in, I want to be loved. So I'm going to laugh, I'm going to smile, I'm going to placate again reflexively. We're not consciously thinking this, it's just happening as we're there. So it's one way the body's trying to just like when you talked about attachment theory, it's how the body's trying to secure attachment. So if a nervous system or a body is coming from let's like an insecure or an anxious attachment style. Fawning is going to be a way, it can almost guarantee a security of friendships because the body is just pleasing the bodies around it. Most bodies are going to want you to be around because of that. So there's that piece, then there's the belonging, like I want to stay alive. And that's, that's the really interesting one. So we can even say the root of fawning comes from primitive survival strategies. When your life is, is dependent on another being and their, their ability to like you, their ability to spare you, their ability to find compassion for you. When your life is actually dependent on that other being, the fawning mechanism kicks in. And this is so prevalent in sexual assault, in cases of people being robbed, in kidnappings, hijacking. These are situations where you're literally right, your life is in someone else's hands. So you go into this reflexive, I'll do whatever you want, just so you calm down. Then let's say the predator's body starts to relax and that ensures your survival. If the predator's body is getting more aggravated, that doesn't ensure your survival. So if we go ancient, you know, primitive as animals even, and you're walking through the woods and there's a wolf and you like, stop. You're like, nice, wolf, nice. When you're like smiling, like you're fawning with an animal. So it's not just human to human and it's not just societally societal or created from civilization. It's a very old way to survive relational threat. So that's really where the two stem from. But goal is to survive and to belong.
- [15:32]
B
I find that so fascinating. I've heard you talk about that before. The predator's nervous system escalating and then ours adapting in a way that the body knows how to redirect the energy because it knows that we will, we can survive the situation. But the shame still comes, doesn't it? It does in either situation. So can we talk a little bit about shame and how that another protective mechanism keeping us assured to the like with our herd. Can we talk about shame a little bit and how shame comes both ways?
- [16:03]
E
Shame is so interesting to me because especially when we're talking about fawning, like having shame because you fawned or your body fawned. Shame is in this case a response to identifying with the response. So fawning is reflexive. No one consciously writes down how they're going to fawn and goes and does it like it's just in there and it's happening in a nanosecond. And usually we're unconscious to until afterwards. Most people will say, like, why didn't I yell? Most people say, why did I agree to go out with them? Most people think, why was I laughing at that joke the whole time? Like, why did I stand there smiling when I just wanted to walk away? So it's an afterthought because in the moment you're not conscious, you're dissociated. And that's how trauma responses work. The body takes over, the mind moves away. So I just think that's an important place to start. Because when you identify with the trauma response, something that's reflexive, that has nothing to do with you, like it affects you, but you're not choosing it, you're not conscious of it. When you identify with that, shame is one of the results because you think, what's wrong with me? That's what it comes down to. Or I should have done this. When you understand the reflexive nature of these responses fallen in this case, you just don't even identify with it anymore. It almost becomes comical, you know, like you see yourself doing it and you get it like, oh, my body is feeling scared, it's feeling anxious, it's doing that thing it does to ensure belonging. But you don't take it personally. And so the shame can't manifest from that. What's interesting about shame is shame. If we were going to organize in a trauma response, it'd be freeze or collapse. You know, shame really cause you to constrict and pull yourself in. You don't want to be seen, you don't want to be touched, you don't want to connect. And so in terms of just shame as a response to things we go through in life or things that our bodies do, the physiology of shame is a freeze and a numbness and a further dissociation of the self. So when I teach people how to work with these things and we start to uncouple shame from what the body did, and actually people start to positively over couple, let's say gratitude, like, oh, thank God I was laughing because I relaxed that person. I got out of that situation. There's no room for the shame. And without the shame, there's no freeze. And when there's no freeze, the energy can move through your body. It's not being constricted.
- [18:23]
A
Yeah, that's an incredible reframe. To recognize the protective nature of something or, or to just have the altitude to step back and you know, a lot of times we talk on here about things being outputs. Like we get inputs to our nervous system, our brain integrates that information and it generates an output. And that output is always survival driven first, whether that's a social need or survival need. But and just that like as someone with a lot of childhood trauma that for so many years of my life was really hard on myself about being a people pleaser and would go into having these conversations with my business partner, whoever, I was going to set the boundary, I was going to do the thing and I just couldn't. I would lose my voice, I would agree with them. I would, you know, sign on to things that I was, that were totally out of alignment with me. And then I would beat myself up about what, why I couldn't have a voice. And then really understanding man from such a early age. Fawn and freeze were the most adaptive responses. As a little kid that can't fight or flight in that situation, I'm either going to flop or I'm going to fawn and that just gets baked in. And then it shows up over and over again and I can start to think about how can I work with my body and my nervous system to create a new experience and inside so that that energy can move through, so that I can have a new output. But it's not going to come from just cognitively overriding. Like you said, no one plans to go into a situation and fawn.
- [19:56]
E
That's right. And you said something important about when there's childhood trauma, especially childhood relational trauma, when the person in charge of you or in control of your environment is part of the disruption. You don't have the agency as a child to fight or flight. There's times as adults, even the agency isn't there. But as children, especially not so freezing and fawning, they are the primary strategies for children. And so if you have like a chronic stressful environment growing up or an abusive environment or just traumas that occur, you're also chronically developing in a freezing and fault and fawning body. Right. And, and just like you said, it's protective. It's like I bring it all down to sneezing. It's the same difference. It's literally the same difference. Right. It's a biology, it's a reflex. No one chooses it. You can kind of feel it going on. You can't do anything about it. And it happens. And the whole purpose is to protect you is to propel something out of your nose that could make you sick. That's all trauma response is trying to propel something away that could hurt you. So if we understand that how impersonal it is, right. How it's so not about you, it so has nothing to do with you.
- [21:02]
B
It's.
- [21:03]
E
It just becomes so simple to be with. Now that's not easy to get to that place of not taking it personally. But when you get there, it's brilliant because it is a pure biology.
- [21:14]
A
It is.
- [21:15]
B
But I think what's confusing and I think what's fascinating also at the same time is that when our bodies develop in that biology, they also become dependent. We're back to the over coupling.
- [21:27]
E
That's right. When you say dependent, you mean with other people?
- [21:31]
A
Yes.
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B
On the thrill, on the fear.
- [21:34]
E
Yeah, that's right. What was interesting about that? So if we think of like, if we go back to sex and the over couplings, there, like even when you say thrill, if you had experiences developmentally where sex was inherently thrilling or something horrible could happen where you could be exposed, where you could be hated, something that was like, not even good or bad thrill, but it's like a huge level of sensation. Your body practiced accessing arousal through thrill. Right. And that's when these fetishes and things emerge where that's the only way we're able to have a full orgasm, let's say, or feel like a huge amount of pleasure or get an erection, have some kind of, you know, physiological sexual response. Because the over coupling now actually becomes the doorway to the arousal and the pleasure itself. So that's exactly like you're saying. And this is what you were saying too, Elizabeth. You can have this concept. You can know all this cognitively. And if your body has practiced thrill and sex for 10, 20, 30, 40 years, it's a doorway now that it relies on to get there.
- [22:37]
A
When you're working with people and say cognitively, they're starting to identify their fawn patterns, what are some of the first things you would do with someone to help them start to move through this? Definitely identifying that it's a protective response and having that gratitude for it in the body. Are there other practices that you would start to weave in with people initially to begin to re pattern this a little bit?
- [23:03]
E
Absolutely. The number one is to embody the response. And so that can happen in the moment, usually until you've practiced a lot. But let's say they're in my office or I'm on a screen with people. We think about the moment, right. We think about the time we fawn this week or we think about someone we're going to see that we usually fawn with, and just the thought of the person immediately brings up sensations. Everyone listening can do this. You can literally pause this and think of someone that you don't know how to say no to, right? Someone you people please, someone you feel really burdened to please or make happy the moment you think of them, right? There's a constriction. It's usually in the gut or it's in the chest or it's in the throat. And some people even notice numbness, right? The lose sensation, which just means there's a lot of sensation. It doesn't mean there's nothing. It means there's too much to process. So we go numb. So embodying where in my body does my fawning actually unfurl from is the first step. Because that's your signal, that's like your helper. The moment, you know, oh, my stomach constricts, right before I start the reflexive laughing, let's say then when I'm out somewhere and I start to feel my stomach do that, I. I have this system, this kind of relationship to this part of my body that says, oh, constriction, that means you're going into that protective place. And that's when I can start, really. When we talk about redirecting it or rewiring it, we're talking about pausing and doing something different. So how can I pause if I don't know what I'm pausing? So let's say I feel the constriction, I pause, I go to the bathroom instead. So it's not even like a jump to a boundary of saying no to the person. That can be too hard for people. But just, oh, I'll be right back up to use the bathroom. And you take space for a minute or two and you feel the tension ease in the stomach. And then you go back and you're teaching your body. Like that exact example would be a flight response. So instead of going into my fawning, I go into my flooding. And I use the energy to walk away to the bathroom and close the door and feel my distance with you. And that will settle our animal bodies. And then when you go back, you'll have more space inside. You won't go right into fawning. You might feel it coming again and then you interrupt it. So it's really about embodying it then from there. There's so many practices of playing around with that redirecting.
- [25:13]
B
We talk about that a lot. We would Refer to that as like the loop, the patterns in play. And like, how can we interrupt that in any way? Like, do anything else and excuse yourself? Get back into your body. And I think that also really cultivates trust and listening to our bodies when we have been dissociated for so long and not be able to feel the sensations or even take those moments to pause in safety with the body.
- [25:43]
E
Even when you say trust, you know, you're speaking to what I teach about the sovereign body. Like, what's the trust? Who's trusting who? The body's trusting your consciousness. And so it's. Even as you're saying that it's pointing to this initial place when I was saying it's impersonal, it's biological, it's not you doing it, your body's doing it. You're becoming this witness, this friend, this guide with the body. And then, yes, the body starts to trust you, and then you start to trust your body. And then when you go out into a social situation or a sexual situation, you don't go right into your old mechanisms because you have you. Rather than being oriented toward the other for your safety, you have it within you already. And there's that distinction. You brought it up earlier, Elizabeth. You were saying like a traditional threat. You know, there's threat, which is like, my. My life could end here, and then there's trigger, which is. It reminds me of a time my life could end or I'm expecting my life could end. I'm not going to go into the depth of those differences unless we want to. But those two things, like trigger and threat are so important because biologically, trigger feels the exact same as threat biology and the hormone response is the exact same. So even getting to notice the difference of them getting triggered by this person compared to him, actually threatened by them, that gives the body more agency. Otherwise we'll be in fawn because we're getting triggered all day, feeling threat and then fawning with people, even though we're totally safe to say no or walk away.
- [27:08]
A
Yeah, absolutely. I think it's an incredibly important distinction to make, and I'm definitely happy to explore it more because there is this way that, yes, the threat was in the past, and it lives also in the present moment with the trigger. Because it is real. It's really happening. It's really changing the way that our brain is functioning. The lenses in which we're taking in information, what information is even making it up to our frontal lobe, if it is at all right. Or have we blocked all of that out with dissociation and the physiology of what's happening inside of us. So even though it's not occurring in the present, it is still trauma lives in the now because it happens with the threat and can happen continuously depending on how our system is set up to perceive all the stimulus that's coming in.
- [28:03]
E
Exactly right. And that's a good distinction of just trauma happened, let's say, 10 years ago. The experience happened. What's happening now in the room isn't the experience, but the experience in my body. It's like a biological reverberation. It's literally an echo that comes through high blood pressure and extra adrenaline and neurotransmission. Like, physical things are happening on a biochemical level in remembrance of what happened. So it tricks the body to think right now. You are threatened. And when you learn to be this guide with your body, you're able to notice, okay, I'm looking around. I can see that right now I'm safe, yet I feel different. And you can identify the incongruency much more easily. And then you start doing this thing where you're kind of showing your body the parts of your body where you are right now, and you're waiting for those parts to update. It's not like a hack where you're forcing them to come here. You're showing them, like, let's say your stomach's really tight. You're showing your stomach, here's a plant. Can we just sit with this plant? And you're waiting for your stomach to respond and start settling. It's like these little puzzle pieces start coming back to the room, away from where they were in the past or, you know, the imagined future.
- [29:10]
B
I love. I just want to pause for a moment and say, I just loved the visual that I got when you said that. It's an echo in remembrance of what has happened. Like, that just really. That really hit me. That really just, like, touched me. It really. It felt like an echo moving through my body. When you said that, can we explore also a little bit too, that there's activations happening from the reflexive responses, but also that sex is a physiological activation also within the body. And how can one start determining which activation is which? And am I being activated by threat, by pleasure, or the mimicking of pleasure through the pleasure activation?
- [29:56]
E
Beautiful question. And right before I answer, I just realized I haven't really said about sexual fawning. We're talking about fawning so much. So I just wanted to kind of pin that and just say that you know, just like we're talking about fawning, Sexual fawning is, as the name suggests, you do things sexually to please the other. And more often than not, sexual fawning comes from safe, long term, committed relationships. Not one night stands, not sexual assault. I mean, obviously those things are kind of go without saying, but. But the more insidious, the more common. Sexual fawning comes from people you really love and feel safe with and you just don't want to hurt their feelings. Or your body's been practicing sexual fawning as a way to connect sexually. It doesn't even know another way. So it's just what it does. Right? So what you're saying is really important because. Yes, the actual biology of arousal is an activating biology. Your heart rate increases, your blood pressure increases, you become adrenalized. So if you're already living with PTSD or a lot of stress hormones or a lot of charge in your body, and then you get aroused, you're getting even more activated. And that can kind of, let's say, tip you over that threshold of tolerance. And you can go into your trauma responses just from beautiful, healthy sexual activation. The difference is like you were saying about navigating those differences. You, you can notice, okay, my blood pressure's building, my heart's getting a little faster, I feel warmer, I'm getting. I can feel my physical body shifting and arousal based on, you know, anatomy and what that feels like. And then I can notice, am I breathing? And then I can notice, is my stomach soft? Are my hips clenched or are they soft? Like, is there an unfurling relaxation happening in response to the sexual activation? Or, or is my whole body, my jaw, my hands, is everything clenching and freezing in response to the sexual activation? That's an interesting phenomenon because you have the body itself having a trauma response to its own internal activation sexually.
- [31:58]
A
Effy, that all really resonates with me. I'm in a very safe, committed partnership. And I also have lots of sexual trauma history. And one can definitely identify with slipping in and out of fawn just in terms of wanting to keep a connection and make somebody else feel valued and good and not hurt somebody else's feelings. And, and the nuances of, of even knowing what that is for myself has been such a journey to know when I'm going in and out of that. And then in moments of intimacy too. I have noticed a lot. My biggest telltale is I'll realize I'm really clenching my jaw and then I'll realize, oh, it's also in my hip. And so then can I like, breathe into that and relax into that a little bit more? And sometimes I can't. And then I just have to kind of roll with that too and say, okay, like there is a bracing and there's this other experience, and it's, it's such a wild journey to bring this kind of healing that we're talking about into a really safe space to explore. Intimacy is just very different.
- [33:14]
E
I really appreciate those examples and how you say bracing because somatically, for the body, bracing means protection. So any part of the body that's constricted or braced, like animistically, emotionally, characteristically, it's a place that's scared, is a place that's expecting something to go wrong. So anyone listening, again, you don't have to know somatic psychology. You can just notice my jaw's clenched, my fists are clenched, my hips are really tight. Wow. My knees kind of come together. My toes start to clench when I get aroused or when my partner's touching me who I love. It's exactly like you're saying. Those are those nuanced signals that you completely miss before practicing embodiment. And then you go right into sexual fawning because it's just the strategy the bodies use to get by.
- [33:59]
B
I can really see how my sort of taught fawn response started to develop. Like hugging, hugging people I didn't want to hug as a little girl, or not being trusted when I said, you know, I don't want to be around this person, or I don't like this person, or whatever, whatever those, those words were, whatever that was, that taught me how to override my intuition and my needs. And then I can see how like the smiling and just be quiet, be the night, you know, and then moving that into my adolescence, my 20s, my 30s. The sexual fawning and how the hyper vigilance, even in the room of knowing, like, I know this man is looking at me.
- [34:39]
E
That's right.
- [34:39]
B
I know these people are looking at me and they're sexualizing me. I. I over sexualized myself. And even like really, it was a very confusing mixture of hiding and over sexualizing myself. But that hypervigilance in the room of people and understanding that like the fawns already happened and I can witness it now in reflection. I had none of this language back then.
- [35:11]
E
And yet you had such an awareness. And you're speaking to those really early stages of the rewarding, the social rewarding with fawning. Fawning is the most highly rewarded trauma response like you said, if you're smiling, if you're nodding, if you're doing whatever someone tells you, you're the good girl, you're the good kid. And it's like everyone wants to be the good kid. So you learn. And Gabor Mate has this great phrase, you learn to bypass authenticity in order to achieve attachment. And that's the fawning mechanism in a nutshell, is my body does the opposite of what I want to do so I can belong with you. So you applaud. And it starts, I mean, second, third, not even second, third grade, but, you know, two or three years of age in preschool, it starts by sitting still at reading time, not getting up to use the bathroom, like really learning how to disorient from your body and then get rewarded. And the children that have a hard time controlling or dominating their body are the trouble children. So it sets up this, like, societally, we have this setup of bodies that fawn and dominate themselves are the good ones, the ones that don't fawn, the ones that don't dominate themselves are the bad ones. And so that's an important point for people to hear because even if you've never had sexual trauma, you could be innocently taught how to please other people against your own boundaries. Hugging your uncle you don't want to. Being in a room with someone you don't want to be in. And then by the time you're 13, 14, and you're considering being sexual with someone even earlier, for a lot of people, you have no clue about your boundaries because you've been taught to bypass them for years.
- [36:51]
B
And then I just also can see myself in all the immobility once we are in the action.
- [36:58]
E
That's right.
- [36:58]
B
It's like, oh, not actually up for this.
- [37:03]
E
I'm glad you said that. Because another piece of fawning that's important is it always has freeze attached to it. So it's one of the hybrid responses where you're never just fawning, you're always freezing. Because the part that wants to run away or say no, that part freezes and then the other part performs. So two things are happening at once with fawning. That's also why people who fawn have the most, the highest prevalence of chronic illness, autoimmune issues. Gabor Mate's book, the Myth of Normal has an incredible chapter all about this. I think they just called them people pleasers in the chapter. And he's talking about this German hospital where I think for a decade or longer they were able to. They did this kind of this large study where they're able to say, this person's going to get this type of cancer because they're a people pleaser. And they were always right. I mean, like hundreds and hundreds of people, maybe even thousands. I can't remember the exact numbers, but it's interesting that that would happen because a part is freezing, a part is performing, and all this charge is building up. So it physically impacts your body, too, more than almost any other one.
- [38:09]
A
Yeah, I think we talked about that a little. We did a recent episode on boundaries as well, and looking at the ALS personality and the Ms. Personality that is so linked with the development of disease and Ms. Runs in my family and so does sexual trauma. So there's some dots I can connect there. And there was something that came up in the boundaries conversation that I was thinking about as you were talking that I wanted to revisit. We were talking and it came up as, like, sometimes when we have the inability to set boundaries and. Or to receive them, there can be this kind of, like. I think the term was used in the episode, like a quiet manipulation. And that hasn't sat well with me, like, thinking about it as being a manipulation because it seems so cognitive to say that we're, like, manipulating people when we're fawning or when we don't have the ability to set boundaries. When I feel like it's so much more of a physiological bodily response. And you had a really interesting post on. On Instagram recently where you were talking about lying as a trauma response. And I was reading people's comments and how different people reacted to that, and I think it's a really interesting reframe that I'd love for you to talk a little bit more about.
- [39:27]
E
Absolutely. Yeah. So when I'm talking about lying, I'm talking about people's inability, let's say low capacity for truth. So whether it's their own truth to speak it or. Or what their truth's going to do in the world Right when they say it. That rupture that will inevitably happen when a lot of people speak, like, a big truth they've been hiding is something that those bodies don't have capacity for. So lying becomes this way to kind of pause the eventual rupture or avoid it altogether. I mean, there's people whose entire lives are lies and they die, and then you find this whole thing out about them. So it's a compassionate lens. And I've learned there's nothing more controversial than compassion, because you're really supposed to and this is a trauma response too, you know, supposed to put things in like a black and white category or right or wrong and all these things. And it's just not how life works for me. There's always a reason someone's having a behavior doesn't justify their behavior. I'm not saying have the person over for dinner, like bring them into your lives, but there's a reason behind it. And in most cases it's capacity. So same thing with sexual fawning. There's a lot. And fawning is great that you brought lying in because fawning is this unconscious lie, you know, like when you say manipulation, technically the way the word suggests it is a manipulation, but it's not cognitive. You're absolutely right. So to call it manipulative would over couple it with someone being like sneaky or tricky or malicious. It's not that at all. It's just the body is unconsciously mirroring what this person wants to. And this is where the manipulation comes in. Have them see you in the light that you, they need to, not who you really are. So you're actually hiding behind a mirror of the other person. It's quite psychedelic because they're not able to see who you are yet. And you're. You want that you know someone. I know when I for years my body fond, the last thing I wanted was to be seen in front of a person. I wanted them to see a version of themselves. And that's what fawning does. The mirror neuroning is instant and you are in. You are an incredible reflection of the person's behavior in front of you. So it's interesting you brought the lying in because there is an element of that in fawning where the truth isn't coming through, something else, something more contrived is coming through. It's not a conscious malicious thing. It's not to hurt the other person, it's to save yourself. And when I'm talking about lying, essentially that's what all lying is, it's to save yourself. And it can hurt other people. And why do people lie? That's the somatic reason I've come to.
- [41:56]
B
Find we laugh about that a lot in our personal lives, like, well, and also like in our community, that when you start understanding the nervous system and you start offering that grace and compassion to yourself, it does go to onto the other bodies that you are near or even like could be strangers that you start giving that grace and compassion to. Because you're like that person's dysregulated that's right.
- [42:21]
E
That's exactly right. I have a really hard time. Really hard time judging people. Do I get irritated and overwhelmed? Of course I have a body. But I have a really hard time actually, like, actively having judgments about people because it's just, as you learn in the nervous system. It's so obvious what's happening, and it's hard to go into story about people anymore.
- [42:41]
A
Yeah, I feel like it is wild, too, to think about how controversial compassion can be. And we say a lot on here, like, everybody does the best they can at the level of their nervous system, and that's not to undermine anything that anyone has. Has gone through as well. And. Or to say that you have to take certain behavior because that's also part of having a healthy nervous system and being able to dialogue with your body and hear the signals it's sending you. It gives you the ability to also give yourself the space from the people that are damaging your nervous system or causing dysregulation that you need to. And at the same time, have compassion for them. Right. Like, I need this space. This is the space I need to take care of myself and to still have compassion for you. And I think that it is wild for people to start to grant that compassion to others and even more so to themselves. Like, I just find a lot of resistance from clients about being gentle with themselves or having curiosity around these things when they're so used to pushing into performing or overworking. And that definitely carries into people's healing where they just want to. They want to do it right, and they. They want to do it in a certain time frame. And it's. It's a really different way of going about it.
- [44:02]
E
I look at that a lot. I call it the capacity for joy. And it's similar to the capacity for compassion and pleasure. Because these experiences of joy and pleasure and compassion, understanding, forgiveness, gratitude, all these things, these are just words for the body. Opening these open your body. And earlier when I was saying that when the body braces, it's in protection mode. When you are chronically braced. That's what we call traumatized. This is what we call ptsd. It's a body that's constantly constricted because it's just expecting threat all the time. Try to tell a body like that to relax. Try to tell a body like that to find compassion. That's the last thing it wants to do. Not because it doesn't believe in compassion. Like, the belief is there, the understanding is there, but the physiology of what compassion brings is a Gooeyness, It's a melting. And those boundaries are there for a reason. So it takes time for those boundaries to renegotiate their history and their present and realize, oh, I can soften right now into compassion. And when the moment comes where I have to brace, I can brace again. I don't have to live just in one or the other. I can be fluid. But I find it to be a really kind of unexplored physiological root of why we are so averse to compassion and things that are really opening because the openness itself is scary.
- [45:21]
A
I really feel that when I was. For so much of my life, I've been very, very braced, very, very pushing hard. And people would tell me to be gentle with myself, and it would literally make me nauseous. Like, I felt sick when someone said, you should be gentle with yourself. And my nervous system and my body were so opposed to it that, like, I would like, throw up a little and be like, no. And so it's been this really gradual unfolding of like, yeah, it's okay to be easy. As my body has come out of that constant hypervigilance, that constant bracing, it very slowly becomes safe to. To be gentle with myself.
- [46:04]
E
And that's even when you say that, when you say easy and hypervigilance embracing, it's again, literally building the capacity for ease. Because cognitively, ease and joy and peace and gratitude, like, yes, sign me up. It takes capacity. It's like biologically be able to handle how it feels to get calm. That's a terrifying feeling when you're used to being hypervigilant. I totally relate to that myself.
- [46:28]
B
Well, we say this a lot here too. Like a well worn pathway is a well worn pathway. Whatever your protective mechanism is for threat, it's coming for joy too, because then joy becomes the threat. So we have to kind of, I like to always say, like, I kind of dip my toe in and I start to learn my thresholds for large groups, small groups, and what I know, like, what my capacity is, what I'm capable of in those moments. And I do have a question about sexual fawning. Is when we engage in sexual fawning, are we breaking a body boundary violation with ourselves in our sexual organs to our bodies? That is, is it adding on to the damage that has already happened in a sexually abusive place?
- [47:19]
E
Absolutely. This is a great question that shows an example to what I said earlier when I was saying about developmental sexual trauma. And I said things that happen chronically. And I said, well, in addition, it can be One event that goes so deep into your body that then you develop with that feeling and that trauma response. And that way of managing what you just said is exactly right. Because fawning inherently breaks your boundary. It's designed to. If your boundary is to say no, and that boundary might cost you your life, your body's going to make you break, break that in order to, to save your life. That's why we fawn. So when you get in the practice, because just like you said, a well worn pathway, these are all practices, whether we're conscious or not. When we're in the practice of sexually fawning or connecting sexually through a fawning mechanism, we are in a practice of constantly breaking a body boundary. Now what happens every time a boundary gets violated, especially sexually, it gets violated. To me, I broke it. And the other person violates it without even knowing it. I'm talking about consensual, loving relationships. Not assault, obviously, but someone you're with for a long time and you adore and you're telling them how much you love them, you're pretending to be into it, or your body's pretending to be into it, they're breaking your boundary without knowing. So there's this double violation happening to, especially in this case, the sexual organs. And so it's super nuanced and complex in that way. Because now you have this, let's say, this root thing. Let's like I'm thinking of myself 10 years old, this huge sexual trauma. There's like the root thing, if we could say that. And then 20 plus years of sexual fawning from that root thing. Every time I practice sexual fawning, my body has experienced another violation. So even though it wasn't aggressive, it wasn't an assault, it wasn't malicious, no violence. You know, in these other situations, the body still became traumatized sexually. And that's why people can be in relationships, really beautiful ones, and have a ton of sexual trauma without even a history of assault or any kind of, actual, you know, perpetration. And they can't figure out like, why is this happening? Same thing happens with birth. Because it's physically traumatizing the sexual organs in those areas of the body. Intent means nothing when it comes to trauma. How the body experiences it means everything. And that's why two people can have the same experience and one person can leave totally fine, sleep at night. The other person, insomnia for 20 years. It's how the body experiences it. Based on what? I forget who said it. I think it was Elizabeth. Based on everyone doing their best based on the capacity of their nervous system. That sentence, the capacity of your nervous system, that's what dictates if you get traumatized or not. Right. Breaking a boundary so sexually lowers your capacity every time it happens.
- [50:04]
A
Yeah. It makes so much sense. And thinking about how unique and individual we all are and how that capacity is, it's just so different based on everybody's past experiences. We talk a lot about deficits in the nervous system here. So like little deficits in your eyes and your breathing and the balance system in your inner ear. All these things that add up to increase that threat load over time. And, and it's just, I think that again, it provides this framework of increased compassion for yourself because it is just so different from person to person.
- [50:38]
E
It really is. And the thing I love about capacity is you start to learn that there are ways you influence it and there are ways you can't do anything about it. And especially before you have the knowledge, you can't do anything about it because you don't know. And when you're a child growing up, there's like no way. So you can't even go into shaming yourself for your capacity because it's beyond you. It's something you respond to and you notice. But you're not even in 100% control of your capacity at any age. Regardless of what you do right, your blood sugar, how much sleep you got, hormones, seasons. There are so many reasons the body changes and we don't have control of most of those changes.
- [51:17]
B
Yeah, I'm feeling that in my hormones today.
- [51:23]
A
It's a big truth. Honoring our capacity is like, it's a real next level thing for me to be able to have that relationship of trust and truth with my body, to honor my own capacity and know that that fluctuates and that it changes. And like now that I have awareness and tools, there are things I can do to increase my capacity and there are times when I have to simply honor it.
- [51:52]
E
I'm just feeling that with you.
- [51:53]
A
Yeah, I would love for you to just tell people a little bit more how they can work with you if they feel called, if they're resonating with this conversation. And what are some of the best ways to find you and to explore your work?
- [52:06]
E
I think the best way to work with me right now is my six week course. So twice a year I do a live six week course, me and my team. And it's very immersive and you get lots of tools and lots of audio exercises and practices. And live sessions and guidance and support through the whole six weeks. It's a great initiation into learning somatics and to learn self inquiry. And even when we were talking about capacity earlier, how simple things like nutrition, the way you set up your room, completely change your biology and your ability to handle stress and metabolize it. So my course is probably the best way to work with me. And then once people take the course, we give them an invite to our membership space and we do a lot of weekly practices in there with a beautiful global group of people who've already taken the course. That's mostly how I'm doing it now. I'm doing some in person retreats next year. Nothing else this year, but mostly my course at the moment.
- [53:04]
B
Awesome. It's been really beautiful to be here with you and it just feels so warm.
- [53:10]
E
Me too. I literally feel warm sitting with you too. It feels nice.
- [53:14]
A
It's really, really such an honor to get to talk with you and have you on the show and I just think that the work you're doing is really, really important. So thank you.
- [53:25]
E
Yeah, thank you both.
- [53:27]
A
Thank you. We have a special holiday gift for you. At Brainbase.com, we've created a 90 day journey designed to give you foundational nervous system health and rehabilitation. We get requests all the time from people. I want to start to train my nervous system, but I don't know how. And this is a clear, expert designed framework that's rooted in neurosomatic intelligence. It's going to teach you over the course of 90 days how to regulate and modulate your nervous system, how to.
- [53:54]
C
Resource your body for expanded capacity, how.
- [53:57]
A
To rehabilitate deficits that are driving chronic stress, and how to integrate these tools to improve brain function, focus and capacity. We'll teach practices for emotional processing, how to use your voice, set boundaries, and neurosomatic tools to boost your higher order thinking systems for more fuel and more focus. And the best part is that you can start your journey for free. @rewiretrial.com you'll get your first few weeks for free. You'll get a class a day, strategically laid out, designed to be really effective and to make the work easy for you. So this is your opportunity to take the first step toward building a resilient, thriving nervous system. Go to rewiretrial.com and you can start your trial today. Our partner is AG1, the daily foundational nutrition supplement that supports whole body health. I drink it literally every day. I gave AG1 a try because I heard about it through Jennifer here on Trauma Rewired and I was really tired of taking a bunch of supplements. I don't love to take supplements and I wanted to cover all my nutritional bases every day. Having better gut health was really important to me as someone with celiac and as I started taking it, I did feel like my energy levels became more sustained and my immune system was functioning better. I drink AG1 in the morning before anything else, even before I have my coffee, and it's actually become an important part of my morning routine. I do it when I'm doing my neurodrills, when I'm doing my daily nervous system training so that I'm getting the nutrition my body craves while I'm also giving my nervous system the input and the stimulus that it craves to feel safe and regulated. And I've made that a very grounded habit for myself. So if you want to take ownership of your health, it starts with AG1. Try AG1 and get a free one year supply of vitamin D and five free AG1 travel packets with your first purchase. Go to drink ag1.com Rewired that's drinkag1.com Rewired check it out this podcast is.
- [55:55]
D
For informational and educational purposes only and should not be considered medical or psychological advice. We often discuss lived experiences through traumatic events and sensitive topics that deal with complex developmental and systemic trauma that may be unsettling for some listeners. This podcast is not intended to replace professional medical advice. If you are in the United States States and you or someone you know is struggling with their mental health and is in immediate danger, please call 911. For specific services relating to mental health, please see the full disclaimer in the show.
- [56:29]
E
Notes.